Produced By - From Musician to AI Founder: Journey of Building a Media Empire | #SPECIAL: Adam Biddlecombe

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

Adam Biddlecombe is the AI guy keeping you ahead of the curve on AI tools and trends. In June 2023, he and his best friend, Matt Village, launched Mindstream, an AI newsletter with one simple goal—deliver the best editorial in the space. Within five months, they quit their jobs to focus on growth. By December, they hit 100,000 subscribers, and within 17 months, Mindstream had grown to 150,000 subscribers, leading to its acquisition by HubSpot in October 2024. Now part of the HubSpot Media Network, Adam and his team are on a mission to cut through AI industry noise and deliver actionable insights.In this episode, Adam shares his journey from a young musician and drummer to a LinkedIn powerhouse with over 170,000 followers. You'll hear firsthand how he built his personal brand, transformed a newsletter idea into a thriving business, and ultimately landed one of the biggest deals in the AI media space. If you're looking for inspiration, strategy, and an authentic story of persistence and innovation, this episode is a must-listen.Connect with Adam:⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-bidd/https://www.mindstream.news/Connect with Tommen:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasloucky/⁠⁠Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisistommen/⁠⁠X: https://x.com/TomasLoucky⁠⁠⁠Podcast:Links: https://linktr.ee/produced_by⁠⁠⁠ Support: https://www.patreon.com/ProducedByPodcast⁠⁠⁠ Produced (email newsletter): ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://producednewsletter.substack.com/⁠More:Trailblazed (marketing agency): ⁠⁠⁠https://trailblazed.digital/⁠⁠EpiXtory (podcasting agency): https://www.epixtory.digital/Podcasting tools I recommend: Riverside: ⁠https://riverside.fm/?utm_campaign=campaign_2&utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=rewardful&via=tomas-louckyBuzzsprout⁠: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=2395601Descript: https://get.descript.com/producedbyCastmagic: https://get.castmagic.io/producedbyFenPost: https://fenpost.com/?via=tomasSome links are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. If you find these tools helpful, using these links supports the show—thank you! Connect with Tomas:X: https://x.com/TomasLoucky⁠⁠⁠Stan: https://stan.store/TommenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasloucky/⁠⁠Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisistommen/⁠⁠Unproduced:Newsletter: https://unproduced.substack.comYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@unproducednotesSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033Ddo8ibDlLYoaP7FFLIWMore:Links: https://linktr.ee/produced_by⁠⁠⁠Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://producednewsletter.substack.com/⁠The Podcast Club: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/25420030/Tools & gear that support the show:Metricool: https://f.mtr.cool/HRJBZKRiverside: https://riverside.sjv.io/vDnDodFavikon: https://www.favikon.com?fpr=tommenRa Optics: https://ra-optics.myshopify.com/discount/TOMMEN?rfsn=8803777.591d19JamX: https://jamx.ai/podcasters-offer?ref_id=e02d48af-ef66-4e76-b804-c2e8d282a8bfSome links are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. If you find them useful, using these links helps keep the podcast running. Thank you!  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

So when we looked at starting the newsletter, the thing I love about this business is, I think newsletter businesses are hard to do. And they're getting harder, by the way. We can touch on that later. But they're very, very simple. And from day one, I had like some very simple questions that I had to answer. The first one is, could I find people interested in the topic of AI and convert them into newsletter subscribers? The second question is once we had converted them into newsletter subscribers, could Matt, my co-founder and copywriter, keep them interested with good content? And third, once we had those interested readers, could I sell advertisement to companies? So there's three very simple questions. At the very start, we were looking at just tackling the first and second, right? It was,

let's build a newsletter and then we'll monetize it later. So I started creating content on LinkedIn. On the 24th of May, this is the day that we decided we were going to start it. And on the first of June, we sent our first issue to like 100 people. So I just started posting about AI, started connecting with people, started trying to build a little community, get some followers. Before we dive into today's episode, please hit that subscribe button. Your support helps us grow and inspire more people on their journeys. Thank you. Hello, Adam.

Thank you for joining us today and welcome to the show. Hey, Thomas, great to meet you and great to be here. So, Adam, for those who don't know you, can you please introduce yourself? Yeah, certainly. So my name is Adam. I was a co-founder of the AI newsletter Mindstream. And back in November last year, we sold it. to HubSpot. So now I'm working at HubSpot and I'm looking after the AI vertical, looking after the

brand for the various AI media products. It's pretty exciting and I will want to dive into it more. But I think something that not many people know or at least from the LinkedIn audience is your exciting journey or the background where you started. So can you tell us more about your background in the music and how did it start? Yeah, for sure. So I think from a very young age, sort of had ambitions to be entrepreneurial. I started playing music. I started playing drums when I was like 10, 11 years old.

And then when I was like 14, I was in school and I had a little band that I got together. And I wanted to go out and do some gigs. But we had like no music recorded. We had no press kit, nothing. So I was like knocking doors of music venues saying like, can you book my band? And the answer was no, there was nothing.

You know, we were just kids. So I took into my own. hand and just hired a venue. Cost me like, cost me £100 to hire this venue. And I went out and printed posters, printed tickets and sold them around my school. And over the next couple of weeks, I sold all of the tickets, sold the show out and performed my first ever gig to a sold out audience and made like £500 off the back of it. And I remember, I remember the high and the rush and the adrenaline I got from performing. And then after that, the high and the rush and the adrenaline I got from like, counting the money. And that really set me on a journey then. I created a company. It was called

Plummit or Send Promotions. And I started hosting shows across my town, eventually scaled it up to like neighboring cities. So I was doing shows in Coventry in Birmingham and got up to the point that I was having like six shows a month. And each of those shows could make like 500 to a thousand pounds. And this one was like 14, 15 years old. And then over the next couple of years, whilst doing like exams and stuff in the UK and going through the school system, I was doing these shows every month. I was playing in two or three bands, like traveling around playing. And that business is events promotion was like, in a way, still my favorite business.

