This Couple Makes $7M/Year Sending Letters⏐Ep. #283

You're making like 36,000 a month recurring within your first four months. Yeah, that's wild. And it was just us that was great. We're setting about 120,000 letters a month now. I didn't expect this. In 2024, we broke the 5 million mark. The last year we broke seven. The best way to describe it is something you've never heard of, but your mother's gonna love. It's Mother's Day huge for you. It's our Super Bowl. Yeah, that's awesome. What other niches do you think could be really interesting with the snail-mo business? Would you believe that you could make millions of dollars per year sending stories through the mail? Well, that's exactly what Michael and his wife Hany do with the flower letters. They charged 12 bucks a month, and they are sending 120,000 letters per month. Last year, they made $7 million in revenue. But what's most impressive is that within four months of starting the business with almost no money, they were making $36,000 a month. And most of that was profit. They grow the business through Facebook ads and referrals, and I am just obsessed with the snail mail subscription business. This is the second episode I posted about it in the last two months. We'll link to the one I did with Hannah below. And at the end of this episode, Michael will give us advice for starting our own subscription business, what niches look interesting, how we can be successful, and most importantly, how to find customers. Let's dive in. You want to start by just telling us who you are and what you do. Yeah, Michael Clark. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called The Flower Letters. The best way to describe it is something you've never heard of, but your mother's going to love. So we tell stories through letters sent through the mail. You get two letters a month for a year, and it tells a story. My wife is an artist and an author, and she's just so creative. She sings. She does everything. She's doing stained glass. Generally. I call her her creator. And it was about February, March of 2020. Anyway, we were just talking. We were on a walk. And she was trying to figure out how to kind of-- she made these paintings. She incredible these 3D floral paintings, and she'd put one up for sale at its sell within 20 minutes. I remember one night, we were going on a date, and she'd put one up. It was like three hours past. She's like, hey, this hasn't sold yet. Do you think it's not good? I'm like, hey, I've got to put this in the context for you. You sell your paintings in three hours. Like, yeah, what people have paintings up for days, months, years. People are-- they want your stuff, and then turn off in 30 minutes, and buy it. And what was she selling these for, and on what platform was she selling them? Oh, this is Instagram. She's just-- OK. Make a penny, put it on Instagram, and say, hey, if you want it, let me know. Someone would say, I want it. And depending on-- she made-- anyway, from this size to big, I mean, the big ones could be upwards of $1,000. But there's mostly small ones, so a couple of $100 each way. Yeah. And so she was doing that just and really enjoying it. And then she was trying to figure out how to grow her business and kind of get more people involved in email list. And she had the idea. She's like, would if I like, sent them a letter if they sent it for my email list. And they're like, oh, that's kind of an expensive thing to send it for email list. She sent them an email. She's like, what if I sent them a letter? She's like, there's all these old letters you can find. To be honest with you, all at once, the idea came to me. And I saw people-- I remember getting mail, a letter in the mail. I saw people going to the mailbox, getting a letter, and it being a chapter in a story. And I said, hey, what if you wrote a story in a tool? And she's like, that's a terrible idea. She's a writer. And so there's a lot of details we had to work out. But I was like, I thought of World War II. I was like, what if you write a letter, then I write a letter, and we kind of send that out, and we've kind of figured that out. And we just iterated, went back and forth. There was another subscription that we were doing called letters from afar. We actually did podcasts at the moment. They're awesome. We got their letters. And there's this sort of a standalone letter each month, which is like, great model. You're the standalone. And you were a customer of this, you're saying? Yeah, at the time. We subscribed to it. OK. And so we had been getting letters. I was like, what was that? That was a story. And so letters from afar is a big part of our origin. We talked to them. And they're a great, great company. I highly recommend them. I think they're more geared towards kids, but they follow this character around the world. It's really fun. Their models, it's much simpler than telling a story. Figuring out, OK, what does this look like? How many letters do you send every month? It's like, it's going to be a year, and it's going to be 24 letters. And we're going to send to them all. To be honest, when we looked at it, I was like, hey, this will be kind of fun. This will be cool. This will be, let's give it a shot. I'm still working on my startup. I was doing some consulting. And we, originally started Sheeralette. I actually, in our first story, there's a letter that I wrote. But it became clear, like, I'm not going to write it. She is. She's a great writer. So it's like, OK, she's like, you know what? I'm going to take this. I'm going to write this. It's so weird. She's like, I'm going to write this. I was like, oh, sounds good. We started doing Instagram posts and just figure things out. Just to her own friends and family, not like from a big business page or anything. No, we just started a flower letters Instagram, put it out. And one of my things is a entrepreneur is like, when I tell people, I say, if you're launching a product or service, don't tell your family and friends. They'll give you a false positive. Your mom's not-- Yeah. Your mom's going to buy 10 of them, but she's not your customer. You got to find your customer. We just put it out there. 