The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Deep Dive on $200K/Year Local Newsletter ⏐Ep. #217

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my new community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━I sat down with Jas to hear how he built Winnipeg Digest from scratch into a six-figure local media business. He broke down exactly how he grew the newsletter to over 35,000 subscribers and 73,000 social followers in just over a year, and how he monetizes through exclusive sponsorships. Jas shared his playbook on ads, open rates, subject lines, and why local newsletters are the most underrated way to build a real audience today. We also got into his new venture, Digest Lights, a Christmas lights business he launched on top of the newsletter that’s already bringing in jobs before the season starts. We talked through unit economics, sales tactics, and the bigger vision of using a local media asset as a marketing arm for other businesses.You can find Jas on Twitter at https://x.com/Creatingjas and check out his newsletter at https://winnipeg-digest.beehiiv.com/Enjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---

I think there's a lot of opportunity, especially for someone that's looking for the first business. It's a really easy business to start. You can easily run this whole business on 15 hours a week. Every aspiring entrepreneur, they know that having an audience is powerful. But 95% of them have no desire to get in front of the camera. It sucks. I feel like this is a great loophole where you can just, through Claude, through Chadjibu, use emails to build an audience. 35,000 people in a city is more powerful than a million TikTok followers that are world.

Why? It is. $144,000 a year in revenue just on our news that are at. Instagram, it's $2,800 for a one post. It's essentially a business that can't lose. The longer I'm in the business, the more money I'm going to make. If I wanted to in three years, I could run for me. Now, only the OG fans of this podcast will remember this, but a whole year and a half ago, when I first started this podcast, it originally began as a question and answer show. And it was live. People would call in, ask me questions about their business or their business idea, and I would answer it on the spot. Well, in one of those first episodes, this guy from Canada named Jazz called. And he was thrown around this idea for a business and I gave him some advice.

He took the advice and now a year later, he has a profitable six figure business on his hands and he just launched another business that's already profitable that piggybacks on that first business that I helped him launch. This is a business that literally anyone could start with almost no money. The path to growth is very clear and outlined in this episode. So let's go. I think there's a lot of opportunity in local newsletters, you know, especially for someone that's looking for the first business even, I would say, right? It's a really easy business to start. And honestly, as step by step as it gets, right? Like, yeah, like you're just basically replacing the traditional media and people are looking for something new. So. Okay, so why don't we start by you telling me about your local newsletter? Where's it based? How many subscribers do you have?

Yeah, for sure. So my local newsletters is called Winnipeg Digest. Most people don't know about Winnipeg, but it's like a cold city here in Canada in the middle of it. And so I started it here. I've been here for about 11, 12 years, you know, and I was looking for my first business to start on my own. Before, Hannah, I had some experience like growing social media followings to like a 100k or something when I was 14, selling them to e-commerce companies, like theme pages and

things of that nature. So I wanted to start a business, had seen Ryan Sneddon, who does it in Annapolis, do it, and had wanted to start it for a while, honestly. And so I thought, okay, it can really be too difficult, started it in last year, April, so 2024 April. And then since then, we now reach over 100,000 Winnipeggers. That's a combination of media and news. So we have both 73,000 followers on social media.

There's like 800,000 people in Winnipeg, right? Yeah, it's about 800K. And then our newsletter is at about 35,000 people now. So. Okay. So 70 something on social, 35,000 on news. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's split now. And yeah, it's good. And we're now trying to start other businesses off over here. Okay. We'll get into that. Trust me. I'm very curious about that. Now you live in Winnipeg, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I live here. How well do you know the market? How long have you been there? I've basically grown up here. Like, I've been here for over 12, 13 years now. So I know the market fairly well.

You know, and Winnipeg isn't necessarily a tech savvy city. I could, you know, I kind of make the joke here that I can copy anything off of Twitter and paste it here and it would do well. Yeah. So it's like not a tech savvy city at all, like Calgary or something in Canada. And so, you know, it's a really easy market to start any business here. And so there's low competition. how successful would you be if you took a, let's say Austin, Texas, 800,000 people, give or take. How successful would you be if you would have taken the exact same playbook and done it in Austin?

Austin might be a bad example because they probably have like 100 local newsletters. So ignoring that, just the fact that you were not a local, how would you have done? Yeah, I mean, if I were to personally start it, I would start it somewhere where you do have a first move as advantage, you know? So that's what Winnipeg did so well for me is because there was not even an Instagram account that just compiled all the events here, right? Let alone having a news that are based on it. So it was a really easy market for me to kind of take a monopoly over. And the thing is now if anyone else starts those local news that are here in Winnipeg, their costs for acquiring a subscriber is automatically going to be much higher. Right.

So I would highly recommend if someone is starting one. So I know a few people in Texas that are starting one. and they are now targeting suburbs around Austin rather than the actual city of Austin. Yeah. So gun to your head, if you had to choose between a city you were very familiar with but didn't have a first mover's advantage and a city that you weren't familiar with but did have a first mover's advantage, which would you choose? Yeah, I mean, I think there's multiple models to go about this. So you can definitely even partner up with someone in another city. I would probably go with the place where I have the first over's advantage just because

acquiring the acquisition cost per subscriber will be much lower, right? Like my house acquiring subscribers for 15 cents Canadian, right? Oh, so like 11 cents US. Yeah. So even today, like even today I'm acquiring subscribers for like, Matt's like a dollar 30 or something like that. Yeah. So what is your subscriber worth, give or take?

Yeah, so they're worth about if I am able to sell out every single ad slot in my newsletter for the year. And we only do one ad slot per newsletter. About $8 to $9 a year is kind of what they're worse. Wow. And the current open rate we have per year too. And I'm guessing at your normal open rate, they're probably going to be ran for like five plus years. Yeah, easily. Like we have a 0.05% unsubscribe rate or something.