It was so fun to run. It taught me a lot about what I know about business. But yeah, at the core of it, it was performing music that I loved. So eventually when I was 18, I gave that up. I gave that business up and I moved down to London to focus full time on performing. Yeah. But I can imagine, because you said that you were 14 or 15, but at such age it's not you know easy to go out and start promoting your business so

were you always this type of person who's easy to speak with people to promote your stuff or what was it like for you no i wasn't you know when i was a when i was a child i was i wasn't like like were extrovert i don't think so it wasn't easy to me i wasn't like the popular kid at school i found socializing difficult i think part of that's what gave me the drive. Like when I found something that worked, I really wanted to kind of like hone in on it. And promoting the shows, you know,

when I was doing my first few shows, it was like, you know, I was creating Facebook events. I was DMing like hundreds and hundreds of people trying to get them to buy tickets. I was like going around, putting posters up in school.

But pretty quickly it became more of a systemized business. So where I used to structure these shows is I'd book for a local music scene, I booked like a good quality headline act of like, a band that I've been playing for four or five years. And then all of the support bands, I would book school bands from like my school or other schools around the area. And I knew that these kids who were playing

in like a nice music venue, supporting a good act, maybe for their first or second gig, they would be inviting their mom, their auntie, their uncle, like extended family, all of their friends from school. So all of the demand generation was done by these kids.

And I used to pay them like 20% of revenue. So I'd literally like, rip them off a sheet of 50 tickets, give it to them, and they'd go out and sell the tickets. So I was kind of like putting the pieces together and then the promotion sort of happened naturally. I'd still be creating posters, putting them up on Facebook, putting their problem out of town. But most of the direct sales was done by the bands that I was booking. Yeah. And back then, did you see it as a hobby or as a temporary work or did you actually want to become like a professional musician?

Yeah, it's funny. Like at the time, I was making lots of money from putting on shows. And then I was spending lots of money on music. Like my first band, we wanted to go and record, record an album and it cost, I don't even know, maybe like one, two thousand pounds. It was like some money was going into this. I was buying equipment. We were going to do like shows around the country.

So I was, like, paying for like travel and all of these things when I was young. So it was quite clear to me when I was young that like, if I wanted to be a successful musician, it was going to cost me a lot of money. So the one hand I had the business that was making. lots of money that was in music, but it wasn't me playing. And then I had the sort of dream that was taking my money. And yeah, from 14, 15, 16, 17, like, the dream was always to be a successful musician. The business was just fuel. Like, I never, I never, I was so single-minded. I was going to be a successful drummer. And like, what I was doing with business was never going to be the full-time

thing, which, you know, it is what it is. I then went and did music, did it for a few years. eventually it didn't work and I've now gone on to do other things in business but when I was a kid all I wanted to be was a performer yeah and what was then the moment when it clicked or when you know you realized that you need to change or you want to change yeah so when when I was 18 I moved down to London with my band at the time we were called chasing deer and we we were down in London for four or five years like really going after it we managed to make a living we were doing like more than 300 shows a year. So we were performing pretty much every day. We were performing in the daytime, we'd busking in the streets, and then in the evenings, we'd go and do gigs. Like, it was full on.

We recorded loads of music, distributed loads of music, played different countries all over the world. But something wasn't catching. We'd have these opportunities, like springboard opportunities, like we'd get on a good radio station. We'd headline a big festival. We'd play in front of tens of thousands of people. And you'd have this springboard and we'd go, okay, that was it. now everything's going to follow up. Like we're going to have loads of interest online. We're going to get interest from record label or whatever it was. And those opportunities never turned into something real.

And once 10, 15, 20 of these springboard moments where I went, that's it. We've made it now. Like we've gone above some sort of level. Once so many of those passed, I realized that the problem wasn't like our work ethic and our output and like our business strategy. it was the quality of the music that we were making. We just weren't good enough. We didn't have clear enough of a message.

We didn't have enough of an emotional connection with our fans. At the same time, it coincided at the point where I was starting to sort of worry about this as the long-term thing. Coincided with COVID happening. All the gigs getting canceled and it sort of forced my hand. Yeah. It's like a perfect timing with the COVID, I understand. And just out of curiosity, what were your favorite bands or your inspiration? it comes to music?

Personally, like, I like old music, so it's the Beatles, Simon Garfunkel called Dio Strait's. Like, maybe that's part of the problem, but I took too much inspiration from the greatest of the date rather than what's going on today. Yeah. Okay, yeah. And then what were your steps then once you decided to change the career?

Is it when you got interested in AI, or did you know what you want to do from them? I didn't at all. So it was 2020. COVID came. I was living in London with my band and we like lost our flat because we couldn't pay the rent. And I moved back up to Lowington in the West Midlands with my family. And it took me a while. It like really took me a while to kind of process that change. Like I was, you know, like I said, I was having these feelings anyway, but then COVID came and like put an end to it. And I was back in my

parents' house, had no money coming in. I had nothing to wake up and do every day. And it took me a while of just like sitting in that to understand that, okay, maybe this is the end of that thing and the start of something new. But what that something new is, I had no idea. I started getting interested in like self-improvement. I started getting interested in finances. So particularly property investment, I started reading about a lot. I started reading listening to podcasts like My First Million, Modern Wisdom, Joe Rogan. I started reading business books. And I, this wasn't particularly intentional. It was just something I stumbled across and something I enjoyed doing. Like I'd go for a long walk and listen to a podcast. I'd sit down and read a book. It's just because

I had time on my hand. And this really just like sort of snowballed into me starting to like hack around different things. So I started to look after my health. You know, I was 22, 23 years old and I'd never really thought about health and well-being. So I started to exercise. I started thinking about eating better. I started looking at different businesses I could start on the internet. I went out and got a sales job because I needed to get some money. And I thought sales will teach me the skills to potentially be an entrepreneur in the future. But it was very, it was very like natural. It wasn't intentional.

