We built the world's biggest local newsletter business — with Ryan Heafy of 6AM City

Welcome back newsletter nerds. We are joined today by Ryan Heefy, co-founder of 6am City. Ryan's like one of five people that I've really wanted to have on as a guest since like day one of like thinking about this podcast. He scaled 6am to like two million subscribers, 400 plus local newsletters. And what I find really interesting is they are doing a bunch of wild stuff on top of that. Like they've got this like newsletter ad network thing. They've got a done few newsletter service. They're doing a bunch of stuff with AI-generated content, which is really cool or the devil depending on your point of view. And they're doing a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, I'm super excited for this one. Yeah, I think one of the things that got me excited about it was, I saw you guys just made a big acquisition. We don't get a lot of excitement in the newsletter space. So can we just dive right into that? So 6am City acquired Good Daily, which is an AI-driven local newsletter platform. So could you just walk us through that? How did that all come about? And you know, what's the plan there? Yeah, I think one of the things as a newsletter-based company at scale, one market, if I was morning brew and I was operating in one, one primary newsletter every day or 1440. I mean, these brands have now scaled a few, a few newsletters. It's very easy to take a person or a couple people and produce your content and someone who handles growth and all these other aspects of sales and fulfillment. We were already doing that in 30-something cities, 30 newsletters a day, editorial staff, boots on the ground, in-market, sales teams and all that. It's a lot, it's a lot of overhead. I mean, we're talking, you know, a million dollars a month or more and just people, right? And so how do you go and expand into more cities in America? And how do you do it in a more efficient way? And as AI or just technological innovation has come about, how do we get there? And it's a build-by decision, right? Am I going to go try to learn and build all these tools and maybe work with the right developer who understands email and deliverability and news? Well, we found a unicorn. I mean, Matthew Henderson was very clearly an expert in deliverability. His background made him as such. He was creating local newsletters with a very similar core principle as us. We always wanted to figure out how do you connect with the community? Give people a quick digest, five-minute read, conversational and tone. How do you spend your time, talent and treasure in a community? No, we don't need to be the investigative journalists. There's other people out there that do that. We want to add value, drive economic impact. So the principle and vision that Matt had was making things accessible in a community, it aligned. Well, we start seeing it and go, wow, that's really interesting. This person's putting out 400 newsletters a day. How the hell is he doing that? Just him, right? To confirm? Just him. Yep. That's great. Yeah. Single individual person, amazing developer, background in email and deliverability, solved a problem for his grandparents and said, "Hey, I'm going to give you a newsletter so you know what's going on in your local community." They had no idea he built it for them and they're like, "Wow, this real newsletter I get every day, it's really cool." And he goes, "Wow, I can scale that." The newsletter didn't align 100% with artitorial ethics policy, but it has to do with sourcing and things that you can easily change and evolve with the tech stack made sense. And so Matthew had built an audience development engine, our app, like for lack of better term, here is a way that he's able to go source, qualify, ensure high quality subscribers coming into the list from the beginning, track that subscriber cohort analysis in a way more automated manner, turn our lists to drive super high engaged healthy lists. That's a win because that's not easy to do. And it's not easy to grow your audience at a low cost. I mean, we were spending, you know, four dollars or more a subscriber to grow sports audiences, and you know, 75 cents to a dollar to grow our local email, a subscriber base, and Matt comes in with a solution that's way more effective. And netting a higher engaged subscriber. That's pretty cool. That's probably the proprietary part that we picked up. The other piece was how do you source content in a community that actually adds value to other to folks and packages it in a manner that's in line with your editorial standards and does it automatically. And so the tools that Matthew built allow us to turn on any new city in America in five minutes. And it used to be that we would turn on any new city in America in 90 days and we would brag about that. Like, hey, I just, for a quarter million dollars, I can go turn on a city, be up and running and be live in 90 days and be profitable in two years. Awesome. Well, now I can be up and running in one day and be profitable in two days and be in any city we want to be in. That's game changing. And so we are optimizing for what the product looks like now, leveraging the tech that he created, making it more aligned with our brand standards. We are designing for the consumer opposite of what most media companies do and they have a journalist that creates content that they think a consumer might care about because they care about it, which doesn't necessarily work to align with your audience. And so we've learned a lot over the years, we're taking our lessons learned at 6am. Our sales talent, our revenue fulfillment process, our strategic partnerships, combining that with the technology infrastructure and the talent, now go one plus one equals five, you know, and go way the hell faster in growing both our audience, our market reach and our revenue potential. In just 30 days or so, it's already showing materially positive results. What would be the one thing you're most excited about? Is it with AI and with this acquisition? Is it the content creation? Is it the growth? Like what aspect of the AI was the thing that when you looked at his business, you said we have to own this? I think the biggest thing is it expedited our ability to deliver things that we've been wanting to work on or we're building else-wise. The less obvious, less