Jeez, that's so good. So it's like you kind of created slash invented this money machine that turns a dollar into 40 or 50 dollars. As long as you're willing to be patient. You don't get that immediately. It takes five years to get the LTV lifetime value. But nonetheless, like you created this template and now put in one, get out 50. 100%. I mean, it's obviously much easier than done.

Like I think the biggest problem that local newsletters run into is not building the audience. Anyone can build the audience. anyone can turn on Facebook ads and put out a different product. The thing that you most likely end up will have problems with is getting sponsors. It's selling local businesses on a whole new concept of advertising. Yeah. So I think that's the biggest problem that most folks run into is definitely anyone can get to 10 to 15,000 subs. Anybody.

It's just that acquiring sponsors for 10 to 15,000 subs. Well, here's a perfect example. And we're going to get into this when you talk about how you're going to launch a business based on this. If I want a sponsor for this podcast, they're going to pay me, call it $20 per thousand views, right? If I use Spotify ads, like the annoying ads that Spotify puts in themselves, which I turned on for a week just to test and I'm turning it off, it's $6 per thousand views. Downloads, which is nothing. Like that is pennies, right? So $6 from Spotify, $20 if I and or my agent go out and hustle to find sponsors.

But if I build my own business that's in this niche, in this vertical, it's relevant to my audience. And I put in an ad for it. It's $200 per thousand views. It's not, it's a 10x difference, right? Like a 50x difference based on, you know, the lazy way of just putting Spotify midroll ads for, you know, Toyota, Chevrolet local dealers, which I'm just not going to do. So there's so much power in having a business mind and having a newsletter or an audience. because you can vertically integrate and sell your own stuff and not the local bakery or whatever it is, right?

Yeah, it gets me excited you talking about that because like when we started the newsletter, my whole idea was, hey, I'm going to build companies on top of this. And anybody I would talk to would be saying, yeah, but that's like an unrealistic thing. Like, you know, it's tough to obviously run multiple businesses and I totally understand that. And, you know, we've obviously shifted the vision a little bit. But if you're going to just go sell ads on top of your local news setter, it's going to be really hard to monetize. Like, you will cap out at, you lax $500,000 a year.

Like, that is the absolute, like, if you have everything perfect and a great market, you'll still cap out at 500 key a year. But some people are hearing that and thinking, I'm cool with that. It's definitely not a side gig or it's not a bad place to start, right? But like, if you're really trying to make serious money or trying to grow the business, you'd have to vertically integrate it at some point. Yeah.

Okay. So 35,000 subscribers. How many do you send per week? We send out three times a week. Okay. How did you land on that? Did you start with that or did you finish with that? Yeah.

So I mean, we started with once a week. We felt that there was too much content for us to cover in just a one time a week edition. Then we went to two times a week. And this was like in a span of a month, by the way. Like this was not, we didn't wait too long. We started once a week, felt there was too much content. Then I went to two times a week. Again, still too much content to cover.

We did three times a week. and then we sometimes started running out of content. So we're like, okay, so three times the week cadence is like a good amount, where even if one email is shorter than the other two, no one's really complaining about that. Let's talk about your content. Is it like local news? Is it updates?

Is it opinion pieces? When we started, I remember Ryan saying this one thing. When we started, it was everything other than crime and politics. And that's exactly what we have run with as well. So it's basically events, community updates,

city updates, any new bylaws, anything that is happening in the city, basically, away from crime and politics is what we promote. Okay. Now, I understand politics. You don't want to alienate half of your subscribers, right? Why not crime? Like, we will occasionally talk about it saying something like, oh, the most wanted report has come out for Winnipeg, like, you know, just to make people aware of it.

We don't necessarily want to talk about, like, you know, someone's getting stabbed or something like that, right? Especially like she's not the vibe. Yeah, it's not the vibe. I mean, Winnipeg is known as like the murder capital of Canada. And so, and so because of that reason, where like, you know what, we're going to change the narrative. And also from a storytelling perspective, it sounds amazing when we say, when we say something like, you know, where everyone says Winnipeg is boring and we're trying to change that narrative. Yeah.

I love that. I just had an idea. Like, if you find yourself running out of content, I feel like you could supplement with like opinion pieces. like Greg from, you know, from this neighborhood ranks the three best ice cream shops in Winnipeg, you know? Yeah, 100%. And we are now also integrated a lot of our socials. Like on social, we'll say, here are the 10 best homes listed in Winnipeg this month or

something, right? So you can integrate a lot of that into our news letter as well. How many words on average are your emails? 400 to 2,600. So pretty long, pretty big. Yeah, yeah. They're fairly long, but honestly, half of it is events because each event. event, like a small description associated with it.

What are your open rates and click through rates like today versus first couple months? Yeah, I mean, they've stayed fairly consistent. We've always been above 50%. Click through rate has always been in the ballpark of like 8 to 12%. Cool. Crazy high. Man. Yeah.

So open week today is about 56 to 60%. So it can vary obviously depending on the set. Yeah. Yeah. Now, I've noticed there's like a, there's like a, a law of newsletters where the bigger it gives, the more your open rate drops. Like, in my experience, have you seen that? Like, did it start in the 60s and then very slowly ticks its way down?

Yeah, I mean, it did do that. And then what we started doing was we cleaned our list like two or three times. But that was honestly kind of a mistake on our end because sometimes what ends up happening is, for example, Beehive in this case might be showing that someone is not receiving an email. and they might be. Sometimes it might be opening an email that is showing that they're not opening an email, right? So it can, so that isn't always fully trapped. Yeah.

Right? And so if you start cleaning your list, you might start cleaning people that are actually reading your email. I've had the same mistake. I set up an automation and Beehive to clean the list for me. And I would just, every day I wake up and I'd see these drops overnight. And it's like, oh, like, is that the right thing to do? And I finally turned it off. And I'm just going to do it manually, like once every two months.