I don't look back on this period of my life as like a golden period. Like it was a really difficult time. I just sort of given up the dream of being a musician and now I was looking at the next thing. So like over that three year period, I had three sales jobs. I didn't really take to any of them. I did okay, but I found having a boss difficult after being like musician and traveling the world and everything. It was very difficult to kind of sit in an office and like do my job.

I tried a couple of kind of small entrepreneurial pursuits. The most successful one is I was like doing Amazon selling and I was selling pool and snooker chalk and accessories. So like for a pool queue and like chalk and like all these things. And I got up to a point where I was doing like 100,000 in revenue doing that. profit margins weren't great making like 10 to 15,000 a year with this. And then like one day I said to my friend Matt, who's a writer, like I was getting really interested in newsletters. I'd like studied the hustle, studied morning brew, the milk road.

They're like successes and their exits. And I said to Matt, who is my friend who is a copywriter. I said, look, I think we should do a newsletter. I know you can write it. I know you can create a good product and I back myself to like go out and sell it. And that was it. Like we decided on that day we were going to start it. We said, oh, what are we going to talk about at the time? This was June 23. Like AI was the hot topic. So I was like, I think newsletters are trending up. AI is trending up. It's a good intersection. Let's just jump in there. Perfect combination. It was perfect combination. It wasn't a particular, again, it wasn't massively intentional. It was sort of borne out of frustration. I was like not enjoying my job too much. My econ.

thing wasn't going in the direction I wanted to do. I had all of this new energy from exercising, studying, listening to podcasts and all of these stuff. And I just said, right, I want to go and do something. I've got all this energy. Let's jump in on newsletters. And we had like 500 pounds we put in each. So we had a thousand pounds to start off the company. And that was it. And we just got going working like evenings, working weekends and just started hacking from day one. Yeah. It's really interesting because as I was listening to, the COVID happened and what you started doing basically exploring self-delopement, listening to podcasts and reading books, I could relate to it because when the COVID happened, I was probably

in a similar situation and that's when I discovered kind of the power of podcasting and reading books to learn something and improve yourself. So it was funny because I felt like I was listening to my own experience. And just I wanted to ask you, if you read Rich Dead Poor Dad, because I just remember that he said that he was I think working for Xerox and selling to learn selling skills so it just reminded me of you learning selling skills like something that he talked about in the book. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a lot of examples of that where people go and sell, sell to learn sales and to learn interpersonal relations and all of this stuff. Normally in those great examples, you find people are doing like door-to-door sales or like you're a load of a load of people like Mormons who say like when they go out and they have to go door knocking for two

years they learn those skills and it's like high you know you're going to speak to 30 or 40 people a day and you're really going to like master that art you're going to get the gift of the gap my intention was great going into sales but I totally went into the wrong industries I went into sales industries that have incredibly long sales cycles like three five years so I wasn't doing 50 sales calls a day maybe spending a week to identify one prospect and then spend like three months trying to break them down there's a very different thing very different skill

but still must have been great experience because it's obviously I would say stepping out of your comfort zone you know trying to sell something if you haven't done that before and probably face rejection as well of course it was probably different if it was less frequent but I guess a good experience for sure. It was a good experience.

You know, I was, like I mentioned, I was sort of lost looking for something to do. I think the routine was very important to me at that point in my life. You know, getting up, driving to work, driving back from work, get exercise and stuff around that. Like I think it locked me in. But I also think it really showed me what I didn't want to do. When I was getting these entry-level sales jobs, you know, making 20, 25,000 pounds a year, and I looked at the potential ladder, you know, like maybe if I can become a sales manager

and manage three or four salespeople. And with my like personal finance goals and what I was, the amount of money I wanted to make, I just became very clear to me very early on that like working my way up from the bottom of a company is going to take a very long time. And also I don't have the willpower. I don't have the patience to do it. I understand. And if we move forward to when you started the newsletter, what was it like in the beginning? Was it something that you enjoyed and you were looking forward to doing? Yeah, 100%. I was very bullish on the industry. So when we looked at starting the newsletter, the thing I love about this business is, I think newsletter businesses are hard to do. And they're getting harder, by the way. We can touch on that later. But they're very, very simple. And from day

one, I had like some very simple questions that I had to answer. The first one is, could I find people interested in the topic of AI and convert them into newsletter subscribers? The second question, is once we had converted them into newsletter subscribers, could Matt my co-founder and copywriter keep them interested with good content? And third, once we had those interested readers, could I sell advertisement to companies? So there's three very simple questions. At the very start, we were looking at just tackling the first and second, right? It was, let's build a newsletter and then we'll monetize it later. So I started creating content on LinkedIn. on the 24th of May, this is the day that we decided we were going to start it.

And on the first of June, we sent our first issue to like 100 people. LinkedIn, I created like an totally new account. I know in LinkedIn, you're not supposed to have two accounts, but at the time I did. I had one that I was using for like my sales job. And then I created a new like influence account. And I just started from like day one. I'd spent time on LinkedIn doing sales outbound. So I followed various creators.

I'd find myself like scrolling through LinkedIn when I was pretending to do my job. So I'd spent some time like on the platform. So I just started posting about AI, started connecting with people, started trying to build a little community, get some followers. And, you know, day one, I was getting hundreds of impressions on posts. And then after a week, two weeks, I was getting thousands. And anybody who was commenting, anybody who was liking, I was DMing them and just begging them to sign up to the newsletter. And this is basically how we operated for the first month, two months. I was hacking away on LinkedIn, trying to build a following there and convert subscribers.