33 people signed up. But I was like, OK. And what was your first pricing? $12 a month. For two letters. Two letters. Yeah. One month for $12 a month. Yeah, OK. $12 a month. And then-- And your cost is, I mean, $1 stamp envelope paper, and then time? The paper, everything, just to get everything at the volume we're doing, it was more around $2 to $3. Because we put a lot of things-- OK. We put a lot inside. Nice stationary and stickers and nice. And we've done that. And that's sort of what sets us apart. Usually you get a lot. And I can show you some things if you want. Oh, yeah. Cost for relatively low goes really well. We started dabbling and ads. So our main sort of acquisition was through Facebook ads. And that sort of really started to kind of get us traction. Facebook ads on both Facebook and Instagram? Yep. Yeah, Facebook and-- OK. And it was us just like giving it a try. We knew nothing about Facebook ads. And then this guy that I was working with was kid, really? I was talking to him about what I do. He's like, hey, I want to try that. I was like, OK. Try the flower letters business or ads. He wants to try doing ads and marketing with us. OK. OK. That's fun. I was like, let's go for it. And anyway, I remember by the end of the year, by the end of the year, we had a few thousand people that had signed up. And then he pitched me on coming and working for me full time. I was like, oh. OK. OK. He started running your ads pretty early on. Yeah. Probably around October. So we launched in August. We started-- we set our first letters and at the end of August. And then yeah, October started-- Dabbling in ads, just spending a few bucks here. And then people started to run up. And then one of the things that was really important that I'm surprised how many businesses don't invest in is email. We knew from the get go that email was really important because medical and break. You know, what if it goes away? You know, it goes down. You got your email address. So early on, we started trying to acquire email addresses. And so we can connect with people that way. How did you do that? Was that with ads as well? Yeah. People will come to our website. That's the first sort of on-site funnel is you ask for the email address for a discount. Pretty standard e-commerce acquisition. That's actually turned out to be huge for us. Upwards of 38 and sometimes 40 and sometimes 50% of our revenue is email-driven. Wow. Anyway, if you're an entrepreneur and you're not thinking email, think email. You have to. Yeah. Oh, in your audience. You got to know it. Since then, we were at 3.5 million letters mailed. We're sending about 120,000 letters a month now. You've got six stories. Concurrently? More coming. Yeah. So six stories, but nine subscriptions you send. One of them is a fantasy. And so there's seven parts of it. There's three parts currently. So eight. So eight. There's eight options that you have right now. Most of it is historical fiction. And we're called the flower letters. And so that was part of the formula. As I had the beginning, it was all of our heroines have a flower name. Originally, we were going to do historical fiction, which is a predominant storyline for us. But then we have Nora Aven who's a fantasy and actually super popular. And it's been tons of fun. It's one of my favorites. But that Nora Aven's been part of our marriage. Like she's been writing that essentially building that world since we were at first married. And so yeah, it's been wild. It's wild, right? So first year, you said you finished at two or 3,000 customers. Was that the end of 2020 or your first full 12 months? Just the end of 2020 within five months, four months. Yes. So end of the year, we had about 3,000 customers. You were making like 36,000 a month recurring within your first four months. Yeah. And it was just awesome. That was great. Yeah. Yeah. It was simple. What was your cost-break position on your ads in those early days? Like how much were you spending to acquire a customer? Early days, off we could go back pre-IR back in. It was like 20 bucks. 15, maybe 20 bucks. OK. So crazy. Even on a subscription, we could be profitable to three months, right? That's one of the biggest challenges with a subscription. Subscription. which I think probably people are getting to it are learning. The key to our growth has been the prepaid option. - Like a year up front? - Yeah, paying up front. It's been interesting, in this what we do, it's kind of like, oh, this is, they are buying a full story. And it is a subscription, but like it's really not traditional. Subscriptions like typical, it's like, all right, I'm gonna pay a $12 and you send me a supplement. Okay. Or, you know, or some of these other letters, it's like, I'm gonna give you $89 and you're gonna send me one letter and it stands alone. With us, it's like, for this to work, you have to get every letter and you have to get every letter in order. And so, it's weird about that. I mean, that's what makes it complicated. And across now, the stories, we're like, oh yeah. All right, you know, I think when I step back and look at it, that has been our key to our growth and success is adding more stories, being able to kind of service a customer as they are in any story they would like, get their letter soon. - Now, I have to think with churn, with losing customers, you're, I'm assuming on the story ones, your churn is low because they want to know what happens at the end, right? So this is a business built, it's a business built for very low churn. But I imagine if you do get churn, it's gonna be after the first couple of weeks or month because maybe the story just doesn't resonate. And then after that, if you keep them after that, you probably keep them for all 12 months. - Yeah. - Is that pretty accurate? - One of the things that makes our churn so low as well is that we're a very giftable item. - Oh yeah. - They can't cancel for themselves, right? Like someone gives it to them. - Sometimes it's funny, we have the best customers. They're incredible, but like, I never thought of this happening. It's like, someone to reach out is like, yeah, my mom essentially hated it. I needed a cancel. I was like, oh, your mom, that's lovely. (laughing) And I was like, okay, that's fine. So she, you know, 'cause so they'll start getting it. I don't like it. So that'll happen from time to time. And that's great. To me, the mail's a miracle. I love the postal