The Startup Ideas Podcast - He has 1M+ followers and $1M startup ideas for you

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

I’m joined by Brian Feroldi, a world-class creator and author in the financial space. We discuss the success stories of Jimmy Buffett and The Motley Fool, how to build a profitable business in the creator economy, the untapped potential of platforms like LinkedIn, and so much more. 🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND BRIAN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianFeroldiLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianferoldi/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BrianFeroldiYTEpisode Timestamps00:00 Jimmy Buffett's success story08:07 What you can learn from The Motley Fool's marketing strategy26:11 First business idea: Back office services for creators34:28 Best categories to monetize as a creator40:41 Second business ideas: Newsletter acquisition46:40 Third business idea: LinkedIn ghostwriting

Starting a newsletter and keeping it going for a couple of months is one thing. Maintaining it permanently and actually reaching out to those audiences again and again. That is a treadmill. I think there will be increasing opportunities over the next six to nine months to look at other newsletters that are in your space and in your category that have kind of fizzled out. Reach out to them and acquire their newsletters as a way to kind of aggregate newsletters together. I could see consolidation coming in the next couple of months. So I think there'll be opportunity if you have capital to do so.

So this is going to be fun, Brian. I feel like you don't do enough podcast. So I feel lucky that you're joining us. You are a big deal on Twitter and other places. You've racked up almost a million followers on places like that where you're demystifying the stock market, finance stuff. You're becoming a multi-printer in your own right. And I just wanted to jam startup ideas. that's what we do here. So thank you for joining me.

Love it. Thanks for having me. Yeah, big fan of the podcast. Before we get to the ideas, you were telling me about a story about Jimmy Buffett and the story about the Motley Fool. And tell me more about why you're into Jimmy Buffett to start. So I'm not into Jimmy Buffett, the musician at all. Like, I could I could care less about his his music. It's just not my vibe at all. But one, one of my favorite podcast that I listen to is the Founders podcast by David Senra. And he recently, you know, that podcast is all about digging into founders or musicians or directors and just kind of jamming on their, on their life essentially. And he came out with an episode on Jimmy Buffett. And I was like, do I want to

listen to this? Like, but for whatever reason, I decided to push, push play on. It probably automatically came on if I'm being honest in my feed. And I love it when I go in to consume a piece of media and I have one expectation about, especially if that expectation is going to be, I just got to get through this. This is going to be disappointing. And on the other end, I'm like, that was a thousand times better than I thought it was going to be. So I found it, I found Jimmy Buffett's entire life fascinating, but I had no idea that. he was such a ridiculously successful businessman. I think I think he died. He died a couple of years ago,

and he died a multi-billionaire, making him one of the top 10 grossing artists of all time. And I just loved hearing his story about how he did things differently. And then he essentially went on tour and never stopped and spun up all these businesses along the way. So I think there's a lot that entrepreneurs can learn by studying Jimmy Buffett, even if like me, you don't care for his music. I'm pretty sure he was friends with Warren Buffett. Is that right? Yes, correct. The two of them were friends, and even though they had no relation to each other. So what's the story? Because, you know, what's the story with him? I know he grew up in, or he was living in Key West. I think he was like poor, you know, playing on the streets. How did he go from, you know,

playing the streets of Key West to being a multi-billionaire? owning a bunch of companies. Yeah, so he actually tried to get into, he wanted to be musician. He knew that about himself and he tried to get into the music industry through the front door. So he went to Nashville and he tried to get a recording deal and he would come in and the record labels would be like, we don't know how to classify you, right? Like you're not, you're not country music. You're not rock music. So he got a couple of records out, I think the traditional way and they utterly failed. And he actually picked up and went to kind of green pasture, Key West at the time, which when he went there was like a shell of what it is today. Like rent was super cheap and he was actually

going from bar to bar saying to them, I'll play here for tips and booze. And that was his fee, if you will. And he basically was super scrappy and lived off of tips and slept where he could in the beginning. But he went, he slowly started to develop a name for himself. And he actually, you know, he was playing so often that his style started to become more formalized. And since he was living in Key West, he started to make that a part of his persona and a part of his, of his music. And he just worked his tail off going from venue to venue around Key West. And then he started to expand. And then he started to go on on tour. And he never had, it wasn't until he was doing this for a couple of decades before he had his first, like, breakout hit that actually made him more well known as a mainstream singer.