And my co-founder Matt was just writing the newsletter every day, seven days a week. And we were doing growth of this whilst we were both working other jobs. So yeah, that's how we started. And I absolutely loved it. Like I fully believed in the fundamentals of what we were doing. I didn't know how long it was going to take, but I knew that one, we had a few thousand subscribers, we'd be able to start selling some ads. And then I'd trust myself to build relationships with those advertisers and eventually get them

onto long-term deals. And then, you know, every few thousand more subscribers you're adding, you can increase your prices and we'll just go from there. Yeah. And you started from the beginning with the frequency to send it every day because it's a lot. So you knew that you can keep up or you can continue. you know. Yes, I posted every day on LinkedIn and Matt wrote the newsletter every day. The fundamental belief behind doing a daily newsletter is if you're operating on an advertisement model,

if you send seven days a week, you have seven ad slots to sell. If you send one day a week, you have one. So it was a non-negotiable. You know, the newsletters I'd studied, the hustle, milk road, morning brew, they were daily newsletters. This was the model I'd studied. This was the model I wanted to operate with. And, you know, I said to Matt, when we sat down to do the business, I was like, can you give me three months of your life to work really fucking hard and keep putting this out? If you can dedicate that, like I promise you, I can turn this into a business. It was incredibly difficult. I know for a fact that Matt wrote some of the early issues of Mindstream at like 3am when he was drunk after a night out. Don't tell anyone.

It was a period like it was only two weeks after we'd started where he went to the Glastonbury Festival and I wrote a newsletter for like four or five days and I'm not a writer. I certainly wasn't a writer then. So yeah, in the start it was like very hacky but I fully believe in the model of daily. I also knew that, you know, daily you can build a habit with your audience. So we just we just worked incredibly hard. It took a lot of time, you know, it took Matt three to four hours to write the newsletter. He was working eight hours a day.

as a copywriter and then coming home and writing the newsletter in the evening every day it's not easy but we just viewed it viewed it as a sprint i made matt believe that this was going to enable him to leave his job eventually so we just started and kept going it's impressive yeah and shows the consistency and if you believe in the vision and keep working on it that pays off in the end 100% and when you when you look at linked in you know i was building my personal brand on linktine at the same time as we were building the newsletter. And LinkedIn, when we started, it was can we use LinkedIn to generate subscribers for Mindstream? It quickly became much bigger than that. You know, LinkedIn, I got to, I don't remember exactly, but I got to, you know, a thousand followers after maybe a month and then

10,000 after a couple of months. Like, it was very slow to start with, but there was a point where we had, you know, maybe two or three thousand subscribers in the newsletter and I was pushing 10, 15, 20,000 followers on my LinkedIn. So the LinkedIn became not just a way to generate subscribers for the newsletter, but also a way to generate revenue. In the very early days of Mindstream, we were working with companies to advertise their products, and they were more interested in me posting about their products on LinkedIn than advertising them in the newsletter. Suddenly, LinkedIn became so much more important, and we were doing 90% of our early revenue on LinkedIn. And actually, why did you decide for the LinkedIn as the platform?

Because you could pick like any other platforms, but was there reason for choosing LinkedIn specifically? Yeah, I think our target audience was on LinkedIn. You know, if you compare LinkedIn across X and Instagram and TikTok, it's in theory got the smartest audience with the most money. So that's one reason why. The other reason why is, as I alluded to earlier, like I was using LinkedIn as a sales tool for these sales jobs I had. So I was spending loads of times on the platform. I was following different creators. You know, there were AI creators I was following like Zane Khan and Adiath.

I was following LinkedIn sort of growth creators like specifically Lara Costa in the early days. So I was sort of piecing together in my mind how this would work before I even decided I wanted to do it. This is where I was spending my time. I wasn't using Instagram. I wasn't using X. Like I didn't use any of these other platforms. I didn't use social media. LinkedIn was just what I was using for work. It wasn't, again, a particularly intentional decision. I didn't go and analyze all of the social platforms and decide LinkedIn was the one.

It was just where I was comfortable playing. Yeah, it sounds smart. And I like it because as you used it before, you never know when it might be helpful in the future and all the knowledge that you got before you could use later on. Because as you can see on LinkedIn, often people, I don't know, don't know how to start or looking for, I don't know, any circuits and stuff like that, but if you already got the knowledge from before, it's only helpful. 100%. So yeah, LinkedIn was huge. And as I was growing, like, I got like so obsessed of it.

I really fell in love with it. I made like some great connections early on. And then LinkedIn was such a huge lever for us, like throughout the whole of the business. It was always a big source of subscribers for Mindstream. I think like 10% of our total subscribers have come from LinkedIn. Obviously, you know, we moved on to lots of different. paid channels and other channels later on, but always a bulk of subscribers come from LinkedIn. Still today, two to three thousand subscribers come from LinkedIn. Great. It was also like a huge

revenue driver for us. I mentioned in like the early days it was like 90%. Eventually this came way down, but it was always 20, 30%. It was also the driver of most of our inbound leads. So people would see me on LinkedIn. They'd reach out to me and say, I want to advertise in the newsletter. like easily 50 plus percent of our leads came from LinkedIn. Everybody we hired came from LinkedIn. We acquired a big newsletter in December 23, and that connection came from LinkedIn. The whole business was built out of the back of LinkedIn.

Don't underestimate its potential. It's a perfect example. 100%. And now, you know, now I'm considered like a big LinkedIn creator or whatever. I've got like 170,000 followers. like, you know, I'm certainly a bit smarter than I was when I started 18 months ago. I've learned a lot from building this business. But I'm not like 10 times smarter than I was.