service because of like, how well it is. So sometimes they get a bad rap. It's like, oh, the postal, they've asked my letters. It's like, you talk to a kid this now. You tell him like, hey, you put this paper in this box. It'll show up in Russia a few weeks. They're like, whoa. - Yeah. - Wow. They can understand. Sometimes they're behind works. Like, I can send a text and get it to Russia right now. How does that piece of paper get to Russia or to, who would be given the next date over? One of the things, so what sort of prompted me to leave everything, like I was a FinTech guy, software, a spill the tech company, you know what I mean? But what sort of drove me into leaving all of that behind and folks, it's only on this one was the opportunity. I think the growth, it was the impact. We started getting letters like very early on year one from people saying that they, you know, how grateful they were for us because we're doing this because it's something I look forward to. I won't say her name, but I remember her name. She would keep it on her bedstand because she had this just, I think it was fiber of my knowledge and she's just in pain all the time. It's like, look at that letter. And I know another one's coming and it keeps me going. Like, I'm reading these things. I'm like, I didn't expect this. I did not expect this. And we get these every week. We still get them of people having, you know, very positive impact. And so I step back, looked at what we were doing and said, okay, if we can truly run a business together, my wife and I, we love each other and we really like working together, which I'm finding is unique. She does the art, I do the business. We step back and say, okay, how can we have a maximum impact in this business and grow it so that we can bring this light and joy to people's lives. And so I left everything behind and we focused solely on this. And we configured, and the best way to describe it, because there's a lifestyle business and there's, you set up and it's like, this is, you know, I've got 10 different things going on or there's like the generational thing. And we decided this was going to be a generational thing for us. We want our brain to work here with us. That causes to configure a little differently and reinvest pretty much everything back in the growth, exactly into the learning, the marketing, the customer acquisition, early on. I mean, it's been fantastic. So much fun, but so hard. I'll be, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say I had a shipping business and we shipped hundreds of thousands of packages. And anytime I hear someone say, like, X, Y, Z got lost in the mail, I'm just like, no, it didn't. Like statistically speaking, no, it did not. 'Cause we almost nothing that we sent didn't arrive. Like it always arrived. Yeah. So it is miraculous how that works. So your turn is excellent. What is your turn on a percentage basis and how has that changed over time if at all or across different genres or stories? Last I looked globally, we're probably at like a 5% turn. Monthly or yearly? Yearly. So very, very low. That's incredible. We predominantly do sell our prepaid option. People are way much less likely to turn in the prepaid. We make it very attractive to come into the prepaid. What is the price for that compared to 12 a month? 12 a month. So right now you can do prepaid for $100. It's like $8.5 a month. Yeah. So that was our entry point. And then you can add a 10 to it. The 10 is then just so well received. People love it. They're pretty. You can maybe see one right back here. Oh. Yeah. Would you mind holding one of those up? They get that like with the first so they can store everything in it? Yeah, they store the letters in it. Brilliant. So looking across, we were relatively inexpensive. Compared to other subscriptions. But that's because we want to make it accessible for people because of the impact we want to have as many impact as we possibly can. But we have other products that help you know from a profitability standpoint like the 10 different things. And like why haven't we added a letter over? It's like, man, that's like a no brainer. It just takes time to put it in the 10. I'll put it in the 10 when you ship it. I mean, there's so much stuff we can put in the 10 like letter opener, park cards, stickers, like different things they can add to their order if they want. So it's 10 bucks. Do they have to pay for additional shipping for the 10 as well? So the 10 we sell the 10 for 30. Oh, you said 10, not 10. So then it'll be $8 shipping, $9 shipping. Right now we're doing free shipping. Spring promotion is going into Mother's Day. So then standard shipping, if you do the letters, we started charging more shipping because we started to track. Then we can add the volume that we, you know, when we get into kind of busy seasons, we'll do free shipping just to remove any barriers to entry. So yeah, is Mother's Day huge for you? It's our Super Bowl. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's bigger than Christmas. Wow. Is it more, you know, sons and daughters for their moms or husbands for their wives? It's daughters for the mothers. Interesting. More than anything. More than anything. And friends for friends. Our demographic is, as Trump is female 35 plus and probably skewed a little bit older. So starts at 35 then kind of gets into like the 45 55 is kind of the peak. And it's, I love this market so much. One I think that are underserved when you interact with them, they're the best customers I've ever worked with like across all the reasonable, they're forgiving. They're, you know, and they, they, they're like, oh yeah, you know, that's okay. And if they're upset, you call them and they're like, oh, you know, that's okay. You know, we'll figure it out. And our mantra is, hey, we're always going to do everything we can to make it right and to do right by you. Because what we said, when we promise something that is pretty, it's a pretty tall order to fulfill, you know, something to look forward to. That's a story that continues and, you know, comes in order. When that doesn't go well, it's kind of like we didn't get, we didn't make it happen. But we got to do whatever we can to make that right. Especially when it's how long are the letters? How many words and