But along the way, he just developed these interests. And he partnered to open restaurants. And he owns like the Landshark beer brand, if you're familiar of that, which is like one of actually a, a, a brand of beer I really, really enjoy. And now he's like in, he built his own record label. He's got his own marijuana brand. He's got hotels. He's got casinos.

He's got apparel, home decor. You can even buy pickle sets that are branded Margarita, Ville. So again, just a super scrappy guy with like really super humble beginnings. But I think he became a category of one. And he rejected kind of like the main way or he got kicked out or failed trying to go into an industry from the main way and kind of built it up for himself. I think that is a lesson that basically every entrepreneur listening to this should know. And it's pretty interesting because you would never think that Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett

would be friends, although their names are the same. Besides from that, right? And they're, you know, I'm just reading an article about about the two. They've actually got no family relation. And I see that it is a quote in the Wall Street Journal. Warren leaves messages for cousin Jimmy and always has. And, you know, Jimmy used to call Warren, Uncle Warren in return. They met in the 80s and they actually took a DNA test.

Wow. So they took a DNA test. They are, in fact, not family. But I'd imagine that Jimmy looked at what Warren was doing with Berkshire Hathaway. and it seems that Jimmy was quite a big investor in Berkshire Hathaway and just saw how he was structuring it with all these different companies and said to himself, how can I leverage my brand to do the same?

Like if you think about Warren's strategy around buying everlasting brands like Coca-Cola and sees candies, like it's not too dissimilar to how Jimmy was thinking about, you know, for example, building his real estate empire and licensing his brand out that way. Yeah, totally. It's a time-tested strategy and how cool would it be to have Warren Buffett as someone that you could call up and, you know, shoot ideas around with. Warren Buffett, I think, just likes being associated with famous people. I know that he's actually developed a close relationship with LeBron James, for example. So, you know, if you can have a moderate level of success, maybe one day you can become friends with Buffett, too. Well, I think he's a brand guy, you know, I think it's probably two things. Number one, he's a brand guy. And I think he, he, he understands. understands the power of a brand.

And number two, I think he's just probably loves world class people and anyone who's like world class he's into. So the combination of those two things, I think just make people like Jimmy and people like LeBron like, oh yeah, like, you know, very interesting to him. The other company that are per brand that you, you were telling me about that I actually haven't heard the name in a long time. And I think it's a story that younger on. entrepreneurs don't know much about the Motley Fool. Tell me a little bit about the story of

Motley Fool and why it's interesting to you. So the Molly Fool is a is a company that I've worked for for nine years now, but they have been in so many ways ahead of the curve. They've essentially been a part of the creator economy for for almost 30 years now. And they have they've done things, especially with their business model that make a ton of sense to people today, but back when they started, made no sense at all. Like, they were one of the first companies I'd ever come across that had a freemium business model. I mean, I myself was a consumer of content from The Motley Fool, so I'm a investing nerd, and they produce a ton of great free content on their website,

fool.com, and they'd create these articles. and I would be reading these articles and they would be, you know, high quality analysis and they clearly knew what they were talking about. And I was like, how am I reading this for free? I don't understand how this isn't behind a paywall somewhere. I don't understand how this company makes money if like they're producing all of these articles and I'm just consuming them on the internet for free. Lo and behold, I already understood later that while the business model is, yeah, produce a lot of free content, get a lot of eyeballs, monetize that with advertising. and then try and convert you on the back end to be a paying member.