I'm not, I think that the attention that you get and the opportunities that you get if you have a big following on LinkedIn are almost disproportionate. You know, like you build this following. You get hundreds of opportunities when before you were getting zero, you're not to feel the same person. You know, fundamentally it's still the same person. If you look at, of course, the number of followers, as you just mentioned, it's, you know, it's crazy if we imagine such a high number. So maybe back then, did you imagine that you will am as such audience or maybe in such a time or was it your goal, actually?

No, day one, it was just, can we get some subscribers to Mindstream to validate the idea? It was never a, it was something we were tracking, of course. But from day one, we didn't see that we were going to monetize LinkedIn. in. We didn't see that all of our hires were going to come for it. We didn't see that, you know, all of our advertisement was going to come from it. It was just like the first thing we did. Of course, when I started growing and I got to like 10,000, then you can start to think about it and model it out. And at the same time, you know, three months after we created my account, I started creating content on my account, my co-founder then created his account. You know,

he's now got 130,000 followers. So we have to... Fitching up. Yeah, we have these two big LinkedIn accounts that, you know, drive millions of impressions a week for the Mindstream name. Obviously, now we've sold the company to HubSpot. It's very powerful in those negotiations to say, you know, we also have these huge personal brands that can now be associated with HubSpot. I get asked to come on podcasts, like your podcast and others, you know, it just creates insane

opportunities. Yeah, and just as you mentioned it, I'm not sure to what extent you can talk about it, But how did it happen, the acquisition by HubSpot? Yeah. So HubSpot acquired the hustle in 2021. The hustle is like the main inspiration for Mindstream. I would have Matt, my co-founder and Maria, a copywriter, study the hustle. We studied all of the newsletters, but predominantly we studied the hustle.

They were my inspiration for the business model. My favorite podcast is My First Million with Sam Parr, the founder of the hustle. and Shan Puri, the founder of the Milk Road. The hustle is a business and tech newsletter, and the Milk Road is a crypto newsletter. And when Shan started the Milk Road, like a couple of years after the acquisition, he just copied Sampar's playbook, like very publicly. They built it sort of out on MFM and he had his exit.

So most of my learnings came from the core of Sampar starting the hustle. So we were going ahead and building it and then working with a sort of independent ad sales guy called Jake, he, like, email me one day and said, I've got some interest from HubSpot to advertise in your newsletter. This was in February 2024. And I remember it was like Friday evening. It was like 8pm and I was doing this like negotiation to sell initially. I think it was four ads slots we sold to HubSpot. And that for me was just like an absolute huge win. It was an absolute huge validation of what we were trying to do. HubSpot are by far the biggest company. that had advertised with us. But not for a minute did I think it would really go anywhere. I thought

that it was, you know, they were just buying ads. And they were buying ads in all in all of the major AI newsletters and other newsletters. You know, they were very active in this game. They found a really smart way to monetize newsletters by creating amazing lead magnets and placing them in newsletters. So they started advertising with us. We then built up a little bit of relationship and they were advertising with us regularly, became one of our biggest customers. And yeah, I can't go too far to the details, but basically they saw great returns on their advertisement with us. And they also aligned with our tone of voice, our writing style, the way we were choosing to report on the news. It aligned with their media network of brands. And soon after advertising with us, we started

talking about the acquisition. Wow, it's impressive. And did you, maybe for a single moment, or did you even think that you don't want to sell it so it stays maybe yours and because obviously you build it so you wanted to keep it for yourself instead to give it away? I think in life people talk about regrets a lot and they try to live their life with no regrets. People think about, you know, lying on their deathbed and having all of these regrets. The way I think about regrets is that whenever you have a 50-50, whenever you have a decision to make out of two things. You can regret both things.

You know, if you are choosing to go to the cinema or go to a nightclub, right? If you go to the cinema, you may still regret not going to the nightclub. And if you go to the nightclub, you still might regret not going to the cinema. There isn't always a right or wrong decision. Sometimes decisions, some are more right or more wrong. So with these big decisions in life, the exercise I try and think about is which, choice can I live with the regret of. Okay. So with selling my company to HubSpot, there is regret in that I would have loved to see what me and my co-founders and our investors

and the team we had at that time could have done with the product on its own. So there is, there is a parallel universe where I'd love to run that out. But what HubSpot, what we're now doing at HubSpot, where we're taking the brand, the opportunities, that available to me now is inside of HubSpot. The opportunities are available to me because I'm associated with HubSpot. The people I'm sitting in a room and talking with on a daily basis, it's insane. It's like, for me, it was just what I thought the deal could be was better than the alternative.

And what the reality is, what the deal is 10 times better than what I thought it could be. So, yeah, in short, I'd love to run the business to see what I could do with myself. but weigh it up next to the reality like it's such a clear decision yeah to be honest gave good reason and so I totally understand and it makes sense and I'm not sure if

you can talk about it or to what extent so if you cannot don't answer but it's like your let's say control or what you can write about or to what extent do you have to listen to them when it comes to your work as compared to before if you can like

I don't know write as freely as before, like when it comes to creativity or if it changed? So my co-founder, Matt Village, he was the editor-in-chief of Mindstream forever. He always has been. And after HubSpot acquired us, he was employed and put in place as the editor-in-chief of Mindstream. So his day-to-day hasn't changed. He had full creative control over the product of Mindstream.

Of course, we don't own it anymore. So in theory, they could sack us. in theory if they didn't like where we were going with the product that they can sack us. But as it stands right now, we are incredibly invested in what we're doing with the brand. They believed in our vision. And me and Matt are still in charge of where we're taking the editorial strategy. The only difference now is we have access to some of the greatest minds in the industry to consult where we might want to take it.