cumulatively, how many words is the whole series? And have you ever thought of making that just into a physical book? Physical book, we have, but at the same time, no. Because you want to keep it special to the letters, right? Or else they're just like, oh, I'm paying 100, 100 bucks for a book. I'll tell you one of the things that we didn't do early on is make each letter formulaic. You know, I think if you're. I see what you mean. If you're a, you know, if you're thinking of starting this, you're like, okay, every letter is going to be two pages with a postcard and maybe one little insert. And that happens every single time. That's great. It's very predictable. And that's a good model if it works. One of the things that I think has helped us that makes us, people like us is different. Like one letter, you're going to get eight things and you're going to have a four page letter. And then the next one, you're going to have a two page letter and a postcard and like a sticker. So the point where there's one where we had to do something because people kept reaching out, I was like, did I get everything? I was like, yeah, it's just that one. We say a pool of tons of stuff. And I can do it. Yeah, I'd love to see how many words are each letter on average? I don't know. Okay. It's not something you track. Well, that's another thing with Hany is, and we have, we try to work into it is writing a story in this way is in our form. It's that she's perfected because there's so much that you can do, you know, with different content. Another's just a random letter from Lily Clara. So I'm going to give you an idea of what comes in this one. So this is the letter. So when she's creating this, she's curating the experience. That makes sense. And she's like, okay, this letter, in this envelope, there's gonna be a letter and this is three pages. So the front and back. And then on this one, then there's, this is like an advertisement card, it's from the era. - Oh, cool. - This isn't part of the story, it's just like, let's send them this so they can be drawn into. - Yeah. And that's a real ad from that era. - Real ad, yeah. - That's American machine codes, ice cream freezers. - Pretty cool. - Yeah. - There's one that we were sending that ended up being, that we didn't really notice it, but it was offensive. So we pulled it. (laughing) - Oops. - And then there's this one, I designed this as a bookmark. - Wow. - And she's designing all of these? - All of it, yeah. This is, and there's like some silver, like metallic stuff on it. This is a character from the story actually. Then there's a telegram. So this is a telegram part of the story. So like, and it's like, you look at it, it's like a telegram can fill in a lot of gaps, right? And then there's postcards. So I read, there's 12 postcards in every story that you get. - Okay. - So we send these. - One per month. - Yeah, about one a month. - Yeah, it is. - Yeah. - Okay. - Yeah. - How long do you take you to quit your job? - Oh, for your startup. - Oh man, that was hard. 'Cause that was like, you know, I loved this so much. We started right during the pandemic. In fact, he's a business partner from that he's killing it now with AI. And it's still going. It was, it took me about a month to kind of truly really decide. And it was January of 2021, where I went to him and was like, I gotta, I gotta go do this. I gotta, you know, do this. And he's supportive and great. I have a look back. I haven't done anything else. This takes all my time. - Yeah. - It's awesome. - Today it's been six years going on six years. - Yeah. - And what is your monthly revenue and profit today? - Monthly revenue is varies month to month. Across it, it's about, in 2024, we broke the 5 million mark and total revenue. - Wow. - Wow. - And then last year we, I was like, man, maybe we could go to 10. (laughing) - And it's like, hold on Clark. - That's a double. (laughing) - That's hard. - That's hard. Last year we just, we broke seven. - That's still. - And so this year, we're like, hey, what about 10? And then it's like, hold on Clark, that's a lot. (laughing) - Yeah. - A lot. - Well, after Mother's Day, you'll be like 12 for sure. - Oh, cool. - And then come October, you're like 10 would be nice. - We'll see. We'll see. I have a girl. The next goal is a 10 million mark just because that's sort of a benchmark. But if we can match what we did last year, I'd be thrilled. 'Cause we were able to service so many new customers and that's been a lot of fun. So that's what the biggest challenges of this business is the seasonality. So you have these big peaks in Mother's Day and you have to figure out, okay. We've gotta make sure we've got enough operations to get it next one and continue to invest. And so. - Did you know you can build a six figure business with only a 10,000 person email list? I just talked to the founder of Beehive and he told me that there are people with 10 to 15,000 subscribers making more than newsletters that are 10 times that size. Here's how. Well, this one designed newsletter with around 15,000 subs doesn't just sell ads. They run two week online cohorts four times a year that generate six figures. And on top of that, they're charging companies 20 to 30,000 dollars to get in front of their audience. And that's on one small focus list. This is not about going viral anymore. It's about owning an eash and monetizing it correctly. And Beehive gives you exactly the tools to do just that like surveys to understand exactly who your readers are or a built in recommendation network to grow automatically paid subscriptions, digital products, sponsorship tools and you keep 100% of the revenue. You don't need a massive audience to run a successful business. You need the right system. So move your email list over today and try out Beehive with 30% off for 30 days with code Chris30 because this might be the simplest, highest leverage business that you can build right now. Just go to behive.com/chris to learn more of that's beehive.com/chris. - That's about a lot of learning for us, especially because we didn't configure this to be lifestyle driven for us. So we have an extracted cash from the business. We've tried to invest all of this. So we try to keep our net profit as low as we possibly can from a tax perspective and keep the business