And then once you become part of their ecosystem, you know, they have multiple tiers of membership that start at, you know, basically $100 per year all the way up to, geez, I don't know, $5,000, $10,000 per year. And, you know, once you're a paying member, they really try and upsell you. So they have had this business model in place now for basically 30 years. But they were, they tried, they figured this out along the way.

And they were doing newsletters. newsletters back in 1994 before the internet was a thing before before the internet was really a distribution center to them so if you're not familiar with the motley fool but you are a part of the creator economy i think it's a business that you should definitely study or at least understand because they have perfected the art of of attracting eyeballs to their their properties, turning those eyeballs into monetizable users, upselling those users over time. And they have built a business that does, I don't know the exact figures, but I have to imagine it's nine plus figures in revenue each year and growing. Yeah. So it's really interesting. So if you go to the

Molli Full website, they have a, if you go to our services, they list out basically a bunch of their products that they sell. And, you know, the lowest price service that they sell is like, it's $100, a report, which is essentially a research report on one stock recommendation by our analysis. What is that? That's a blog post. It's a newsletter. So you're paying $100 for a newsletter. Or they have these other, you know, newsletters that you can sign up to.

They call them services that pretty much are on average, three, four, five hundred bucks a month. But they have ones that, you know, go up to $2,000 a year, you know, And it's really, you know, I think you would never think of a newsletter costing $2,000 a year. But it's all, I think what's really smart when Motley Fool does that's really smart is it's all about the value, right? It's like, oh, if I get one good stock pick, it's worth it to me to pay $2,000 year. And I think that's how a lot of people think about it. Yeah, absolutely. Especially depending on the subscribers that they have, many of the people that sign up for the low price ones, they're probably working with, you know, five or six figure portfolio.

maybe seven-figure portfolios on their own, but they have plenty of members that are worth $5, $10, $20, $20, $50, $100 million. And for at that level of clientele, for them to spend, you know, $10,000 a year on a service is like, you know, chump chains to them. So they've done a really good job at segmenting their audience, their back-end audience, and then upselling them over time. The other thing that they've done that's really fascinating is they have taken their initial business model, initial brand name.

And they have actually spun off from there a number of different brands. So they have a hedge fund that they run called 16233 Capital. And that, I believe, employs a fairly traditional 2 and 20 model, which is very obviously lucrative. And that is they service a very small number of clients, but they have a very high net worth client base that goes in there. They have mutual funds that they've spun off. They have ETFs. They've spun off. They've had sister brands that they've spun off that focus on personal finance and really.

estate. So they have just done an excellent job of taking this core, this core business functionality and finding multiple ways to monetize it at different price points throughout their business. So again, if you're in the creator economy in any way, it's definitely a business that is worth studying. One of the things I like to do when I hear about businesses like this is to really go through the funnel. It's the best way to describe it. So Molly Fool is one of those businesses that has a funnel worth studying. And it's essentially, you know, I listed off the 20 different services that they have. Those are 20 different funnels worth, you know, worth, uh, understanding. So for example, you know, right now I'm on one of their landing pages. It's very, very, um, tight, I would

say the messaging. It's our top 10 stocks to buy. Um, the Motley Fool stock advisor, it just identified these 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now. And it's, you know, learn how to get access by entering your email below. So these are actually, I call these tweet size landing pages because it's, you know, 280 characters or less, create some, some curiosity. And once you get in there, you get that email, I'm sure. I haven't put my email yet, but you get that email. You probably, hopefully get some value.

And then you get into that flow. They could see that, oh, you clicked here, you click there. And, you know, you don't make nine figures by not, by not, you know, keeping. keeping to send emails. My partner Jordan always says if you ain't send in, if you ain't send in you ain't win in. That's what he says. So I'm very motley full of sending a lot of emails

and this and and and the the funnels are tight. Oh like you I've signed up to many of their funnels and if you have a one trepidation that I have when I create funnels

for myself is like I don't want to be a annoying. I don't want to be annoying and salesy to the people that are on the receiving end of my funnel. I always want to be helpful. And it's like, well, how often is too often to email is like once a week too often? It's two times a week too often, et cetera. When you sign up for these Motley Fool funnels, you get up to four emails per day, per day. And that is obviously an extremely deliberate decision that they have made. They've been split testing this and doing all kinds of optimization of this over the course of years. So if they are sending four emails per day after you give an email to them, that that isn't by accident, right? That was all pre-thought about and tested.