Want to take your podcast to the next level? At Epic Story, we help you launch, improve and market your podcast with expert guide. whether you're just starting out or refining an existing show we've got you cover visit epochsperida digital and bring your epic story to life so then speaking of the vision would you be willing to tell us more what are the plans for the future yeah of course so in an editorial lens of mindstream what it does now is we are very very good curators of the news so every 24 hours a load of stuff happens in artificial intelligence, Matt and Maria, the writing team, will go surf the web, find out what's interesting. So, like, as a first point, they just, like, filter out all of the

hype and all of the rubbish and find the really interesting takes. And then they compile that into a format. It's very easy to read. And as they're excellent copywriters, they are able to pick out the things that really matter to you. So if you are interested in AI, and you're overwhelmed by everything on social media. You're overwhelmed by the pressure of your like boss who maybe wants you to be using AI some more and you feel like you have some FOMO. If you subscribe to Mindstream,

you'll just get a three-minute review every morning of what's happening. That's what we are now. And I think that we are the best in the industry at doing that. Where I want the editorial to be in one to two years is looking at that curation and taking that up another level. So we are not only curating the news of what's going on,

we are also curating the voices of some of the best minds in AI. So at HubSpot, just inside HubSpot, we have some insane AI experts. We have Demesh Shah, the CTO of HubSpot, who has built out agent AI and is constantly building and innovating with AI inside HubSpot and then with everything else he's doing. We have Matt Wolf and Nate. Nathan Lanz, the host of the Next Wave podcast, which is one of the biggest AI podcast out there.

It's pretty cool because I sometimes listen to that one. So it's impressive. It's fantastic. We also have marketing against the grain with a Kim Bodnar, the CMO of HubSpart and Kieran Flanagan. And that's like a marketing focus podcast, but it's becoming more and more about AI because those guys are like obsessed with AI and they're finding all the innovative ways AI can be utilized for marketers. So that's just like five voices inside HubSpart. And I want to build workflows where they are speaking on podcasts, they're distributing on Twitter and X and LinkedIn. And I want to be able to become the mouthpiece for them in the newsletter format.

You know, if they're doing a badass podcast episode, we should be able to surmise all that information and put it into the newsletter format. So that's how we take curation from, we're curating all of the breaking news and making sense of it for you, but we are also taking the analysis of these real AI experts and putting that into a format that's useful for you too. Now we take curation up a level. I also want to become the most actionable AI newsletter out there. So not only are we making sense of all the noise that's going on, we are also giving you educational content that will teach you how to do X, Y, and Z with AI. Yeah. It sounds impressive. Of course.

we'll be looking forward to it and having access to all of these professionals in the industry. It's a great benefit of HubSpot, as you said before, so well done. It's huge. The advantage that we have is, obviously, when you're a private media company looking to expand your business, and you see this with a lot of other AI newsletters, they're launching like horizontal products. So there's a couple of AI newsletters who are launching like AI universities on the side. So they like take the educational piece out of the newsletter. and they pay wallet, right? It's a brilliant idea.

It's something we were considering doing with Mindstream because your motivation as a media company is to make the most amount of money out of your subscribers and increase their LTV. With HubSpot and the HubSpot Media Network, like there's like, you know, 90, 100, like YouTube channels, podcasts, newsletters, what HubSpot Media is trying to do

is becoming the go-to place for, business leaders, entrepreneurs to get business and tech news insights and that goes across marketing, sales, service, AI, business and tech. So the goal of

HubSpot Media Network is to just create awesome content. And like a secondary goal of that is that these people who like trust HubSpot media as the place to be for all of this content eventually are going to become HubSpot users later down the line.

because they have built up all of this brand trust and authority. So when we're going out there with a goal to like make an awesome product, we don't have to monetize it in the same way as these private companies who have to launch all of these products. We can focus on creating this amazing free product and giving away like the best possible content with no compromise because we have different goals to these private companies. And that's one of the best ways. That's one of our most unique advantages that we have as like a small media company inside you just ask company yeah it's it's very smart and it sounds great and what about when it comes to

building your personal brand such as on lincoln if you even have time do you plan to grow it and keep a building as well a hundred percent my personal brand and matt's personal brand on lincoln is still a huge asset for mine stream if you follow us you'll notice that like we have ctia to subscribe to mine stream at the bottom of like every post so we're still using our personal brands to drive subscribers for Mindstream. We optimize and we work to put out like high value actionable content that is created for the LinkedIn audience. You know, so it's a lot of infographics, carousels.

In the future, it's going to be more and more videos as this grows. So that's still a big part of it. Personally, when I look at who I am and who I want my personal brand to Brie, and I've just done a little bit of a rebrand, I want to, convey my story as an entrepreneur and building the newsletter. I want to give people like actionable advice on how to build their business. And at HubSpot, you know, now I'm working in like a very like marketing focused role, looking after the brand of Mindstream and the other AI properties. I want to share my learnings as a marketer as I'm going ahead and doing that.

So my content over the next six months will move from like 100% AI to a blest. end of like AI marketing entrepreneurship and really become aligned with who I am and what I'm doing whereas for the longest time it's been how do we optimize it to get the most amount of subscribers in a set period of time for Mindstream now it's how do I optimize my personal brand to still do that but be most aligned with who I am and what I'm actually doing on the day to day. Yeah it sounds exciting and it will be a shame not to ask you for some LinkedIn tips and advice for the audience, you know, when it comes to growth or any mistakes to avoid? So I think a lot of the conversation on LinkedIn is how to get leads, how to book meetings.

You know, people talk about like top funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel content. And I think one of the like popular things to say from big influencers is you don't need a big following to make money on LinkedIn. Like I see this all the time. You can book a meeting with 1,000 followers rather than 100,000 followers. Like this is very popular. And I think it's like parallel to rich people saying money doesn't make you happy. I think that a big follow account, lots of engagement and impressions on your posts is absolutely huge as a magnet for business.