I think that's the best way to do it. What is your writing style like? Are you writing all these emails yourself? What is the vibe of the newsletter? It's super casual. It's like a very, very casual vibe where it's almost like I'm talking to them. You know, it's not written in news that are jargon. It's a fifth grader reading level.

Super easy to understand. Even when we're talking about like city bylaws being passed, we're making sure everybody can understand what's happening. And the feedback we get whenever we see a reader out and about, it is that, hey, we love the positive outlook that you have on the city and the conversational tone of your writing. And so that's the way that we've written it. It's not any news, jargon that we're using in there. Yeah. What about AI? Are you using A to write this or to help write it? Yeah. I mean, if we started writing this whole thing on our, like, just ourselves, it would

probably take like eight hours a day or something. So we do definitely use like Claude and Chat, GBT. And then I have two VAs who are kind of responsible for, one is responsible for events, the other one's responsible for writing, and they kind of do everything, everything for me. So that's why it's a little bit automated. So it's like the first draft through Claude slash Jad GPT and then a human goes through and cleans it up? Yeah, so they do that. And then I go through and usually like late at night, probably 11, 12 p.m. I'm usually going through final draft an hour of me, you know, break making final changes. It's funny you say like you take eight hours a day, but up until two years ago, that's what everyone did, right? Yeah, yeah. It's been super

helpful for us. We haven't gone into like automating things just yet, like completely automating things, but that's something that, you know, we're looking into. What is your time involvement per week on this? Because of sponsors, like bringing in sponsors and sending ad drafts and things like that nature, like it ends up being probably close to 20 hours a week. It used to be a lot more because I used to write every edition and also make a social post and stuff. When we also were growing our social media following, it was very heavy video, reels. So it was going out and reporting them, editing, voiceovers. Now we've shifted to completely just carousels. And so that's made our life a lot easier as well.

What is your revenue like, your monthly revenue today? Yeah, today it's about, you can range from 12 to 15,000 currently. So that's the general revenue. It's amazing. Yeah, it's good. Like it would have grown a decent amount. in the last like six months is where a bunch of it's starting to compound now. I always like to use like a rough 50 cents per month per subscriber. It sounds like you're kind of close. Well, actually, you might even be above that because that's at five cents per week. Yeah.

So if you were to extrapolate that out, you'd be probably closer to 60 or 70 cents per subscriber per month if it was five per week, right? Yeah, that's about the average that we try and go for. We also haven't explored any of the negative chat and things or nature. I think that's something that we would do when I explore eventually. I just haven't gone around. Yeah. And for those listening are watching negative cac is negative customer acquisition costs where instead of paying Facebook for your leads like you're getting paid for your new subscribers, right? Yeah. And is that kind of like from what I understand that to be you pay Facebook a

$1.20 for a subscriber and then they go through a flow. Like they subscribe and then you say, hey, check out these newsletters. And then once that's done, it's like, hey, fill out this form. And then you can kind of sell those leads. You can do that. The way we would most likely go about doing it if we did it was like, let's say if we sold a discount card or something, right? Like, oh, buy this discount card for $20 and get 10% off of these 20 restaurants or something, right?

What we would do is let's say if we're getting a subscriber for a dollar, right? And so even if one in 10 people convert, right, we're basically making money every single time we're paying Facebook, right? And that's without going to. to sponsorships at all. That's just like just for seven days basically. Yeah. I think people also call it self-liquidating ads, right? Where you make money for requiring customers and then you, you show them ads and make more money. That's the gold standard. But it takes time. Like, there's a lot of things at play, right? 100%. And I mean, a lot of things are local newsletters,

unlike traditional newsletters where you can just plug other newsletters and get them to subscribe to that. The downside with local newsletters is that you can't just plug it. any other AI newsletter or something, you know, start making money off of that. It's true. You almost need local offerings that you can offer these readers. So it doesn't feel like you're a foreign company or something like that. It should feel below. Yeah.

I feel like someone needs to build a Sparkloop for local newsletters. And for those listening, Sparkloop. Sparkloop is like a referral engine for newsletters where you subscribe to the, what's the name of your newsletter? Winnipeg Digest. The Winnipeg Digest. and then you get a pop up five other newsletters. What you're saying is that there aren't,

you don't want to compete with yourself in Winnipeg, so you don't even want to refer them, A, B, there's no one else to refer, really. So if there was like a spark loop that could aggregate all the restaurants or auto repair businesses in Winnipeg, and you could sell them leads for every time they check that box, right? Wouldn't that be an interesting business? I think that's a really good business,

especially because, well, we can also promote other local newsletters, right? because they're completely different cities and someone living in Winnipeg doesn't care about Boston, Texas, right? No. So that's why I think that's a big problem for at least solving that negative tack issue for us is, you know, you kind of have to make a custom offering just for your subscribers. Yeah. But like if I could subscribe to your newsletter and then get like $20 in Coles cash for checking a box,

therefore being added to Cole's email list, that could be pretty valuable for Coles and for you, right? Agreed. I think that's a good idea and then you would obviously have to just put in place those partnerships, right? Yeah. If you weren't chasing after sponsors, which I know is like most of your time right now, how much time would it be taking per week to run this? Man, like seven hours at max, probably. Just from, it probably takes about an hour a day. for reviewing content, for Instagram, sending, you know, making sure the content is good for the news that are in things of that nature. Yeah, about seven hours a week. Okay. Outside of Claude, Chachapiti, what does your tech stack look like for this? Yeah, I mean, we use Beehive for sending a lot of things Beehive does, right? So I would say analytics and everything we get from Beehive. Sponsorships, I track everything in Notion. I don't, I haven't really invested in any specific CRM for just tracking sponsors.