growing, keep it fueled and try to look at the intention of expanding our net. - Yeah, we're hitting a critical mass, I think, where we're really poised to really start to expand into different categories like retail. Retails are real opportunity, I think, for what we do. We figured out a really neat product where we worked, I don't know if you've ever been back to the Newport mansions in Rhode Island. - Mm-hmm. - It approached us last year, one of the other person that runs their gift shop signed up, reached out, I was like, what if we, what if you wrote a story about the Guild of the Day, and we could put it in our shop, it's where we're like, yeah, that's totally cool. So we're in their shops, that's pretty awesome. - Yeah. - You know, then we're like, what if we could get this, what if you could walk into Costco? And you see the flower letters on a stand and it's a gift, a giftable thing. It's like a gift, almost like a gift card. - Yeah. - Come in and look at the, - Yeah, like you just bring it to the register. - Yeah. - So we built out a whole redemption website. And, wow, and you know, we can come in, you scan a QR code, pulls up, into your address and you're good to go. And so that's been built out and configured. And we'd love to, you know, get into three-tail stores, but also expanding into different mediums, audio. We've always explored what if we could have the opportunity to turn this into like a TV series. - Yeah, why not? Why not a podcast where your wife just reads the letters? - Oh, we thought about that. We have a podcast where sort of dabbling in it. It's called Stories Told Through You. People from our community come on and tell their stories. Like come to find out, people have, so like people are fascinated. That's one thing I've learned about this community from them. I had this experience where I was in the doctor's office and you know, this lady had a little, a post at no, right? On her desk and I was, you know, paying for my doctor visit and her post at no, it was like taped down, you know? It's like one of those posts, enough, like, she's like, I'm gonna look at this every day. It says, your story matters. And that hit me. I was like, why would you think your story didn't matter? And so anyway, we invite people from our community to come on our podcast. We've heard some fascinating stories. Just incredible. - And everyone has them. I don't care who you are, your story is fascinating. Because you've felt fear, you felt love, you felt betrayal. I mean, all of these things that make up a great story are part of your life. It's been fun to extract that and have people come and tell their stories. So, but yeah, that's a great idea. Like an audio version where she reads the stories. There's so many different things. So if you were like taking profits out of the business, what would you hope to do in net profit on 7 million in revenue? - If we did invest back into as much as we did in meta, you know, I would love at some point to be able to have a net profit of a million dollars. - Yeah. - Your growth would slow. - Yeah, it would. - It would be a little slow. We wouldn't be able to get as many customers. But there is a point, there's a tipping point where I think we start to hit a more organic growth. A lot of people refer to this to their friends with more people coming into this medium and doing tonic stories to letters. There's a lot of people that have started to do in the last little while. It's becoming, I think, a viable. I think way to experience a story. And I think with that, you know, we've never really invested in organic growth. It's all been paid. But as soon as we're able to crack organic and not have to spend so much within meta, that's like net profit will start to really build. - Yeah. How much are you spending on meta today? - Oh, so last year we spent 2.6 million. - And your cost per acquisition went from 15 to 20 in the early days to what? - Oh, yeah. - Cool. Man, if we could 15 to 20, we'd be swimming in it. (laughing) - Yeah. - But every e-commerce brand has, I mean, you can't do it. You can't do that. That's virtually impossible. Some do. I mean, just, you know, 'cause they're really good at it. But ours is 40 to 50 at this point. - Did you hear my episode with Hannah, the snail mail business? - I heard part of it. Yeah. Yeah, she's friendly. - So she's all organic. - Yeah. - You should go look at her TikTok page and like the style of video that she posts, 'cause there's a lot to learn there. She's doing it really interestingly. - Yeah, I'm learning that organic, what you do is an art. - I don't know. 'Cause you go, you're a, I don't imagine you spend a lot on ads for what you do, but you have a huge audience. - Depends on the thing. - You've been able to kind of get out and make it happen. But every time I see it's like, figuring out the organic would become a full-time thing. Because when I look at it, it's like, well, what organic, there could be some organic approach because we're a product, right? We're not, a lot of the organic success or brands that are organic, the people are the product in a lot of ways, where people are buying them when they buy their product because they like their content, they enjoy their, you know what they are. And they've attached themselves so closely to the brand that when you buy their product, you're essentially buying them. And so that would be essentially me in hand. really investing in that organic approach, which we thought a lot about, like, she's writing stories, like, that's what she does. I don't know. There's lots of things we can do to try to figure that out, but the more I look into the organic and see the people who are successful in it, I'm like, wow, they've really kind of, because it's not just, you know, I really appreciate what they do, because it's not just a willy-nilly, it's like, formulaic. Yeah, yeah. You figured out. You know exactly, you know your hook, you know, everything, and it's, that's what I do. But it starts willy-nilly. Yeah. You learn from there. You figure it out. You're like, hey, wow, they like that. Okay, I'll do that. Yeah. I'll see more of that. Yeah. Yeah. So roughly, I'm just estimating here, you're spending like a 30-year revenue on like, cost of goods hold, postage and paper and supplies. You're spending another third-ish on meta ads, straight to meta, and then the rest of it is going to pay your people operation and investing growth operation. Yeah. Yeah. It's a reinvestment cycle, but just been fun, right? But it's kind of a, because you can see opportunities, different ways you can grow, and it's no, nothing's ever different. Like every year's, you know, exciting, something else has happened. New stories are coming out. Like a lot of it goes into investing in new stories, to be honest, researching the stories, things like that. Yeah. That's kind of, that's where we're at. So your yearly turn is 5%, you know, $100 per year per customer. How long, I mean, it's still early, you're five and a half years in. How long are customers staying? What's your like year-over-year turn or like lifetime value, I guess? What's the lifetime value of a customer? Our monthly lifetime value right now is about $180. From across 12 months, really? 