sexy parts are the cool parts. Like man, we have all these people creating social media content every single day. They're literally going to our newsletter and then they extract a piece of it, they match it with an image and the social, like create a social post, then it goes out. Well, it's all automated now. We have a developer. We know what we want. This is the source. This is the output we desire. Let's create the process, process efficiency. I don't need to have 20 people doing that anymore. That's great. That lets our editorial staff focus on the higher value stuff that keeps people involved. I think Adam Ryan at Workweek, I think talks about this a good bit, but like you need to have this human relatable actual value ad element. You cannot just all AI. There's nowhere in our plan to just go build straight AI. AI is a seed tool for us from my content perspective. We want to be able to get this stuff, so get an infrastructure set up so that we can then layer in the human element around a profitable product that's sustainable and then you really are adding value in a market. We are more focused on the process, efficiency behind the scenes. How do I deliver to my editorial person every morning? Here's the top 50 headline stories, things that surfaced from all these different sources overnight that you want to pay attention to today. Then they can go curate, but why spend four hours curating when the curation can be done for you? That's the wins. It's not just that hey, the newsletter is pumping out something and it's all done by AI, and to be clear, it's not going to be all done by AI. I think people don't understand how humans can create the infrastructure for a piece of content, and AI can fill in the data points versus just it's not like a RSS feed of shitty AI content. It's like editorial lens and the lessons we learned. AI subsidizes that information to enrich it a certain way, and then you share it. It's really the operational efficiency that matters. You said you're up to what 400 and something locations now, and you can spin up a city in a couple of minutes or a day. How do you make that decision then about which cities to, I guess, firstly, which cities like go into that you're not currently in, and then secondly, if it's going kind of okay when you're there, how do you make the decision whether it's like investor or it's that or not like fills out like ads and all that kind of stuff. Let me give you a backwards explainer on that. So a few years ago, we decided to triple the size of the company. How do you get from seven to 21 cities overnight? And our model at that time cost about $250,000 to launch a new market in year one. And we just made bets. And we used to say, hey, we only go to cities. We go to non NFL cities. If as an NFL city or an NFL team, the city's too big. So we go to the ones that are smaller where there's a strong pride in place where people are excited about their community. We know we thrive there. Well, Advertiser Demand said, hey, y'all aren't in all these cities in America. We really don't want to target just those seven you haven't the southeast, like you need to be at a bigger footprint. And so we said, what the hell? We got some capital. Let's go expand. And so we did, well, if you can do the math real quick, 14 cities times a quarter million dollars a year, the editorial staff, the sales staff, the expanded the footprint, we were paying to grow the audience. And it wasn't a winning formula in all the cities. Not every city is created equal. It's funny, like Asheville, North Carolina can make just as much money as Greenville, South Carolina, or Charleston, South Carolina, or Raleigh, North Carolina. It's a much smaller city in a way, but the pride and place in that community drives the ad dollars to be just as impactful as a much larger city. Lakeland, Florida is the same way. They're punching above their weight as a community. And there's investment from the community impact brands that makes that a viable profitable product going to the West Coast to San Diego and Sacramento and Seattle and Portland, the operating costs were higher. Hiring the sales sound was higher, the editorial talent was higher, but the markets were bigger. And so penetrating through, you're going through an ad agency instead of a local buyer a lot of times. And just the time horizon to become profitable just took a lot longer. AI changes the game. Now we launch a seed market. I can turn on a city anywhere. Does a few things for me? Domain health and deliverability, building that reputation, slower, getting it going. I'm delivering every single day. I've got a product. People are engaging with it. Healthy list. Wow. Over a few months that was screwed to 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 subscribers. Awesome. We've got self-serve advertising revenue. This goes to some of the other things that Six Am's doing. Our own self-serve ad platform. The ability to pull in national advertisers that some of the that you would typically see in a 1440 morning brew. Those are are able to come in and backfill. And so now I have 5,000,000 subs. I'm doing over 5,000 a month in revenue. All right, great. That newsletter today is a, you know, 60 to $100,000 your product. Well, what do I do? I add a sales. I add a editorial staff person and sales talent. Now it goes from $100,000 your product to a $1 million your product. So the importance of the humans come into the mix dramatically drives up the revenue potential in that market. But what what the AI is doing is if I go into a thousand cities, it's going to surface the 20 that I should put talent in faster. And so damn, okay, now rather than making bets, I don't have to make a bet anymore. I did product market fit. I got validation in the markets and here they help. Here we go. And so that's the big win and opportunity with it. And at the same time, we believe that we can also make those markets really profitable by themselves. And hey, the eight with AI, the cost to deliver that newsletter is really small. And $5,000 a month in a market like that's pretty damn profitable. So that's really kind of the path and that that's what we look at them as seed. We planted a seed in these markets. They're going to grow and go on that journey for us, which goes seed stage market, launch, where we start bringing resources, growth is a next set of resources