So I've built kind of a semi-custom one in Ocean. Yeah, other than that, it's just chaty BT Claude and nothing really other than that. And Instagram is, yeah, nothing significant. I mean, BHAV is amazing. Do you use like their boost features or any of their other like monetization features? I don't because again, those ads that don't apply to local. It's not a good experience for the reader at the end of the day. And yeah, like we want to make money based like using the reader as future customers for

other businesses. So if we start providing a bad experience, they're going to start opening less. And it's just a, you know, downward spiral from there. How much are you testing your subject lines or your preview lines, if at all? Yeah. So we're usually, I mean, now I've gotten pretty good at basically knowing which ones are going to do well. In the beginning, we should test them almost every edition. Now we don't really test them because I know that I automatically almost know which one's going to do better or not. Yeah. Have you noticed that like on the whole shorter just does better shorter subject lines? 100%. Under five words. Like time should be in there. Something like this weekend, new urgency. Yeah. Urgency. And so, you know, I would say under five words,

under five words and under 40 characters. I love that. People just want to say everything. But it's like you're you're not leaving anything to the imagination. The more you say, the less reason they have to click because you're answering their question with the subject line. I think today's was something like new Winnipeg Costco location. That's it. They click because they want to know where, when. Exactly. Right.

You could put like, hey, on the corner of X and Y, new Costco location opening, you know, August 3rd. How small is too small for a market? Because I know you're in Winnipeg, but you live this world. You're talking to other local newsletter operators. What is your experience? Anything under 100K is. too small, I would say even 150K, you know, I would say anything under that is almost too small.

So you want to then broaden out, maybe do your county or something like that. Anything over a million, I almost find it's too much because then you have a weight and wish to cover unless you're doing five times a week. If you're doing five times a week, you may be able to get away with it. But over a million, you're pretty much pushing it with the amount of things that you can add in there. And it's almost over a million people. The city is so spread out that, let's say,

I'm not sure with Austin, but someone living in South Winnipeg is probably not going to care about things happening in North Winnipeg. It's like a different world. Exactly. It's almost the different cities at that point. So if you're over a million, you should almost have two different newsletters for like splitting the city in half or something like that. Yeah.

Yeah. What are some other creative customer acquisition strategies if paid ads just aren't your thing? Yeah. I mean, honestly, like you're like if you're going to spend $100 out in $90 should be spent on just Facebook apps. You know, if you're going more the creative route, Instagram obviously helps you rad create success with it using ManyChat. We haven't fully explored that channel.

That's something we're now exploring. Referrals are huge, though, having, for example, for us, we do restaurant guides and hiking guides, and we change those according to the season that's about to come up. So let's say with winter, it's going to be top 50 things to do in Winnipeg this winter, right? And so we kind of change that up according to the season. And so referral guides are huge for us as well. Are you more interested in growing horizontally and adding more local newsletters or vertically

and just going to five days a week, more sponsors, like more vertical integration by launching other businesses that you promote with this? Yeah, I mean, ideally. So I've kind of considered both channels or both kind of ways. If you go vertically, if you go horizontally, there are other companies that do this, like 6AM city and things like that, but I just find. your CPMs drop really drop a lot just because then you start having national brands, which are not going to pay you $100 per thousand views, right?

And so if you start working with Nike, they're not looking to, they're just going to pay you a lump sum, which is going to be like $10.000, if that's why I find that rather than just going horizontal, I would rather prove out a money model in my own city, right, then go to other cities. So for example, if I start a business on top of this, right, And I know that, okay, on average, each subscriber to me, rather than being worth $7 now is worth $15 a year, then I'm competing on a whole different game when I go to another city, right? Like, let's say if I expect into Calgary, what's going to happen is when my competitor can only acquire subscribers for maybe $2 a stop, I can acquire them for five and still have a great ROAS on the customer. Yeah.

Okay. Roaz return on ad spend. Yeah. I know those things. You mentioned CPM. The amount of money you can charge per thousand opens, right? Not per thousand subs, but opens, right? What are you charging nowadays for ads?

We're about $70-something dollars, like probably $75 CPN. Wow. For local advertisers. And then a lot of them, so we sell annual spots. Like that's kind of our business model is we sell exclusivity. Like if anyone is looking to sell sponsorship, don't sell one-off sponsorships. you're not going to make money. You want to sell annual sponsorships on an exclusivity basis.

So if we work with one HVAC company, we're not working with any other HVAC company for that full year, right? And so you're trying to sell exclusivity is what your main thing you're trying to sell is. So now when we go to a sponsor, we say, hey, you're basically getting a monopoly over $100,000. And it's the only form of advertising that lets you do that. And you said only one ad per newsletter. 19,000 opens per send times 75 you're looking at like 1,400 for one send that's our cost for a one-time advertiser

so if someone's coming in just a one-time ad like they have an event coming up or something that's what they'll pay for our instagram it's double so it's 2,800 for 1 for 1 post yeah and then obviously if they're annual subscribe or if they're an annual sponsor they get much better ad rate than $70 per thousand cents. How much better? Yeah, so right now we're charging about $12,000 for 12 newsletters or add. So one per month. One per month.

Okay. That way you don't like oversaturate yourself. They don't see it too often. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And what ends up happening is, you know, so we send out, give or take, let's say 12 newsletters per month, times that by $12,000 a month. So that's, I think, $144,000 a year in revenue, just on our news that are. ads that doesn't even include our Instagram, right? And so, you know, we're kind of looking

in the ballpark of about 200K when you kind of combine everything together and then where, yeah, we have some other like local markets and stuff that we end up running throughout the year. Yeah. If someone's launching this, like what types of local businesses, local sponsors should they target? Because you've probably learned like this, I'm sure this isn't accurate, but like an auto repair store, it may be much more likely to give you money, but not get much ROI out of it so they're not ever going to do a long-term thing. Whereas a local bookstore might be really hard to convert, but they see a really big return on investment and therefore could become like a highly recurring customer. What kind of things like that have you learned about

the types of sponsors that are best for local newsletters? I would say probably like event venues are great, right? So we have an event venue who is our annual sponsors. They do, I think, this year they're they're going to be spending $40,000 a year with us. Right. So they're a huge, they're probably our biggest Advertiser. Other than that, I just tell people, sell people on LTV, just say that, hey, for lifetime value. Yep. So if let's say a dentist is coming to you or you're talking to a dentist, you have them, right? What's on average a customer worth to you? A customer is worth $5,000 to me. Great. So if you're going to spend $10,000 with me, I just need to get you four customers for you to double your return on that spend with us, right? And you're telling me I can't get you four out of

35,000 people, right? So it's an easy sell to make. Oh, I love that. And honestly, a dentist, a customer for a dentist is probably worth a lot more than that, right? Because they might stay with them for five or 50 years. 100%. So dentists, hVAC, plumbing, roofing. High ticket stuff. Anything.