So their data clearly showed that sending lots of emails to really get people to convert is the way to go. Yeah. So you bring up a good point. Something I've been thinking a lot about, which is, you know, recently a lot of a lot of founders that we know are obsessed with conversion rate optimization. So how do I get, you know, as much juice out of this lemon as possible? And I get it, right? If you're converting at 8% and then you get that up to 12%, that could be the difference. That could be, that could be, you know, that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, not millions of dollars of profit for your business that year. So like, it may, you know, I get why people optimize for conversion rate. But I think that people are making a mistake by just optimizing for

conversion because it's not really long-term thinking. You know, long-term, and this is like a half-baked thought, so workshop with this, a workshop, but it's this idea that like, yes, I could send four emails a day and I'll probably increase sales and, you know, that's great. But think about those people who unsubscribed and who are now going to tell their friends, oh, you know, or they're at a dinner table and someone brings up the motley full and they're like, I got so many annoying email for them. I had to unsubscribe.

So I think that there is a balance between conversion rate optimization and no optimization. And I actually call it community rate optimization, TRO, where you're optimizing it, you're optimizing it for what the community actually wants, which is kind of somewhere in the middle. Yeah, I think that that's fair. The other thing to think about is, you know, It depends on if you're sending emails as a personal brand or you're sending them as a company, right? You don't want your personal brand necessarily associated with spamming of people.

But if you're on the company side, my hunch is that they know that your likelihood or your interest in signing up for these service is super high at the start. And then it kind of rapidly diminishes from there. So they know if you click to give them their email address to download some report, that's when you are a white hot lead and the odds of you converting then and there within that 24 hours are probably the highest. So they really try and hammer that. And then it just diminishes from there. But if you study the Motley Fool's marketing practices, people have been complaining. Members have been complaining about that or non-members have been complaining about that for years.

For years, they say this is too over the top. You guys produce too many reports. You send too many emails, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah. And then if you look at the behavior of the people that actually sign up, many of them only sign up because of the way that the marketing is done. And then once they become members, they grow an affinity for the brand because once you're through the paywall, the experience is completely different. So it could also be a sense of be worried about learning too many lessons from what people say and follow what people actually do, not what people

say. Totally. There's one interesting point I want to bring up with the Motley Fool that a lot of people don't know about. So why is the Motley Fool, the Motley Fool? How did it get so popular initially? Well, the Motley Fool had a partnership with AOL in the 90s and into the 2000s, where for those of, those people who don't remember AOL, it was basically, you know, you dialed up, you get, you got to this they called it a portal, which was essentially a website. And there'd be different buttons that you can go in and explore. So you can go ahead and chat. You can do social networking.

You can go check finance. And then once you went to the finance section, that was all powered by the Motley Fool. So basically what happened was as AOL grew and increased their network effects, Motley Fool grew. And they were standing on the shoulder of giants, basically. So the question for, you know, for me and you, Brian, but also everyone listening is like, you know, what is that equivalent today, right? Like, you know, do you go build on top of Shopify or Shopify ready too big, right? Do you go, you know, what are different ecosystems that you can go build upon? And then how do you go and reach out to those people so that, so that you have placement and you've partnered with these people?

So I think, you know, a lot of people create startups and they think, okay, how do I get to market? I create content. I'll do paid ads. I'll create these marketing funnels. But a lot of people miss the strategic partnership point, which is probably the fastest and easiest way to grow. Yeah, I've heard Andrew Wilkinson call this the barnacle on a whale strategy where you just want to create, you want to attach your business and your business model. to some idea that is crazily rapid going. And for people that don't remember back in these days, like, AOL was the internet.