and a profit market for us is really, hey, we're doing 800 to 1.2 million a year. It has at least a full time dedicated editorial person to full time sales person. And then we add other product lines into those markets as they move up funnel for us. That's so cool. In the early stage, like that sort of seed or precede stage, where you're getting from zero to 5,000 subscribers, how much time, like how much human time is actually involved on like a week to week basis? I know there's like a bunch of stuff up front, like you've got the editorial like framework that the AI is going into, you've got all this stuff, but like actual like humans sort of like thinking about that one place. In a way, we've done eight, nine years worth of diligence on what's right, right? So we've got a massive amount of data that says what's right with AI, we're able to take our data, evaluate the market, determine sources, audience, product mix, things that are going to, that we know are going to win. Like we just know there's enough data that says, this is going to work here if we set it up just like this. Part of what math you created, which is genius is here's the parameters, here's the prompting and the AI agents that get you to do all that other crap in the beginning, that work that that's just tedious. You plug in set of parameters, hit go, three weeks, it learns, it does its thing, it proves itself out a little bit of QA and it's live. So, you know, maybe we're spending five to ten minutes with an overseas support person to make sure that all the sources are validated correctly. And then we're doing a little bit of mild QA for a period of time to make sure that that content's accurate and good and that's all we need to do. That's it. It's done. The audience development engine is created. All we need to do is just say new market, new market, new market, new market. So yeah, the human work is, I don't know, 30 minutes total, maybe. And we're able to outsource a lot of that part of the work to someone overseas. And we've got some great talent overseas that is, you know, a third of the cost of our U.S. based folks. It allows our team to focus on the higher value opportunities. And we're spending up markets following this, this playbook that we've established. And yeah, it's, it's easy. Now then the question becomes, you know, tracking that, which is all in automated dashboards and databases and stuff that tells us how it's performing, what's working, what's not, compares all of the markets against each other. And it says, Hey, you know, it's really time for you to take this to the next level. So my big takeaway is I would be absolutely terrified if I was in the local newsletter space. And I'm, I'm not in the local newsletter space. And I'm a little terrified of you guys because of what you're doing. I'm curious. What would you say to somebody who says, you know, I live in a great community. I want to start a local newsletter right now. Like, would you recommend they do that? Or do they just give up? Maybe they should talk to us because we might be interested in a, an exit path for them. However, I do think that there's a lot of opportunity locally for a person who wants to create a local newsletter. If they're willing to make the investment correctly, and they, do you mean time or money or both? Uh, both. Uh, and time, money, and content. So we don't cover politics, crime and punishment. We're not going to the city council meetings. I saw a great article the other day from a legacy journalistic organization that highlighted something. I think the reality is that going forward, we anticipate that local TV broadcast, like linear TV, morning TV shows, evening TV shows, and newspaper print newspaper are going to be like, do the way you got two to five years, maybe, if it gets last that long. And so as that goes away, uh, who covers the stuff going on in the community? And there's this whole like influencer marketing concept, all that there's influences around food and all these other food is maybe one of the food and beauty, like everyone can get on board and understand that. But there's also a lot of people who are the influencer that loves doing the local investigative reporting. I don't necessarily need to have or rely on and we're building our product so we don't rely on local news outlets. I don't want to rely on something that I think is going to go away. We want to rely on other relationships. And so how do you partner with incentivize, collaborate with the future state creator economy in a market where, you know, maybe there's just a badass blogger, insta influencer who covers local politics. And that's awesome. That person oftentimes has a bigger following as more relevant than the local journalist who's doing the same thing, but is held back by their organization. And so their contents behind the paywall, they did a, their content might be amazing, but it's only seen by like the 500 people that are paying to get there. So I think as the creator economy evolves more, people need a distribution channel to reach more engaged eyeballs. And we fit a good void to like become that partner with a lot of folks. And there's ways that we can align partner compensate, collaborate to make sure that we fit into the ecosystem correctly, but you have to build a foundation first. We're building the foundation. We can bring lots more folks to the table to tackle other verticals and shit like that as we go forward. I guess the especially the AI stuff, it lends itself very well in its current iteration to like text-based stuff, right? Like it's like the perfect sweet spot for newsletters right now. Are you also exploring or starting to think about like other forms of media, podcasts, YouTube, stuff like that? Yes. And without totally sharing the plan on this, because I think we have a pretty unique approach. Local morning TV newscast and evening newscast won't exist. Like in the current way that we see it today. So how do you get to a point where you have it? And people also just don't want to hear a lot of the crap that's being parsed through legacy channels. Like I don't care about the national article about the bear that chased some lady down the running trail in Montana when I live in Miami, Florida. Like it's just not relevant to me, but they're aggregating national news to just fill a void. And so how do you create enough content