Or highly recurring. Exactly. And like what we do is we actually run a survey. The second someone signs up, they get straight sent to a survey that they fill out what part of the city they live in. Do they own a home, normally home? Are they looking to sell a home, buy a home, upsell down? Like, are they looking to? what are they looking to do essentially?

Like what is their current household income? And so that then allows us to go to advertisers and say, hey, 75% of our audience are homeowners. And that's a very valuable audience for you. So I highly, like, you know, it will end up working out for you. What percentage of your subscribers fill out that survey? About an 87% like completion rate. Are you serious?

87% fill out the survey? Yeah. That's insanity. Yeah. That is great. how many questions are in it? Eight. Holy cow, I would have thought 5%.

Yeah. I should think local newsletters are built different. They're just so loyal and they're just like you're contributing to the community. They're like being a good citizen by contributing to your capitalism, right? Which you're not complaining. I mean, to be fair, though, I think if anyone is starting one, please take this from a perspective of when you're bringing on advertisers, don't bring on casinos or clubs. if that's not the vibe you're trying to set, right?

Short term, you might be shooting yourself in the foot, returning down revenue. But long term, your readers really do appreciate that, you know, that they don't have to, because your readers are mainly going to be 70% females, 80% females between the ages of 35 to 65. They're all looking to learn about clubs and casinos. So you're much better off just like actually handpicking the advertisers

that are going to add value to their law as well. But I'll tell you what, that demographic that you just named is like the most valuable demographic. Those are the spenders in the household. Yeah. They are. Yeah. Right. And that goes back to like the new business that we're starting and how why we have picked that business as well. I'm going to get to that. I'm saving the best for last. What survey tool do you use for that survey? Beehive. So you can build a survey. Okay. It's the it's fairly easy. Well, I don't I have a survey on my newsletter. I feel like an idiot. Like I should totally do that. Yeah, that and polls. I think those two are the most. I do polls.

Yeah, those are those are used like things that you should probably do in if you're running a new player. How successful are you in finding sponsors in your subscriber base? Like putting an ad in there for yourself saying, you know, your ad here. Does that work? It does sometimes. But for smaller companies, I would say, you know, and that's not really our target audience. So a lot of the larger advertisers are relationships you're building or they'll reach out.

Well, something like their marketing coordinator is some 23-year-old that follows our Instagram and has no idea that even our news that are even exists. So they'll reach out, watching a feature on the Instagram. I'll hop on the car with them, sell them this whole new world of newsletters. And then actually that's where I get the ad dollars from them from. So it's usually like the foot in the door is like some 23 year old marketing coordinator who is like on their team and thinks it's a cool idea to be featured on on Instagram. Are there any like other perks like local perks like priority seating or you ever get

recognize any intangibles like that yeah so i mean when i had my face associated with the brand so in the beginning we did a lot of reels that's how i grew the instagram following pretty heavily we did a lot of reels a lot of restaurant reviews and things of that nature so i would be recognized like five six times a day that's amazing yeah like i would be at the gym was that cool it was cool for sure but then i kind of it was also concerning at the same time because i was like okay if i sell this if i ever want to sell this thing i can't have my face associated with it. So that's why we switched more to carousels or a way where I disassociate my face from it. And then it becomes a sellable asset at the end of the day. Yeah, that's fair. All right. So

you're dabbling in Christmas lights. Is that right? That's the new business we're starting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, is that the business or have you done other like vertically integrated businesses for this? No. So that's like our first business on top of this. Yeah, it was the thinking behind it was it's seasonal. It works great. It doesn't. We forget about it. Right. Second thing is that it's high LTV customers. So let's say it's a leasing model so you don't sell the Christmas lights. Right. So when we lease the Christmas lights out to them, they're usually staying with us for another four or five years, right? Or even like, let's say three years. So we end up making a lot more money on them in the following years. And then if it works out great, then a natural upsell

into it would be permanent lights. So those are the lights. So those are the lights. like going your jellyfish yeah yeah so it would be the permanent lights that kind of go underneath your gutters and stuff like that right and so that's kind of the plan is okay if it works out great come next spring we're going to start the permanent lights business and then also we have a lot of females obviously that are readers that's a primary reader and i was like man if i go and start an hvac or roofing company or something you know if someone's heat goes out they're not going to say let me pull up winnipeg digest and find the like you know find the hvac tech so Christmas lights, it was great because I feel like females are primarily the ones making that

decision. And that's exactly what's happened as well. So we started running some ads in the Winnipeg Digest, have already sold like five, six jobs before the season has even started at all before the main season kind of kicks in. So one piece of advice, take it or leave it. I have a friend that has a Christmas light slash roofing slash he has several different successful, big home service businesses in Pennsylvania. And he says like stay away from permanent lighting, stay away from jellyfish. He says he only installs it if someone like demands it. And he can't have them as a customer any other way because it's just a one time thing. And then he's sometimes he has to go out there and maintain it and fix it. And he just hates his life every time.