Like, that's how I first got started on the internet. It wasn't like you went to the internet. It's you went to AOL and then you were on the internet. And those two things were synonyms. And AOL was growing at like insane rates, like 100 plus percent compounded over for year over year. So you are 100% correct that the Motley Fool. deployed the barnacle on a whale strategy super successfully.

And if we were on the clock just over the last couple of years, how many brands have been built or how many personal brands have been built off of just the enormous growth in TikTok? Like if you were creating on TikTok in 2020, it was extremely easy to, it wasn't easy, but it was much easier to go viral from, from nothing and gain,

you know, hundreds of thousands of followers and use that kind of, that growth to sprinkle across the rest of your, your ecosystem. So I think you're asking a fantastic question. I don't know what system is doing that today, other than to say something related to AI. I mean, that is a thing that has gone parabolic over the last year.

It's hard to know where we are in the growth curve and how you can take advantage of that as an entrepreneur. But I think that idea is correct. When a new platform comes along, find a way to attach yourself to that platform, find a way to create a business model around that platform. And if you do it right and get lucky, you, you'll do it right. can build an entire huge business on top of that. Yeah.

And I think, you know, to me there's a difference between TikTok, which is a plot, you know, it is a barnacle strategy. Like it is a platform that's growing or although now, you know, you might, you know, you might lose your whale because it might be get, get banned from. Right. Yeah, there's always risk, right? Always risk. So there's, um, there's that where anyone could join, but it's still growing.

And then the other, the other, the, the, the even better. Motley Fool approach is you go to the whale, but you say, I'm going to be the only barnacle on you, right? So you essentially sign like an exclusive agreement that, hey, you know, I'm going to be only providing financial content. And, you know, to your point on the AI side, like, yeah, of course there's, you know, it's a whole new world with this AI movement. So it's, it is tough to go to, you know, open AI and be like, hey, let me be your de facto, you know, financial provider. But I actually think that you, when it comes to reaching out to whales for this sort of stuff, you actually don't want to reach out to them when they're, you don't want them to be whales

initially. Right. You want them to be like when, I'm sure when the Motley Fool reached out to AOL, like the AOL was like a startup. They were literally a startup. Yes. For sure. It just happened that they grew to grew to be a whale. One last thing on the subject, which is, I know you might be listening to this and you might be like, how am I going to be able to do this? You know, like easy for the Motley Fool in the 90s. But the reality of the situation is,

if you're a series A, series B, seed startup, you're looking for ways to add value to your user base. And if someone can come and help you do that faster, you're all ears. Right. I mean, yeah, you can't replicate this exactly as you see, but you can riff on the theme. And in AOL's case, you know, their whole thing was get people online and one way to help give people a reason to go online. Like they were literally looking for reasons for people to log online.

Like back then, you had to tie up your phone line to go online. The connection speeds were crazy slow. Like, I'm talking like super early on. So the Motley Fool became an enabler or. a reason for people to go online. So that, in that case, a partnership made made a whole lot of sense. You do have to think, what can I offer this platform to help them get they want? And at the same time, I get what I want. A daily reason, too, because like every, you know, you want to check your stocks daily. You know, and I think that's, that's another way to think about some of these

partnerships is how do you, how do you create, how do you, how do you, how do you go to them and say, like, I'm going to help increase your retention rate. Your attention is going to go up because the thing that I provide is a daily use case. Absolutely. I don't even think that they necessarily had to create a special deal. Like I think AOL actually had a program in place because they were, again, looking for content. They didn't want to be content creators. They wanted to partner with content creators.

So again, it was easier for them. It was easier for them in the first place, just given the nature of what they were tying to do. but I totally think that that general strategy, the general idea is find something small that could be big and find a way to partner with them or find a way to help them get they want. That can be a great way to build a business. So Brian, this is the ideas podcast. This is where we give free ideas to people, some nuggets. And I want to give people some nuggets to chew on.