that people care about locally where they can maybe opt out of caring or hearing about any politics or whatever because they just don't want that. So if you can customize the content people want to consume and you have a database of that content, that content can become audio, it can become video. And there's no reason why we don't have an AI avatar providing you the morning news in a two to five minute segment every day on 20 different platforms. Like so if we build the foundation correctly, we then quite candidly are the replacement for or competitor for any existing local TV or newspaper in any community. And it's not that we're going to necessarily do the investigative journalism or those parts. There is a different set of folks that need to solve that equation, but we can add value and be part of maybe the morning streaming thing. So when you hop on to YouTube TV and it's predetermined what stuff you want to see this morning, we're part of that feed. And so I think that there's if you look at kind of a path, that's maybe where we go. And it helps to protect and be defensible against evolution maybe in the inbox over the years. It diversifies your distribution points of that content because all that other stuff is rented lion. And so we want to make sure that we're optimized to move with technology and be able to put our content anywhere. So if you have the right data base and know your audience and know your content and you can geographically parse it out, I think your position to the rise. Super interesting. I hear you talking about this and I talk to a bunch of newsletter operators, right? And I don't think I know any who we're doing or attempting to do even like 25% of what you guys are currently working on. And then on top of that, you've got this newsletter studio stuff that you're working on, right? The newsletter is a service basically. You have a bunch of other stuff that you're doing as well, like on top of everything we're already talking about. Like, where does that fit into like the strategy? Like where you're like, okay, we have a bunch of like really difficult stuff to go and do over here. Like let's also add in this other stuff. Like how how how did this happen basically? I guess like what's the what's like the book like pull them together for me? Advertiser demand. So one of the things that's interesting folks like Axia's HQ have created great tools that are really maybe more leaning internal corporate comms and maybe has more of a core use case. You have other folks who are helping create tools to build newsletters for whatever. Because of how we've grown, we have amazing relationships with local and regional and national healthcare systems, financial institutions, travel and tourism organizations, etc. And so they they currently are going and they have an ad agency and they pay a ton of money to the ad agency to build all this content and there needs to be paid to be distributed. Well, in the newsletter space, this is almost true for everybody is someone comes to you and they want to buy an ad and guess what? We create the ad and place the ad. We're already doing the creative and the distribution. And so naturally in a lot of these conversations, we're seeing a lot in real estate and healthcare. Hey, we own this master plan community in some part of the country. We have this captive audience of 20,000 people are in this region, our bid district or whatever and we want to be able to communicate with them. Well, we want to add value about the community and we want to push our own messaging and we'd love it to come from a third party source. So either that that community is going to hire a marketing person to do all the work. So I'm going to go pay, you know, all in 75 to $150,000 a year, that person plus the resources and skills to do all this stuff. Or they just say, hey, you guys are right here on our backyard. You're already creating awesome content, city guides, all sorts of stuff that supports. We need a white labeled solution for our our community. Can you take and parse in your content plus the news and information we want to share with our community. And wow, yeah, and oh, by the way, it's going to cost you half what it costs to have that one person that you needed to hire. You don't need to do any work at all whatsoever. And we're going to either white label deliver you the HTML to distribute to your list and or we're going to do that. And you can pay to send it through our our list. And you own the content and you can put it wherever the hell it's you want to. And so we're well, a lot of folks today engage and they have to go through all those levers, agency relationships, building the content with that video production house, paying for the distribution. We're doing it all for like way cheaper. That's the opportunity. And then they actually own their own product in that mix too. So we're seeing a lot of inbound inquiries for that. And so because we have the team, that's amazing at creating content. We already have the infrastructure for packaging and distribution. It's a very, very simple play for us to do that brand lift through our newsletter studio or newsletter is the service side of the business. And that's growing materially. I'm curious. So you have the the newsletters of service side. You're clearly growing in a ton of different cities. What is the thing that's working the best right now to grow a local newsletter? What's working best to grow a local newsletter? I think it's reliance on the data and the history. And we know it worked really, really well in our markets. I think we have a unique advantage over most folks. We started around the same time. I think the scheme existed and the Charlotte agenda started. And like the hustle and morning grew and all of them were just coming. Everything was just kind of coming out of the ground. I mean, we literally started this as a product innovation at the beginning of 2016 under my business partners, family business community journals in Greenville, South Carolina. And we built the product from day one to be different from traditional local media. No politics, no crime punishment, no divisive topics. How do you get people to spend their time, talent, treasure locally, economic impact? How do we make how do we move the needle differently? How do you create a product that people want to consume? And so differentiating our