He says if he could have it his way, permanent lights were never installed and he only does Christmas lights on the leasing program every year. All right. So when you put this ad in your own newsletter for your other business, are you calling it your other business? Or is it, Does it seem just like a third party entirely? Yeah, right now, I mean, we ended up doing, so what we did is we ran a giveaway. I had heard it in some like Alex Ramose video or something where he mentioned run a giveaway, give one thing away and call everybody else and say, hey, you get $150 off for just entering the giveaway. So with that, got about 300 entries or something like that.

This is a giveaway for free Christmas lights? Exactly, yeah. And then we call it just lights, the company, no website, nothing like that at all. But when we do do the brai-dice, it's going to be the same colors as Winnipeg digest. Yeah. I love that. You're just leaning into it, right? Like, you're supporting the newsletter by going through me for your Christmas lights.

You're probably going to go through someone, go through me. Yeah. And then now what we're doing is, you know, we can run offers that kind of make it seem like they're exclusive for the readers. So we'll say something like, hey, get your Christmas lights done before October 7th, and you get $150 off or something, right? The plus point for us is our season doesn't start until October 15th anyways. So anything that we do before that is just extending our season more and more.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Now, are you planning on running this? Like, are you outsourcing it to another company? Tell me how the operations of this looks. In an ideal world, what I would like to do is kind of have Winnipeg Digest as a marketing arm for multiple businesses.

So let's say I either acquire equity or I get given equity into businesses. whether that's 15, 20%, of course, depending on the size of the business. And we end up becoming like a fully fractional CMO type of situation where we, they get access to Winnipeg Digest, they get access to me, right? And then we handle all their marketing for them, right? And then in return, we get some sort of equity share in it. That's the ideal world situation. But to go to a business today and a local business owner and say, hey, give me 15, 20%

of your business, that's kind of, they're not going to believe. even the fact that, hey, we can actually deliver that value for them. So that's where we started our own business for now, at least, that's the Christmas lights one, where we're going to run everything. So I did my first install yesterday. And the, yeah. And so then the plus point about this is I am learning, obviously, the skill set of putting the Christmas lights and stuff.

And then this is the only company will ideally own. And then after this, this kind of proves out the model that, hey, this works for home services. And then we're able to acquire equity into other home services. after this. Yeah. Okay. Of all the businesses out there, what made you think Christmas lights? Yeah. I mean, the biggest thing was it's seasonality, right? So. But most people look at that as a negative, right? Yeah. For me, it was, well, I have a primary business, which is Winnipeg Digest. I can, I don't have to take away too much time away from this. It's just 10 weeks. I give 10 weeks. If it works

out great, amazing, I double down. If it doesn't, then I'm just going to forget about it. Like, it never existed. And there's no website or anything for it yet. Okay. I like that. Yeah. Yeah. What are the unit economics of these jobs? What's an average job size? What are you going to take home per job? I know it varies from year to year. There's higher costs on year one. Can you break all that down? Yeah. I mean, this is just our obviously first year doing it. We've booked five jobs the last week. About $1,400 is our average job right now. Wow. Cost of doing that job for us is most likely going to be like $2, $300. But like the thing is, The thing is we're actually doing the labor right now ourselves, right?

So it's owner-operated. So that pricing takes into account in the future when we do end up hiring labor and everything like that. And then following years, I think on average, the average is about 85% for the amount of customers that stay on year over a year. Wow. Okay. So the two to 300, that includes the lights or just labor? No, it's about $300. $300.

It just includes the lights. Okay, so you're not like counting your labor as a cost. All I heard is, you know, $6,000 of net profit, you know, for on five jobs. Yeah, yeah. So it's fairly high at least right now. And then they take about four-ish hours to do, three, four hours to do, which is not terrible for the first year. Second year, we've already cut them, cut the lights for them and already have the bulbs free screwed. So it's like, you know, that kind of time gets fed into half.

What are you going to have to pay in labor to have that four-hour job done? once you do start hiring people. Yeah, I mean, it'll be just minimum wage. It won't be crazy. $100 in labor per job, give or take? It's about $15 an hour, you know, give or take, let's just say, you know, three people doing a job, right, should take three hours. So yeah, like, give or take $150. Wow. Okay. Let's say year two, you stop doing it yourself, you hire it all out. You basically, you don't have the cogs, the cost of goods sold, the hard costs anymore. Now you have the labor costs, but it's half as much. So if you have, call it 80% margins year one, even if you outsource all the labor, year two plus, you have 90% margins. Yeah, my goal is not to run the business myself,

for sure. I'll definitely be bringing in an operator where I can get them to like best equity or something over a few years. Of course, there'll be a whole new world of problems, but it'll be fun. You know, I think, I think it'll be fun where, you know, I don't want to run the Christmas lights business at the end of the day. Right. But I say this all the time. Like, it's important that people get to know the weeds before they outsource, you know, these core competencies and get out of the weeds. Like, yeah, people are like, oh, I heard a guy on the internet say I, I need outsourcing. This is, this is, I'm above this. I'm a, no, you, you got to know exactly what those weeds look like until you're ready to get out of them. Exactly. Which is why I decided to do the jobs on myself this

first year. Easily, I could have like hired someone just using the cash flow from Winnipeg Digest, like it wouldn't be too difficult. It's just that down the road, I don't want someone saying that It took seven hours when I should have taken three. Like, bro, I've been on that ladder. I know what you're doing. Yeah. So that's why, that's the simple reason why. I was like, you know what?

First year, it's 10 weeks. I just won't have a life for 10 weeks. That's slowly part. Yeah. Okay. How many jobs do you think you'll do this year based on what your conversion rates are looking like? Yes.

I mean, we sucked at sales for the first like seven, eight quotes that we gave out. And then now we've started converting. I think in the last six jobs, we've converted four of them, or in the last six, quote, we've converted four of them. I think I am very safely saying that we'll hit $100,000 in revenue in the first year. Jeez. I think so at least. That's not fun of it.