12 months, yeah. Wow. Why not closer to 100 if they're paying two-story? 12 bucks a month. Okay. Okay, so you'll have a customer and this is not uncommon. This year I had like, "Oh, wow. I'm going to give this to my mom and to my sister." So that I too. And then, you know, later on, they're like, "You know what? I'd like to do this and they buy it for themselves." So that person has spent, you know, for just $300 depending on what how many, to do a tin or whatever. But we have a lot of repeat purchases. I saw one, someone bought like 10 for their friends and I was like, "Man, you should. That's crazy. How do we get more of those? Yeah. Because you still spent $40 or $50 to find that customer too. Yeah. But it's also we have a really strong core of people that when we release a new story, they're excited to sign up for it. Because they love what we do and they know they kind of know what to expect from us, from a story perspective. We're not trying to be edgy. We're not trying to like scare you or not trying to like throw anything in this controversial. The stories are all designed to be just full of light, happy endings. You know, we're not a polydetic about that. We're not trying to throw any curveballs. How you but our customers appreciate that and really like that. And so if they're spending 180 per year, do you know how many are coming back for a second year? It depends. A lot of it bleeds into the other. Because it'll be, she'll, they'll buy two in the six months later, the buy another one. And then, you know, a year later, the buy another one. So we'll have wind back campaigns where people maybe haven't, you know, the pain of tension. No, we have another story about to email campaigns to try to win them back. I think we've built a really good core of loyal customers now. It's sort of hard because it just doesn't renew, right? It's not like after your story's done, you don't just roll into another one and pay a guess. We don't, we, you sign up individually for each story. But that makes a little bit more challenging for us to really get subscription data. I, we also don't prove that our annual subscriptions through a subscription software. You kind of do that on our own. Can we use a software? Okay. Come on. Come on. And so we don't get as much, we kind of get the, the software is good because it gives you more like a subscription. We treat them a little bit differently because they're sort of buying that story, that experience. Right. Everyone has to pay 1% to the subscription for their, the prepaid. If Mother's Day is 10 out of 10 busy, what is Christmas Thanksgiving? How does that compare on a scale of 1 to 10? Oh, they all, they all feel 10 out of 10. Christmas can actually be a little bit more hectic because just from a personnel standpoint, this one, people want to go give their families want to, so yeah, we have people staffed. It's a little bit more challenging, but Mother's Day usually, you know, goes really well. Yeah, I think from a, they's in a standpoint, Mother's Day is 10 out of 10, say 9 out of 10 for Christmas. And what is your team look like? How many people do you have? And logistically, are you in like a warehouse? Do you have automation equipment for stuffing all these or are people doing that by hand? It's all by hand. So the way that, and we have a warehouse just over in Oranguita. Right now, our head count is 16. We've had as many as 25, but we've built in like our operations, managers, and crowd. He's fantastic. To give you an example of how efficient he's gotten us, we used to have like 15 people stuffing 20,000 letters. Now we have five doing 120,000 a month. Holy cow. That's incredible. But yeah, it's very high touch. So people are handling each and every piece that you get. It's gone through the hands of our team. It's funny. I talked to a lot of business owners and 9 out of 10 times. It's like, how are you using AI? How is AI going to transform your business? How are you going to make more money with AI? And with this business, I'm just thinking about it and it's like, you don't need AI. I use everything. That's a fee. Well, I guess you don't want AI to write your letters. No, right? No, you're not going to get AI to stuff your envelopes anytime soon. No, you could use it in your meta ads. But how are you using AI? So AI has been, I'm fastly. I love it. I think it's just this incredible opportunity. I mean, if I were going to start a business, it would be an AI business. There's tons of them. You can start. But I use it every day to process thought. I'll, you know, do analysis on a string of emails I've received. Pull in data from our Facebook ads and have it run an analysis on our efficiency. Put in our financials, right? Pull in our friends, have it do an analysis and give us some insight into how we're operating. But yeah, you're right. We wouldn't use it to write the letters. I think there's something that are probably using AI to write letters, things that they're doing in generate images. And I think time will tell how well received AI generated entertainment is. I do know that the entertainment industry is, I mean, they're already using it. They're already leveraging it. Yeah. From a writing standpoint. Well, yeah, for me, it's more about business intelligence running up bouncing ideas. Sure. I generated a webpage. It took five minutes. And that