What did you bring to the table, to the pod? What do you want to talk about? Yeah, so my category is, I'm a content creator, right? So that's the business that I'm studying and trying to get to know, really, really well and trying to get off of the ground myself. So that's the place that I kind of spend the most of my time thinking, what are some, what services do I need or what ideas could be out there that could help other creators that are depending on where they are in the creator journey. You know, a lot of people, myself included, I did not, this wasn't like a thought that I had ahead of time. I kind of like accidentally discovered the whole creator economy thing. And I was actually, the reason I started to put so much time into Twitter was one, the pandemic. So there was not much else to do. But two, I actually signed a book deal. So I was writing a book and I knew at the start of writing this book, well, there's no point in writing a book if, when you complete it, you don't have an audience

to sell it to. Like, people have to know who you are and care about it. Like so much of a book's success, especially early Arne, is just the marketing of the book. So I put as much time into growing my social accounts, specifically with the goal of having an end audience to sell my book to. And it's only after I built an audience that I kind of backed into the, wait a second, you can actually earn a living if you have an audience, like beyond just selling, beyond just some of them book.

and oh, by the way, of all the ways to monetize an audience, a book is probably the worst way that you can possibly, possibly do so. But I think that there's a lot of content creators out there, small content creators out there that are doing good work, really love the content creation side of it, but don't think about the back office end of it at all. Like that is a whole other skill set to develop a whole nother. list of work to do. So one idea to have would be to raise some capital, reach out to a group of podcasters or Twitter users or X users, whatever you want to call them, YouTubers that all are in the same category, because a lot of times people start on one platform and they just post it exclusively on that platform and get them that are all similar size, say maybe like 5,000 followers

to 50,000 followers, pay them and go to them with a deal and say, hey, I will pay you some modest salary, right? I will allow you to turn this into a job, right? An actual job with a predictable income. In exchange, you're going to essentially continue to create. I'm going to have access to sell sponsorship opportunities on your podcast or on your platform, etc. And I'll handle all that back office stuff. And I think if you would be able to pick a category that you think was a growing category that was monetizable, and you could cobble together, say, 10 or 20 of these smaller accounts and kind of handle the back office for all of them, you would have a decent size of inventory to sell to potential sponsors.

And you could provide them with a small amount of salary that they could use to kind of put more, more time into it. And as long as you set up the relationship so that it was mutually beneficial, if you place enough chips on the table, the odds are pretty good that a handful of them will take off and become fairly sizable accounts in time, especially if you pay them to do so. You know, this is something that David Perel has done successfully with the cultural tutor. That account went from like zero to what, I don't even know what is that now, like over, well over a million Twitter followers. And David essentially just gave, I forget the man, the gentleman's name that writes those threads and behind his cultural tutor. He just essentially

paid him a salary and said, this is what I want you to do. Write a thread on the cultural tutor every single day. And that has worked out tremendously well. That account has grown like wildfire. Now, in David's case, his whole business is I help people become digital writers. So he invested in a very high quality case study more than that. But I think you could take that idea and apply it across different platforms and spread out your bets. And if you structure it correctly, that could actually turn into a relatively meaningful business. So basically the proposal is to productize what David Perel did for the cultural tutor. but with having a bit more of a services back office layer.

Because I imagine that David, I mean, I don't know exactly, but I just imagine that he went to the cultural tutor and was like, hey, I'll give you X amount of dollars per month and just like continue doing what you're doing and just go do this full time and make it better. And then almost as like a patron of the arts, it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah, is that, is that fair?