How did you get better at sales? How did you suck before versus what you're doing today? Yeah. So, I mean, we would just go in before and trying to close them on the, like at the door, you know, and we would have a pre, like we would book an appointment, like a design consult. and they would come out and we would literally just try and close them there. And I didn't realize that, okay, that's what we shouldn't do.

So then I talked to some, a friend of mine who did who did painting. So he did door to door painting like student painting or something like that. And so he's like, yeah, if you have a design consult booked, you're going to go inside their home, sit with them, showcase them the mock up before and after, walk them through your booklet. And then you're going to price anchor them to this price, right? Like just the whole whole shebang, right? And so that's kind of what we've started doing now, where we go in and we have the quoted like $3,000 or something that includes all the trees and the home and the side of the home. And we slowly go with them and take out everything.

And it gets to like, like, $1,500. And then I'm like, okay, if you book before October 7th, you get a $150 discount today right now. Right. And so that's what we've started doing now. Yeah. And you're closing like 60, 70% of that. That's the number that will end up at it after the season, right? 67%.

Now, please tell me you're asking for referrals. Yeah. So what? Neighbor's name. Yeah. So what we're going to do in is there is a Christmas lights person on Twitter. He always says this. So it's like $100 the gift card or something to a steakhouse or something along those lines.

So we're now starting to offer those. Right now we're just getting all of our stuff still printed. Like it's way early in the season. Most people start advertising for this like September 15th. So we're way too early anyways. Yeah. Like the homes that we have done, we haven't asked directly for referrals yet, but we will when we finish the job.

I mean, you have no clue. Your conversion rate will only get better through September, October, November even, right? So whatever it is today, we'll get orders of magnitude better. Yeah, and these are all, but these are, like, there's pros and cons, because all these are leads coming through Winnipeg now. It just currently, so they're kind of worn leads already. If we start exploring Facebook ads and stuff, those leads are going to be a lot more colder, so our conversion rates should drop there a little bit.

Are you going to do other stuff like that? Yeah, we're not just going to rely on your newsletter. We're going to do everything. Yeah, we're trying to 100,000 dollars is like what do we want to do base level. Over the three weeks, if we're able to do 15200, that would be like ideal world. Yeah. It blows my mind that you're going to come close to doubling your revenue by adding Christmas lights to a newsletter. Yeah.

Like who would have thought of that? Ryan Sneddon added luxury wedding bathroom trailers to his newsletter. Yeah. And like that became a big business, right? Because events. Yeah. Right. Events. That's what you said too. I already know that you're thinking of the spring and the summer. What other kind of seasonal and or other businesses are you thinking for this?

I know that it's like very not like a lot of people do the whole gutter cleaning, window cleaning thing in the summer and thing. I don't want to get into the whole door to door hassle of it. Honestly, I am not a great salesperson training guy and that might be able to become one, but I'm not that right now. My bread and butter is like marketing where I do Facebook ads and things of that nature. I want to explore businesses which I can utilize that in, you know, and so most likely that's why permanent lights was a natural cell. Also because a lot of Christmas light owners, what ends up happening is they'll say, hey, we're actually 50-50 on whether we want Christmas lights or not, right? Because we're considering permanent lights. And the permanent

lights average order value is about four to five X, whatever Christmas lights is. Obviously, LTV, no, but just a one-time cost. So what we're able to, to do is bring in someone for Christmas light. So let's say first season, we make some money on them and then say, okay, if you do permanent lights with us the following year, you get $500 discount. So we're basically just pre-selling customers

for permanent lights during the Christmas light season, right? And rather than making that money over three years, we're just going to make that money over two years because they're going to do first off the end of Christmas lights, then they're going to do permanent lights the following season. Smart. I should have asked this earlier,

but what has your timeline look like? with your newsletter and like subscriber growth. When did you launch? How many subs did you add those first few months to today? Yeah. I mean, in the beginning, we were adding like 4,000-ish subs a month, four or 5,000 actually. Now it's decreased to like 2ish K, give or take where, you know,

we're still spending the same amount of money. So it's about $3,000. But yeah, you start like saturating your market and things like that. So now pretty soon I think like it might be time where I just turn off ads and try and spend that money on referrals or something. So if we can do whether that's giveaways or lead magnets or something like that for referrals and just try and get more subscribers that way, I think that might be the next thing we're trying to go into. So how many months to get to 35,000?

It's been, yes, we started in April, whatever that is, I think like 17 months or something like 16. Yeah. That's amazing. At this time, no plans to launch other local newsletters. You want to keep growing this way. I've had a lot of interest from other cities for sure. just because I talk about local news that is on Twitter and I've kind of, and obviously I've been on your pod and Nick's pod and stuff.

So I've had a lot of interest of people saying, hey, can we franchise this out or something like that? It's just that I know my dollars will be much better spent trying to vertically integrate this currently, right? So Christmas lights took $10,000 of initial capital to start. If I started another location instead of Christmas lights, Christmas lights, I might do $100,000 in 10 weeks.

the new location would have taken me $20,000, $30,000 to then on sponsors make like $50,000 the first year. And then once I'm able to prove out a money model, at least in my city, so let's say if I know, okay, I'm going to on average make $200,000 from just the newsletter and then another $500,000 from Christmas sites. I might not even explore other businesses after that. It might just be, okay. Yeah.

That's the business model. I'm going to go to other cities and start. There's a cash cow. Yeah. start the media company based on the media company start crystal flights that's it yeah yeah yeah do you feel confident that you could as up today with what you know now pick another city not move there not know really anything about it and have just as much success 100% i could yeah like once you've been in the space for over a year a year and a half and i think for me the usp is

the unique selling point would be the social media aspect of things so social media is if anyone is going to start this, don't forget about social media because at this point, I'm a top three followed, let's say, account in my city, right? If I reach out to an account or a business, they're almost obligated to reply to me. So it makes my cold outreach so much easier and the reply rate just skyrockets rather than me mailing them. So if you're going to go down this route, also social media is a great way to upsell your current sponsors into saying, hey, I have two different times that you can read.