was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think I told you this. But my wife is in the middle of starting a snail mail business for cooking. Yeah. It's called snail mail supper club.com. And got a couple selfish questions for you. And she's starting it because she read a book called Bread and Wine. And she was inspired to start like a cookbook club with friends where they every month they meet, they all bring their own meal, you know, appetizers, entrez desserts around a central theme. Like this month was Greece or Mexico or St. Patrick's Day. You know, a country or a day or a theme. And they all kind of have a group chat and they just bond over it and they share their food and they dress up all nice. And she has absolutely loved it. So she heard my episode with Hannah. And she's like, I could just turn that business into a snail mail business where I could write the recipes out. And we get some artwork done. And it's great for referral marketing because like, we're encouraging groups. Like so one person signs up the chance that they send it to their seven friends is much higher. They don't have to. They could do it themselves. But then they'd each get a unique recipe. So there's kind of some logistical challenges there. But she's launching from other's day. And I'm curious like what what other niches do you think this is that could be really interesting with the snail mail business that you're really not interested in tackling. But you see opportunity. And other recipes interesting. There's a friend of mine started a company called Peachy recipe. You can essentially upload your own recipes and they'll print out a cookbook for like a family cookbook. But pretty pretty neat. Oh cool. But yeah, the recipes ones that's really that's unique and fun. I think when there's there's a lot of this, any sort of like the penpal one is interesting. We have people that I think there's other penpal businesses that do it. I'm just trying to think anything that's like a standalone like once a month thing is way simpler than getting into the story business. The story of it is it's a much different animal to tackle because when you have to write a story and that's difficult recipes and things like that would be interesting. Someone was like, hey, you should do Santa letters. And I was like, uh, that's in our brand. But I know there's a couple people that do Santa letters around Christmas and they do well. What about true crime? Like there's a business called the hunter killer. And they do like true crime boxes, right? Where you solve a that's like a hundred and fifty million dollar a year business. That's huge, right? Yep. And so why not take that and put it in like a letter form and just a true crime story or like a puzzle, something to decode, you know, think there's one that does it. I think I saw one that is doing that. Good. They prove the model. We can go copy them. What it comes down to, honestly, that the reason those companies were so successful, one they knew they knew their market and they marketed the heck out of it. It's all meta. - Yeah. - I think you can only go organic in your business so far. - Yeah. - Especially when something's sort of niche where it's not a mass market up-kill, you're gonna need to advertise market and break it. And develop e-commerce skills, you know, CRO, like CRO, if I didn't even know what that was. - Conversion, for the listener, conversion rate optimization. - Conversion rate optimization, Mike. Getting 3% of people to buy it to 3.2% of people to buy. That could be a lot of money. - 3.15. - Yeah. - There you go. - And it's like, it's the creative stuff. Hey, let's make this button green. - Yeah. - Let's move it from the left to the right side of the page. - Who cares? - Why would you care about that? It's like, well, when you have 100,000 people come to your website in the five day period, that could be significant. - Yeah. - The fact that a button's green and people are more likely to click on it, it's wild, it's kind of creepy. Or if you learn like Samsung users in Turkey, for some reason, the checkout button doesn't load correctly. So there's so many one off things, and in aggregate, it can really make a big difference. - It's huge. If you're an entrepreneur, you're a business owner, you probably see people coming up in your feed, telling you you're doing it wrong. Let me show you how to do this. Let me show you how to do that. You have to know your business. You have to know your, if you don't know your customer, none, or your business, or your product, none of it's gonna work. You gotta know who your customer is gonna know how to talk to them. That's why early on, the more someone can really, truly understand who it is they're selling to, and who it is, is their customer, the better off they're gonna be. 'Cause if you ask us, "Well, who's your customer?" I say, "Well, anybody with a mom?" I say, "Hmm, no." (laughs) That doesn't work. Well, to great Mother's Day gift, well, everyone has a mom, so just market to everybody. It's like, "Well, no, there's a specific demographic, a specific type of person that this will resonate with." Marketing for us, marketing to men has been, it hasn't worked. It just doesn't work. Because we don't get it, men see this and live in a 30-stay, it's very difficult to get. I hope I don't sound sexist, but. No, not at all. They don't think about it. You have to hook them. Yeah, you have to hook them. Ironically, like, if I'm, I mean, most of the people that watch this will be men, and by the time they get to the end of it, they're watching it for business reasons, but they're probably like, "You know, I'm gonna get that for my mom," because they're sold. But if they were to see the same type of video, you would not hook them in the first five seconds. Oh, you know? It's been super fun to figure it out. All that stuff. Yeah, they can drive you nuts. Yeah, it drives you wild. There is an 80-20 to all of it. You have to, at some point, you have to stop moving pixels, right? Yeah. (laughs) Well, my last question for you, I wanna be respectful of your time, is if someone's watching this and they're entrepreneurial, and they wanna start some sort of a snail mail subscription business, what is some advice that you could give them that could help them save themselves a world of pain or hurt or all