Yeah. And I know in that specific use case, I think the cultural tutorial is working at McDonald's. So he essentially said, I'll give you the same salary or maybe more of a salary that you're working at McDonald's, but quit that job and spend all of your time doing this. But I think there's an opportunity to apply that same thinking. Cobble together, for lack of a better term, a podcast network, but do it across different platforms. and if you build up a decent enough size and have a decent enough trajectory for the accounts that you go after, I think for the small accounts, it gives them an opportunity to actually monetize their platforms without having to think about the back office way before they could reach any scale on their own to turn it into a full-time living. And in exchange, they're giving up some of the future upside if they really hit it big. But I know a lot of small creators would happily make that trade.

And then the other side, if you're the one aggregating it, you have to think like a venture capitalist, right? You just need a handful of those. If you have like, you know, 20 or 30 of these on your payroll or in your network, you just need a handful of them to really make it big for the entire, the entire payoff to be big. I wonder if the type of creator that make, you know, is the right creator for this offer is. like is it the McDonald's I'm working at McDonald's creator you know because you know if I'm going to pitch Lenny Richitsky five years ago four years ago and he has 15,000 10,000 followers and I would give him this offer you know he wouldn't take it because he sold a company to Airbnb and you know he worked at Airbnb for like nine years like he wouldn't need it so I'm wondering is

the idea to find some of those like maybe younger talent, maybe, you know, talent that's working a job making 30, 40, 50 grand a year. Is that, is that the idea? Yeah. I think that, well, Lenny, I think, you know, is a special use case in many ways. I totally agree with you that he would be nuts to be kind of take that, that deal. But on the flip side, I know there's a lot, the vast majority of creators that are at the, the small scale kind of, kind of do it for because they're interested in it and they're not, the odds of them having, you know, a massive bank account to kind of bankroll that on their own are fairly,

fairly low. So you are absolutely correct that it would take a certain type of creator that would be interested in taking a deal that would be worth it for you to take on the risk of bringing them into your network. But, you know, the law of large numbers out there, you could definitely find people that would be willing to do this if you, if you turn over enough rocks. And any thoughts on categories?

So I recently spoke to Eric Torrenberg on the pod. We talked about B2B media podcast. That podcast actually went a little bit viral. If you haven't listened to it, go and check it out on the channel. But, you know, do you have any thoughts on, you know, categories that make sense? And how do you think about B2B versus, you know, your classic B2C funny meme account? Yeah, you're asking obviously excellent questions because it has to be in categories that you could monetize them in some ways. So having a bunch of prank channels get together isn't going to be great.

But you could certainly focus on like one category that I love consuming content on is like the building category. So I love watching YouTube videos that are people constructing houses or doing home repairs or doing product reviews of tools. tools and services, that could be a very lucrative field to enter because there's a bunch of ways you could monetize that on the back end. I'm also in the finance world. So that's the one that I know best. And obviously, there's lots of ways to monetize people that are interested in stocks or investing or real estate through brokerages that you could partner with or there's tools out there that you could sell to people that have interest in that. So those would be the two that come to mind, but I'm sure there's lots of categories that you could apply it to.

Yeah, I mean, finance, obviously massive category, even for consumers. Like people spend money on financial products, no question. You know, building, although at the surface that looks like, okay, is that super niche? It's actually in the real estate category and the development category, which is absolutely massive. You know, if you go to a lot of small towns, a lot of the biggest companies in small towns are, are your home renovation store. They actually do the most amount of revenue in these small towns. So I think one way that people can think about,

how do I pick a category that's high value is watch linear TV and see who's advertising. Look at who's spending money on advertising a lot because those are some of the categories that are big and they have money to spend. And then what you have to do then is think about what is it. I call it a super niche. So it's like you pick a niche in that in that category, but then you only focus on the top 10% of that niche. So you even go a little bit nicheer, super niche. I think that's a good exercise for folks.

Absolutely. I mean, it was recently pointed out to me when I look at some of my favorite YouTube channels that have that that I watch regularly, what they essentially are is the modern day version of hit TV shows that existed 20 or 30 years ago. If you think about like one channel that I love is Mark Rober, my entire family, loves watching his content. And he is basically the modern day version of Mythbusters just on YouTube's format. Or if you look at some animated shows, I love history, like a lot of YouTube channels that are all about like history, such as, such as Crash Course.