Yep. Right. So that's the unique selling point if you are going to start one. Yeah. Dude, you got to reach out to local businesses that collect emails and say, hey, I'll give you a free ad in exchange for your list. Like, let me share your list basically, right? Because they're probably not using it. Most companies that collect emails, they just sit there. They don't do because it takes work. Yeah. Right. To regularly work your list. So a lot of them are going to be dead, but you could say, I'm going to run them through a verifier. And you could either pay them, you know, 10 cents. per email or just say, I'll give you $2,000 worth of ads for your 20,000 person list. They have no idea what it's worth. Like, would you just add them to your list?

Like rather than I guess sending an email thing, hey, subscribe. I would just feel it out. Yeah. Like try multiple angles. Like segment the list. And let's say it's 20,000. You take four groups of 5,000 to one. You just say, hey, you know, I partnered with Mike's bakery.

And I would really love you to check up my local newsletter. 5,000. You just kind of work them into your list. them differently so you could track them, make sure they're cleaned and scrubbed. How many are opening? Oh, it's not bad. Okay. And then the other 10,000, try different kind of creative things. It's a time game, right? Like, I love this. This is obviously my first or second business, but I've heard a lot that businesses that are just a time game are the best businesses to be in because as long as I'm just in this business and my list keeps growing, it's essentially

a business that can't lose. It's an audience that I can not only monetize through ads, but then I can run my own businesses on it. So it's just a time business. The longer I'm into this, the more money I'm going to make. Oh, man. I just kind of had a thought where it's like, every aspiring entrepreneur or entrepreneur or business owner or whatever, they know that having an audience is powerful. But 95% of them have no desire to get in front of the camera and to do all that stuff because it sucks. It's hard. And I've been there. So they don't even consider it. They're like, I know having an audience is valuable, but not for me. Yeah. I feel like this is a great loophole into that, right?

Where you can just, through the power of the written word, through Claude, through Chad GPD, through a virtual agent or a virtual assistant, you can use emails to build an audience without having to get in front of the camera, that you can still have all that power. Like, it's like 35,000 people in a city is more powerful than a million TikTok followers that are worldwide. It is. I joke around with some of my friends. I'm like, if I wanted to in three years, I could run for me.

right like if yeah totally we could have enough pull in the city to be able to run for me yeah right but yeah i think i completely agree with what you said because the biggest problem people run into when looking to make content is what do i talk about in this case you already have what you're going to talk about because things are happening in your local town fresh content every day yeah exactly and this is a business at the very base level the writing and all that stuff can be given out to one or two VAs and they can handle 90% of the business for you. And all you really have to do is deal with sponsorships if you're not even able to, you know,

give that out. If you are able to also delegate that, then good on you. You know, so it's not a business where you need 40 hours a week in the beginning of spending 40 hours a week to write and also do sponsorships. But as you continue to grow, you can easily run this whole business on 15 hours a week. I just feel like this, you know, under an hour video is probably about as tactical and specific as you could get on the internet for watching a local newsletter. I 100% agree.

And honestly, if anyone is going to start one, they can reach out to, like the local newsletter community is fairly friendly. And you can reach out anyone. And other than that, just go to Facebook Ads Library, search up any local news. You can search of my local newsletter, Winnipeg Digest. And what's the 80-20 of your best performing ads? Video, Instagram, Facebook, 15 seconds. It's simply at the top usually have some sort of a local monument as the background.

Video or image test both. I would say video has done better for me, some sort of a drone footage of a local monument. Then at the top it says struggling to find things to do in blank city, right? So let's say struggling to find things to do in Winnipeg. Underneath it, say Winnipeg Digest or Blank Newsletter sends you 50 plus events happening in the city every single week. That's it. That is the best performing ads that you will probably find. One thing I love about this business is how like, let's say you're once a week.

You can start there. It's very palatable. You do it yourself. You sell out your ads. The easiest lever to pull is now twice a week. Cool. I just doubled my revenue. Three times a week.

Tripled it. Four or five. Why not seven? Let's do seven. And if you're running out of like current events, you just do opinion pieces. And if you're in New York or something, like a really large city and you don't know how to split things up. You can also like almost niche down twice.

So you're already niche down geographically. And then you can do dads in New York. You can do you can do. Freelancers. Yeah. Like freelance. Yeah. Because each of those audiences is going to be a million people on its own,

if not more in larger cities. So if I lived in Austin, I would have just done something like young dads in Austin or something like. That alone is probably like a thousand people worth. Yeah. I mean, I'd be so bold as to say you'd be dumb to be in New York and just do a New York local newsletter.

Like you're just nothing to know one in that sense, right? Exactly. Yeah. Like you could do like a Williamsburg moms. Yeah. Like pick a neighborhood. Pick a, yeah, demographic. 100%.

And just and the higher obviously and your audience, the more expensive sponsors you can sell, right? That's the biggest thing. Only downside to New York newsletters I will say is you might run out of sponsors eventually. you know, if you keep providing a great result, yeah, okay, you're always going to have those core sponsors. So you'll have $100,000, $200,000 worth of revenue coming in. But if that's your goal, go ahead, start one.

But you should probably look at ways to monetize on top of the news that are eventually. Oh, jazz, this was great. Where can we look for you if we have questions? Yeah, Twitter handle is creating jazz. So if you ever reach out, if you guys have any questions, and happy to chat with whoever wants to jam on some local news that are ideas. Yeah, and for the 14 listeners in Winnipeg, Canada, go check out the Winnipeg Digest. Yeah, and reach out to me and maybe we can grab coffee.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Thanks, Jess. Yeah, thank you. Hey, guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out, you're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star

review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business, it would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.