that? Know your customer. No. But also know what you're sending them for. If you're doing a story, it's much harder than doing a standalone month tomorrow. Because the story is, you know, you have to get it right. It's a risk I'm in order. You have to tie it all together. Yeah, yeah. Well, first you have to write a story, right? One of the reasons why it works so well with my wife and I is she's the creator, right? And I think most people, and I think it's all with Hannah, my wife's name's Hannah as well, but with the person you have on your podcast, works well with us as she can really focus on the creative, and I can really focus on the business. Yeah. And when you have a creative venture, it's very difficult. So authors, that's why authors and writers and creators create this often struggle is because they just want to create. They want to write, they want to do this, they want to do their art, right? Which is I should do, but you got to sell it. And so you got to figure out, okay, now how do we mirror these things together? And, you know, really get a customer base and make a viable business out of this thing that I'm creating. Yeah, I think that would be, know your customer, figure out the business side. And if you can have a partner, whether it's a spouse or a friend that can handle one side of the business and the creative, 'cause it's a creative endeavor, right? Probably with your wife, if you run maybe to help around the business side and she does the creative scenarios, it could be a match, great match, because you can see, you know, you're attracting customer lifetime value, your acquisition cost, you know, all of the different business and she can focus on, ah, because that, honestly, enabling the creative is, 'cause that's your product, I mean, that's the match, right? That's squelched in any way, shape or form. It's not gonna be as good, but I'd say that I don't think that's just for cinema, I think that's for any business, have creative minds, business minds, that can really help understand the ins and outs of business, but also, I mean, the more you think about any business, like the creative, I think sometimes we undervalue creativity in the creative minds and business. I think if people have a hard time finding or knowing their customer, 'cause I agree that's paramount advice, know who your customer is. If you don't really know how to figure that out, just start with a customer of one, you, right? Yeah. And my wife and I had a conversation about this snail mob business, she wanted to take videos of her making all the recipes and then put a QR code in there so people could watch how to make it. And I was like, okay, great idea, but that's a very big lift, that's a lot more of a lift than what you're currently planning on. And I asked her, would you, do you watch videos of people cooking when you make meals for us? And she's like, no, well, build it out for you. Like if you're not likely to do that, then people aren't likely to do it either. And so if it's not a big lift, then try it, but if it is, then maybe just give it a month or two before you try it. That's really actually insightful because when Hany was creating our first story, which is Andrew Rose, she wrote it for her, and she wrote it, it's like, I'm gonna write this for me and I'm gonna curate this so that it's something that I love. Turns out, wow, there's lots of different people. They love. And now they feel loyal to her because they're like her. We like people that are like ourselves, right? Right. So it's good business. I think people need to remember the markets are huge. Like I think sometimes it's hard to fathom. Like just think about 100,000 people. That's a lot of people. Times that by 10, that's a million, that's a lot of people. Times that by, that's a lot of people with a lot of different preferences. And you haven't sold anything. Doesn't mean the market's not there. You just have to keep trying. You have to keep finding it. Irrating and it could be try weird things. I don't know. But like there's markets for just about everything out there. I think a lot of people get discouraged because they're like, all right, I gotta launch it and nobody buys it. I like, all right, it didn't work. (laughing) Yeah, yeah. I also have a theory that I tried. 'Cause the business is all transactional. It's to me, it's whether it's a transaction of, you know, coming into a store. I think that's a transaction. I came into the store for some reason. I transacted by walking through the threshold into the store. I transacted by picking something up and feeling it. And then ultimately the final transaction is a financial transaction where they persist your goods or your services. Number one, leading indicators of a successful financial transaction is someone giving you their email address. Because like they want to get what you're sending. There's a way that the secret that, and if I were to start another business, I would do this. I would develop a product that comes concept idea. And I would build a website. I would put up a form coming soon. Here's my product, here's what I'm doing. Here's my service. Give me your email address, stay up to date. If I can just run some ads, there's just little things here and there. And I can find a pretty good mass of people that are willing to transact with me through their email address. I'll honestly, okay, I think I got something going here. I think there's, there's gonna be something here. That's a really easy way to like test a market. Sounds easy, but oh, I got to build a website. It's like, well, that's easier now than ever. - One prompt. - You know, but anyway. - One prompt and that's something that people could try before they really invest anything. - That's excellent advice. Michael, thank you very much. This has been incredible. Obviously we can find you at theflowerletters.com. Is there anywhere else that we can find you? - Social media, the.flower.letters. - Yeah, our website's the best. We'll find links to all of our social media there. And obviously you can sign up for any email list as well. And here for us there. - Awesome, thank you. - Thank you, man. I really appreciate it. Great to meet you. - Likewise. - All right, would you think, please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the corner office.