So if you're starting out with LinkedIn, I think growth is like a huge focus and should be a huge focus. And you should maybe book in like six months where you're just going to focus on growth before you really start to monetize. So yeah, I think, you know, a common misconception is like followers don't equal money and followers don't equal cash. They don't, they don't at a core. So like I wouldn't sacrifice your values for followers. But followers are going to massively boost what you're trying to do. As I'm talking about this, like it's such a big topic. And when we talk about like LinkedIn growth, a lot of the advice is very generic.

And that's great. You know, you need to have like good hooks. You need to have nice visuals. You know, infographics will help you get followers faster than anything else. Carousel is probably great for conversions. Video is great for branding. Like there's all this generic advice that we can give. But the first piece of advice I would give anybody if they're looking to start out on LinkedIn

is get really aligned with what they're trying to do. You know, yourself, you're using LinkedIn to, like, promote your podcast. You also have an agency, right? I was using LinkedIn to get subscribers for my newsletter. and then later on I was using LinkedIn as somewhere to do like brand partnerships and make revenue very very different goals and there is someone out there on LinkedIn who is trying to sell design services there is someone out there on LinkedIn who is a consultant for X. There is someone out there in LinkedIn who is a salesperson and what you're trying to do on

LinkedIn should dictate your strategy and your goals and your focus and your attention. You know, if you're trying to do what I'd do, I'd say post seven days a week, twice a day, if possible, have a crazy engagement strategy, post high growth content, use lead magnets to capture subscribers. But that's not what I would recommend someone doing if they were selling like a really niche service. So when you're looking to grow on LinkedIn, get really, really aligned with what your goals are. And don't compare yourself to others. Don't compare yourself to the fastest growing person if you're trying to sell super niche software services. Don't compare ourselves to Adam. And are there any people on LinkedIn that are inspiration for you or that you like to follow for their content?

100%. The best creator in the AI niche is by far Ruben Hesed. He's not the biggest content creator in AI. There are people who have more followers than him. But in my opinion, he has best content. he is one of the smartest content creators I know parallel with one of like a true smart AI engineer applicator he spent a long time creating a following and monetizing like incredibly well with brand partnerships and then for the last I think maybe a year he's been building easy gen

and he has been like super successful in building a tool that works really well to create LinkedIn posts and then has been super successful in marketing it in really innovative ways. He got two of his employees and built their LinkedIn accounts in public, wrote their LinkedIn posts using his tool and grew them to like millions of impressions and tens of thousands of followers in just a month as like a candidate for what the tool can do. He's like very smart marketer, very, very smart brand guy and one of the best content creators on LinkedIn. I agree. Just as we are recording recently he got some new brand ambassadors and really impressive names maybe seen maybe not but just to prove the point that I agree is amazing creator very smart and amazing product

yeah for sure I remember when he like announced easy gen the first time I was like a little bit skeptical I was thinking like I genuinely think Ruben is like a great entrepreneur a great business person and I was thinking this opportunity he has identified is like too small He should go and do something bigger and better. This was like so wrong on my behalf. Creating EasyGen is like so aligned with him, very successful LinkedIn creator, creating content in AI, which is what he's used to build EasyGen, incredible opportunity for distribution.

And yeah, as you've seen now, he's just launched these new partnerships. I don't know the ins and outs. I don't know the details, but I'm sure they're going to provide a lot of value for him, a lot of value for the audience. I agree. And I'm looking forward to seeing it. because just some amazing creators. And Adam, just to be aware of time, we'll ask you a few last questions.

So we discussed it in the beginning, but what will be some books that were influential to you and that you would recommend to audience? It's a good question. The last year or two, I've moved away from business books and moved into history books and particularly I'm really interested in Antarctic exploration. So my favorite book, which I read like every three months, is endurance. And it's a story of Shackleton's failed trans Antarctic expedition. I read this book so regularly because it's like a great story of endurance, of survival,

of leadership. And for me, whenever I'm like struggling in life, like I'm stressed out about work or I'm stressed out about my personal life or whatever, it really grounds me that like, you know, We all have it incredibly easy in the 21st century. So I like to read about exploration and hardships for inspiration, but also grounding. In terms of business books, I think if you're doing anything that's like public-facing, how to win friends and influence people should be... Oh my God, that's...

That was one of the most influential ones to me as well. I love that one. So happy to hear that. I have it here. Like on my desk, I keep it here. I flick for it regularly. I read it often. Every time I go into a new job or a new opportunity where I'm going to be spending lots of time with specific people, I reread it cover to cover because I think it's very grounding.

I think it's got really good core fundamentals. And I truly believe in life, if you have a book that you read and it really hits home with you, you should be rereading it as often as possible. You shouldn't put it back on the shelf, take it off in good reads and look for the next book. You know, you're going to remember like 2% of a book. So I fully recommend rereading it. The other one, one that I do remember that really stood out. I think it's called The Magic of Thinking Big. Yes, the magic of thinking big.

I remember reading this like just at the time that I launched Mindstream. So that was quite a big jumping off board. So I think if you're, if you're like stuck on a decision of you're procrastinating something, I'd recommend that book. I also think I'd reread that one myself. Yeah, it sounds great. and have you got a favorite, like a biography? Autobiography.

I've just read the sort of books by Ranald Fines, who's like a modern explorer. I mean, relatively modern. He's like 80 now. But he wrote a full sort of, yeah, biography analysis of Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton as two similar to Polo Explorers. I really enjoyed those.

I'm going through a Churchill one at the moment, which I'm enjoying, but like I'm just at the start of those. I haven't read hundreds, to be honest, but it's something I want to do. Yeah, but those about exploration, so interesting, something I will have a look at. Then, if you have any time left, what do you like to do in your free time, such as any hobbies and stuff like that? Yeah, so you talk about free time.