approach and then learning over the years, years and years of what worked, what didn't work, how to be different, how to be independent, how to live in and be and play our part in the ecosystem with other media brands has really set us up to be successful today. And so I think a lot of folks have a really hard time starting something because they're either too rooted in a legacy journalism mindset or they are a legacy outlet. And it's, you know, driving a speedboat is a lot easier than turning them Titanic. And so getting that by and while it's super important and even leadership and other even some of the folks who are younger have come into those organizations know that it needs to happen. I mean, I worked in Fortune 500 company before manufacturing. If I wanted to move a machine from this part of the building to that part of the building, it took a year. And like, it was the simplest task, like we just want to move this. But and so there are a lot of folks are struggling with that when it comes to launching and building local newsletters. And then the other part is people haven't made the the newsletter of the product. And so they're building a I love to write about this. And so I'm going to write about this. What's great. Well, how are you going to grow the audience and how are you going to monetize it? And so they're going after a passion play. And then the other is if you're a legacy and you have a big without naming names, a big broadcast company or a big newspaper organization. And I have maybe two million subscribers, I think. But when I actually go and clean the list hasn't been cleaned in 10 years, I might have like a hundred thousand active engaged subscribers. And my newsletter product is a feed of like who got shot last night. And it's not something that resonates with the audience. So it's not designed to be engaged with. So lots of folks want to start a thing. But they haven't truly done the homework or made the investment in how am I going to grow engaged audience? What's going to what's how am I going to monetize it? What's the LTV going to look like? Is this going to be a viable sustainable business? And so what you're starting to see today is the churn. As Beehive popped up and as lots of other newsletters came to our people came to the table and wanted to create a thing. They're reading the shiny like, wow, a nap town scoop. Ryan Snedon's freaking awesome. That kid deserves so much respect. I think he started that young, he built the things, making a ton of money in one city. He went all in, like he put all that effort in. And if you're not willing to go that far or farther. And even if you do that, there's burnout. You can only do this thing. So many that like by yourself, if you're trying to produce the content, do the sales, do the revenue fulfillment, all those things, you're going to drop. And so you're seeing it. I mean, we get asked every single week sometimes every day to buy or acquire someone's newsletter. Because they started, they worked at it, they hustled, they maybe gave up some other things in their lives to try to create it. They haven't learned and taken an advantage of AI and some of the tools out there. And so they're trying to slap together something or chase a dream. It is not easy. I mean, we just wrote a whole thing about how hard it was for us as a business where we've grown and have a lot of resources. And it is not easy to do. So it depends. Are you doing it as a passion project? Are you doing it as a lifestyle brand? Are you doing it? Because you want to exit it. And I think a lot of people think that they want to exit and sell it to somebody. But if I built my lifestyle brand. And even if my company's doing, let's say it's doing $100,000 a year in revenue, my newsletter. And I think I'm doing awesome. But I'm also having to go to all these events and do all these things. And so really, I'm only making 20 grand profit. And then they come and are like, Hey, do you want to buy it? And I'm like, well, you got, all right, great. You got 25,000 subscribers and you're throwing off 20 grand a year in revenue. I know that when you leave, since you're the only salesperson, I'm going to see a huge cut in revenue. So maybe I can count on 50 grand coming in next year. And you have this subscriber base, which, okay, you got 25,000 subscribers. Let's do the homework. How many are actually opening? How many are actually clicking? All right. So there's 8,000 subscribers in here that I care about. And you want me to spend, you want me to buy your company for a quarter million dollars? I mean, I'll pay you 50 cents per active subscriber. And maybe there's a little additional fluff for the revenue potential. But like, I think people are just, are don't understand. Like until you get to a certain scale, all these newsletters, I mean, if you're doing under $100,000 annually in revenue and your lists, not massively huge or it's not recurring guaranteed revenue that's going to stay after you go. And if it doesn't align with your buyer's interests, there's not a big exit for you. And so I think people just need to think about that part. And I don't think enough people talk about it or dig into like, I'm here today. Where am I in three years with this product and opportunity? And so should I be investing more into it or do I need to move on? That's just the reality of like entrepreneurship. And not everyone that goes into newsletters is doing it with the full like EOS mindset. So like, there's just some lessons learned there. You say EOS, do you follow that internally? Like pretty structured then? Because I'm trying to like, I'm thinking we do a lot less than you at Spock Loop. And it's like, we struggle to keep like an overview and like add in new stuff all the time. Like it's gets pretty active and pretty crazy. Like how do you like just execute all this stuff at the same time? Like what's the, what have you learned over the last couple of years? I'd love to lie and tell you that we had it like so organized and like we knew our priorities and we like did a thing and tackled it and did the next thing we literally we've been talking about it a lot lately. Because there's a lot of scope creep, especially like where we're at today. And it can be true for anybody at any stage. We've had, you know, a great idea, a great idea, a great idea. Let's go build this real estate newsletter, a