Like, I'm sure you've had, you've done like a hundred of these episodes, right? I'm sure you've had a load of people come on here and say, like, I don't have free time. Like, my business, I'm working eight hours a week. Like, I have this idea that success compounds horizontally. So a lot of people will say to you, if you want to be like really successful, you need to sacrifice X, Y, and Z to be successful in what you want to do. I think this is the case of you're trying to be the best footballer in the world. You're trying to win in the Olympics. You're trying to be Elon Musk.

But I think for 99% of people, it's not the case. And when you focus on one thing and doing one thing well, the muscles that you're like training in optimizing anything should be. and will be applied horizontally. So if you're working really hard on optimizing your business, and then something goes wrong in your relationship, you'll naturally think analytically about how to improve it. So over the last two or three years, I have been more successful in entrepreneurship than I had hoped,

but I have also been more successful in health and fitness, in my relationships, in my hobbies, and yeah, in my personal life. so I try and live my personal life, like, as high as possible. So what do I like doing? I love exercise. I run and I go to the gym. My goal this year is to do 12 marathons and run 1,000 kilometres.

What, 12 marathons? I won't do 12 marathons this year. My goal. It's impressive. At the same time, I love hiking. So me and my partner, we have a VW camper van and we travel around the UK, like going and hiking the mountains in Scotland, in the Lake District, Peak District.

So, like, just next weekend for the Valentine's weekend, we're going away in the van for a couple of days. I try and get away two to three times a month. Just go somewhere new, read books, get outside, get my feet on the ground. And then, yeah, three or four times a year, we'll take a, like, a bigger holiday and we'll go to somewhere else around the world to travel,

usually to hike, but to do, like, active travel. And then also I love, like I talked earlier about how I used to sell, I'll like pool and snookerichalk. I love playing pool, so I'll try and play like one week with like old friends from old companies. I'll go and go to the pool hall and play pool. Yeah. I'm glad I add this question because I would assume that, or maybe people who don't know would say that you are busy work in, you know, 24 hours.

But as you said, it's important to prioritize your free time as well and enjoy your life. So it is. It's great. It is. I look at the weekends and sometimes me and Hannah, we'll have a weekend where we don't really do anything. Like maybe we think of it as like a refresh weekend. We're going to like clean our house, do the washing, like walk the dog, whatever.

And we get to like Sunday night and we're going to go back to work on Monday. And we feel exhausted. We feel tired, right? Well, really we should feel refreshed because we've like relaxed over the weekend. Tidy the house and done all this stuff. I remember specifically one trip last year. It was in the summer. And we went really far.

We drove for like three and a half hours. to the beach. We camped, beautiful sunshine. I ran on the Saturday and the Sunday, I ran a 10K. We also, like, in the sea all day, like barbecueing food and everything. And when we were driving back, it was 8pm that I set off. And we were going to get back at 11.30 on Sunday night and go to work Monday morning. And I have never felt so refreshed for that time. I drive back I'm setting. I still had like sand on me a little bit like tingly from the sun. And we got home, went bed and woke up that next day with so much energy. So I think when you go out and you do things that may tie your body, but they energize your mind, you're going to come in and come into work

and go out and kill. If you're feeling lethargic and bored and depressed and all these things, you're going to have so much less output. So I work, some weeks I work 50, 60 hours, some weeks I work like 30, 40 hours. But when I'm working, I'm excited, I'm energized, I'm ready to go. I'm aligned in my health, my body, my mind, my soul, and I'll go out there and kill. And I couldn't do this without weekending hard, exercising hard, eating right, doing those core fundamentals. I like it.

And I think it's something that I can relate to because I feel like without exercise or like a healthy lifestyle in general when it comes, for example, to nutrition, I wouldn't be able to perform well at work. So I like what you said. 100%. Just last week, so Monday last week, I had a hair transplant. So if you want to see. Oh, really?

Oh, wow. But for this, I wasn't allowed to do exercise for seven days. Yesterday evening, I went for running this morning. I went to the gym. And I tell you, like, by Monday, so seven days after I had done this transplant, I was feeling absolute dog shit. I was just getting worse the day after the days went by because I wasn't doing the things that give me life.

Yeah, of course. And especially if you are used to it and suddenly you have to stop. It's just a terrible sudden change and you want to, but you cannot. I cannot imagine. 100%. So, yeah, any advice I'd give to someone who's like grinding 60, 70, 80 hours, just ask yourself, are you happy? Are you fulfilled?

Are you working 80 hours because you actually need to or are you working 80 hours because you feel that you should? A lot of people think that you only get things in life out of hard work. and I just, I think that's wrong. So ask yourself these questions. The best question I've ever asked myself, and I ask myself this every month, I do like a review,

is what would my 80-year-old self wish I spent more time doing? And when you ask yourself this question, it's not normally checking emails or refreshing dashboards or whatever. That's a good point, and I like it, yeah. Then before we finish, can you summarize or tell people where

I mean, it's probably obvious, but where they can find you, follow you and promote any services. Yeah, 100%. If you want to follow me, I put out content twice a day on LinkedIn, Adam Biddlecom. And if you want to see what we're doing with Mindstream, head over to Mindstream.News and subscribe to the newsletter. All the links will be in the show notes. And the final question, is there something that I should have asked you and did not or something to finish with to give you space? that's a good question if i'm giving like a final call to action if there's anything that i've said today that people have connected with interest in learning more about just dm me on linkedin i'd love to talk to you i think that's great so i want to say a big thank you adam been following and supporting for some time i think you're doing great work and it was a pleasure to speak with you

i really appreciate the opportunity that you joined and i will keep following supporting and you keep doing the great work and thank you. Amazing. Thomas, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to Produce by with Tomen. Check out show notes for all the links. And don't forget to like, subscribe and leave your feedback. Speak soon.