good build this, whatever. I can't tell you how many projects we've built and kept too long and wasted a ton of people's time on. We've gotten way better now at testing things quickly, doing smaller micro beta tests, tests that don't require every single person in the organization to be involved. Okay, that work that didn't work, go shoot it out back because it ain't like not wasting money on it, stop wasting time. How do you do it as a low cost test and then AARs like after action reports? Like what did you learn from it? Was a good idea? Do we need to do that again? Are we doubling down? Are we doing that again next year? So a lot of stuff will test now as like campaign based or like time bound? Like, okay, hey, this, uh, sales initiative, we're going to run it in July of this year, see how it does. If it's worth it, we'll plan for it next year and then build a more robust marketing strategy around it. It's a lot of this, um, test it, try it, learn it fast. If it doesn't, tell it doesn't work, you kill it, um, and move on. But certain things stick. Um, and then I think as you take more shots on goal, you start to learn faster, which ones are going to work and which ones aren't. And I think that just time does a lot of that. And then listening to stuff like this, I mean, there's a lot more folks sharing thought leadership in the newsletter industry today than there was 10 years ago, like probably a hundred, like a thousand percent more. Um, and so folks have a greater opportunity, uh, to get their foot in the door and grow and learn and move the ball faster. But again, a lot of them don't actually consume it all. And if you don't, and you, and you're just the kind of hope and in praying, it's, it's hard. That's a good point. There, there is a lot out there. I'm curious what you would do if you had to start over today. What's, what's one thing you think you would do different and, you know, kind of starting this business? Changing the prioritization of what we go after, um, in the beginning, we tried to grow like fully organically, um, based off of our pre-existing relationships with my business partners family media company. I think we came in with about like five thousand business subscribers initially. Over time, we learned that our core audience was actually more female leaning at some other stuff. But like, we didn't invest in the audience. We also didn't have a lot of money to invest in the audience or anything like that. And so we kind of just thought that this slow rolled organic growth was going to allow us to get to some much bigger place. And it wasn't the reality. And then we started taking this playbook and saying, Hey, we need to go higher. Why should we initially it was like two editors and a managing editor and a salesperson and and organic audience growth. That was backwards. Now it's market, test, seed, like get a thing planted. Is it working? Is it growing? Don't spend really much money? Does it get to a certain point? We need to put money to the grow that audience. I don't have an audience. I can't make money off of it. So if I hire a salesperson and I don't have an audience for them to sell, they the salesperson's not going to stick around. So we kind of like have re-structured things a little bit more to be intentional around the audience development faster and establishing stronger multi-month quarter year partnerships. Like if we go into a city, hey, new market, we're turning it from a seed product to a core. Let's go get a bank that's on board on a multi-year annual contract, give them additional value out in the beginning. But I know I'm locked in and I have revenue and sustainability versus just like getting some small little contracts like hoping it's going to cover costs. Those have been interesting lessons learned in the process. If you don't make money, you're not going to be sustainable, right? And so I'll give a quick thing that I love that Carmen Starns, who's our director of revenue operations, helped to visualize well. And you have this funnel. Vanity metrics matter to get attention. How many subscribers do you have? Well, that's great. I got a million subscribers. That's awesome. Well, the next level is I need to actually get them to buy something. So how many impressions and what's my open rate? Like, okay, 60% open rate, 600,000 impressions. Got my attention. I made my first buy. Well, if you want to have a sustaining business, they need to come back. So the bottom of that funnel is CTR. And we've backed out to be able to kind of optimize what CTR for the newsletter yields on average a CTR on the ad units that will drive renewal. And so if we optimize like, hey, if I have a million subscribers and a 60% open rate and a 13 to 15% CTR, well, then my ads are probably going to perform and I'm probably going to not I'm going to get their attention, get the first buy and get the second buy. And that second buy typically comes at a higher dollar value and a longer term contract. And that's that's been a really interesting thing that I would that's we've learned over time. And so to that end, starting you optimize for that, right? And that that sets up maybe a more sustainable path. And so take me to the top of that funnel. Are those people coming from is it mostly Facebook ads? Are you guys going out and acquiring lists and markets? Are you boots on the ground? Like how are you you mentioned you think it's so important to make the investment? That's something you would have done at the beginning. How are you guys doing that? Every way you can in the beginning actually feel like the first three years of our existence is our organic, which was not very smart to be solely organic. What do you mean organic? Like not not paid at all? You were just waiting for people to find you via SEO. Yeah. Well, so we've actually never in the beginning, we didn't have a website. And so we weren't even using SEO. It was like someone sent this newsletter to the next person. I mean, it was that organic. You think I don't scale, right? It scales, but not fast enough to just catch up with your expense. Great, great, qualified audience. We actually funny. We have some people who signed up for our new floaters over nine years ago who are still receiving and actively engaged today, which is huge for the like to for validation of the brand. But we co like in local markets, there's a lot of different things you can do. We did co-reads with events. We did strategic partnerships with folks. We would work with a real estate company because on a local level, realtors really want their perspective buyers to know what's going on in the market. So they would be signing up their perspective clients or the whole entire real estate firm who's an advertiser wants all their realtors signed up. We would partner with children's museums and sports stadiums to do co-reads, double opt-in or opt-out type structures, all that stuff. We still do some of that stuff on limited level. We got really good at Facebook lead ads or meta over time. And we could scientifically control like, hey, we know that we're picking up a subscriber at, you know, 20 to cents to $1.20, you know, range. And then we could kind of back out what the ECPL was on all that stuff. That became the primary engine. And then now we've kind of created some additional dev tools that make us more dangerous and how we target and market and do different levels of cold outreach to get people to convert in. Hey, here's the product. Are you interested in it? If you click here, you can become a subscriber. One click conversion. We don't do, we hate double opt-in. I don't, I think that's kind of gotten old. In a lot of ways, there's other ways to make sure that you have a qualified intent-based person cleaning the shit out of the list quickly is important that your deliverability maintains high and those people stay. Otherwise, your whole entire efforts at the top of the funnel are useless. You guys have a number, like I know, some newsletters, right? The metric is four opens in the first two weeks. Like, do you guys have something like that? Various. So based off of whether or not we're launching a new market or it's a market that's been around for three years or four or five years, it's a bit different. The faster you're applying a spend or audience acquisition channels, especially if you're getting into like, you're doing a lot of paid, you're working with a traffic grid, an audience builder, a sparkly or whatever. I mean, whoever, all the different places that you have stuff coming through, the more you're throwing at it at the same time, the higher likelihood of some volatility happening. And so you want the churn process, or the qualification process to be a lot faster. So if you're like, in some instances, we're down as little as like, we've done somewhere, it's two days, five days, seven days, and they're out. So out, if someone's real and they're participating, they're going to be participating pretty quickly. Like, you want to give someone a pass if they're on vacation, right? And they're like, out this week, you're not reading their emails. But like, 14 days, 21 days, long haul. Like, I mean, clean that list because the worst thing you need to have happen is which we've had happened and even still have happened these days from time to time is get that list spun up. You're like, damn, I have ad, like, what we're having happened. I have advertisers paying and they want us are advertising in that city, starting August 1st. And I'll just launch to the market. And I got four weeks. I really want to get to 10,000 subscribers before then. So we go all in after it. And then we'll go a little too hard. And then you find out, shit, the SPF records or some other DNS setting was off slightly. Or you find out that there was some spam complaints from one source, our bot activity or something. And that little micro inflection point or two of them stack back to back. And then Google goes, low, bad. And you're like, shit, now I got to recover the whole entire domain before I can keep going. And you see stuff like that happening. And it's real. And because that's that's a, I don't think you'll understand the importance of the deliverability and getting it right and how you grow that. Like when you drop your domain that let down to let low or, and you're at the bottom of the thing, I mean, getting back is totally out of your control in a lot of ways. And so we'll shoot the domain entirely and start all over in those instances. My great, the highly engaged users over and go through that process. That deliverability and growth rate and top of funnel is super important. It's super important to use a diversity of sources we believe. And we still run cohort analysis against all the different pathways and some are good and some are bad. And sometimes it's not the same for every newsletter product or every geography. So I might work with a audience builder or traffic grid, right, as a partner in a different city. And I use, I work with them in one market and then I work with them in another market and the outcomes different. And it's different for a wild variety of reasons. But I did the same exact effort where I might use my own, I might be working and doing my own meta ads in this market. And the same exact that's in another market. Too wildly different outcomes. And it has to do a lot with the, the markets themselves, the content, the somebody's, some bot activity, some person who's intentionally being malicious that whatever, like all kinds of stuff happens that mess up that growth process. Are you guys implementing AI in, in your analysis to, to help with that? Because obviously that's, it sounds like a shitload of work for you guys to be doing to, to be doing kind of cohort analysis by platform on each newsletter. We basically have a, a deliverability agent that we've created that tracks time periods and daily and drops straight into slack. Here's all the markets. Here's the ones that you need to pay attention to for whatever reason. These ones are overperforming and these ones are underperforming. And you probably need to go take a look at that. And like it hits the inbox or it hits slack at a certain time every morning. And it pulls from a lot of different, so AI read and learn from all these different places. Give me some insights on deliverability and our team can respond faster. And that's like the faster you can fix a problem, the less it's going to hurt your deliverability. Because stuff's going to come through. Like, whether you want it to or not, there's a lot of great, reputable, awesome sources that can help you grow your audience. But there's also a lot of bad actors out there that take advantage of these tools and try to come in for their different scams and stuff. And you need to be acutely aware of what those are and how to respond and be willing to go in and manually clean your list. You know, hey, all right, I know that yes, something happened yesterday. What was that? What changed in my list? And you're like, oh damn, I got 50 email addresses that somehow came in and they're all just a series of numbers and letters clearly not a really mail address. And it came in roughly in this time and which one of my acquisition tools was running at that time. And can I back it out and go, all right, here we go. This is what happened. And then manually purge. Make sure it doesn't happen again. I mean, there's everyone's texts evolving. And so is this sophisticated spam and bot attacks and stuff like that. Are you guys using any any off the shelf tools for that, right? So if somebody's listening at home to like, hey, you can just go plug and play with this and this helps quite a bit. No. To be honest, we found like a lot of tools weren't optimized for us or our use case in many instances. So we just built and because AI makes things really easy now, we know what flags matter most to us. And we curate them together. And can create AI agents that tell us exactly what we need to do. And then we don't need those other tools. Now, we might sometimes lever or integrate one that is pulling this data. And then we parse it in. But I can't think of anyone in specifically on the deliverability side right now that we're using. That's not us going more native to certain sources to get the output that we want. Some of the source, well, every tech is a little different. So they have all pros and cons. And so it's hard to get all the things you want from one person and a lot of what we're optimized, maybe for a more of a marketing company, then they are like a published like a news publisher and stuff. So there's different things that make one thing better than another or none of them better. Is there anything where you're like, oh, like they should have asked me about this or this is like super exciting. People aren't talking about it enough. Like any one thing where like we should have hit the head on this and we did. Louis, you got to ask that question at the beginning. So we look smarter before we even get on. A lot of folks talk about like owning your audience and having this relationship with them. There's also this like evolution and AI. And so what are you going to do to differentiate yourself from the others down the road? And if you're just using AI to curate information and repackage it and deliver it, I think this also is an atom Ryan thing. Like Gemini's just going to summarize that in the top of your inbox or they're going to move you down in the fold. And so what strategic relationships can you establish? What level of personalization, recommendation, added value that optimizes for geo or or training the LLM models to make sure that you're relevant in their outputs? I think thinking forward that way. Like while the newsletter is its thing, like are you really optimizing to be not made extinct in a couple of years? You know? Like because the last thing you do is spend your time and effort building something awesome only for one platform to change and then you're not viable anymore. And I think folks are seeing that. I mean, even in just the the changes we're seeing around deliverability, I think this past year, it really highlighted bullshit like newsletters that were like kind of built on fake vanity metrics. And you know, when it comes down to it and like, man, I was on B-Hive and I thought I was great and I had built this audience and all of a sudden I'm my open rates went to crap and the click to rate went to crap and like it wasn't B-H. And like you see a deal with chime in chat, chattering about like well the ESP screwed me over. No, you just had a really crappy list and you know Google and Yahoo and everybody else just decided to tell you the truth and now you have to fix and build a healthier list. So I think this big focus on deliverability list health, true engagement and and making connections with your reader with content that's going to resonate and make you be differentiated from what AI and Google or whomever can do on their own will be very important for longevity and thinking about that sooner rather than later and building your roadmap is paramount. Very cool. Right, thank you so much for joining us. Do you have anything that you want to want to plug for people anywhere people should go follow you on LinkedIn, socials. 6amc.com we just gave our site a little bit of a brand refresh to showcase a lot of the different projects initiatives priorities that we're working on and the markets that we're in. Obviously we always love them. People subscribe and provide feedback. The best way to improve your product is to have someone tell you that it sucks. So feedback is always welcome, especially as we're going through some big innovations and evolutions. We are actively seeking strategic partnerships with other materially larger brands and data sources. A million plus subscribers, unique data sets that might be applicable to local communities, M&A activity, profitable newsletter products or newsletter adjacent products that might be accretive to our business and our newsletter studio or newsletter service side of the business. We are pretty good at than building newsletter for folks and if we have the opportunity to need to help someone get to the next level, we're here and our doors are open. For that, all of those things and more are elevated on 6amc.com and the last thing I'll share is we have created a free Slack community or behind the newsletter that is available on our site for anyone in this ecosystem and we're about to launch a resource of all of the different things that exist in the newsletter ecosystem and summarize what they are by a category to drive people to those resources. We had a hard time finding a resource hub like that and ours won't be perfect at the gate, but we're going to, you know, there's hundreds of things resources in it to begin with. She'd come out this second week of August and then hopefully we can build on that and continue to point people towards resources to help them grow their businesses. Nice. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Ryan. Definitely. Appreciate the time. Thanks guys. Have a good day.