And it's like, well, that's obviously what the history channel literally was 20 years ago, just turned into a free YouTube. channel. So that's an underrated tactic, I think. We basically looked like what actually worked on old traditional legacy mediums or who is actually advertising on old legacy TV and how can you bring that, how can you apply that to the platforms that are actually growing nowadays? So that's a huge insight that I actually think people don't talk about enough, which is looking at proven ways that proven products, proven creators, proven media in the past. I mean, we did a little bit with Motley Fool.

But looking at that and just being like, what are the sort of takeaways I can have? And how can I modernize that? And I'll give you a concrete example. We're actually, you know, through LCA, our innovation agency, we're working on a really major AI product. And we noticed that a lot of the AI products are kind of look the same. And we started asking ourselves, well, why do these AI products? products all kind of look like chat GPT. It's because they're all kind of looking at each other for inspiration.

And then I had brought up the example of, you know, askjeeves.com, which was an old search engine that had this mascot called Jeeves and it was kind of this, you know, kitschy butler and, you know, he would give you the answers to your questions. And I think through, and it became like, you know, it was an ultimate success even though people don't remember it. And even though it had like 0.5% of market share, it's still sold for like, you know, $2 billion or something. So it was a success.

And it's like, what can you take from that and then implement that into today? Like, what can we learn from that? So I think your insight is a correct one. Yeah. Or even the whole idea of looking back at, you know, the year 2000, there was a huge graveyard of business ideas, innovative business. ideas that were just way too far ahead of their time, right? The obvious one to talk about is, I think it was called Webvan, which is essentially grocery store delivery to your house. That was a very

innovative idea that tried to get off the ground in 2000, but that didn't work because people didn't have mobile phones and there wasn't an Uber already established in place. Well, fast forward 15 years and that exact same business model is now called Instacart. which is what, a $10 plus billion company that that's out there. So you didn't have to come up with new ideas. You can just look at the graveyard ideas and ask, was this a good idea, but just timing was wrong? That's another way to do it.

All right, give me, Brian, while I have your brain, give me one more idea. Sure. So I'm in the newsletter space, like I know many of the people that we know are. And I know that you have said, I believe, that you think we're in a newsletter bubble where so many people have been incentivized to take their audiences that are on rented land and kind of going to a quote unquote owned land in the newsletter space.

And we've seen tools like ConvertKit and Substack just make that so easy to do. And starting a newsletter and keeping it going for a couple of months is one thing. Maintaining it permanently and actually reaching out to those audiences again and again, that is a treadmill that I think a whole bunch of small creators do not want to be on for the long term, especially when ad rates are under pressure and dropping. So I think there will be increasing opportunities over the next six to nine months to look at other newsletters that are in your space and in your category that have kind of fizzled out, but have a couple thousand subscribers to them and to reach out to them. acquire their newsletters from them at some price as a way to kind of aggregate

newsletters together. I don't know about you. I am subscribed to probably 20 or 25 newsletters, if not more, many of them in my own category. And I just asked myself, how long can this keep going? And will the people behind these continue to run business models that are ad, especially those that are ads supported, I don't know, I could see consolidation coming in the next couple of months. So I think there'll be opportunity if you have capital to do so. Yeah, I think the, the newsletters that are supporting themselves via ads, you know, as soon as it gets more and more difficult to acquire real subscribers and which is, which I think is happening. Real subscribers is the key word.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. We can talk more about that, but, you know, real subscribers and ad dollars, you know, there's just more supply, right? There's more inventory of newsletters. So obviously the price is going to go down. So I think a lot of people who are like, oh, yeah, I'm making five grand a month or seven grand a month or nine grand a month. Now I'm making three grand or one grand. They're just going to lose interest. And I think the ultimate winner of this whole gold rush for newsletters is going to be, when we look back on it, will have been the,

the largest creators in the space who are buying tons of newsletter subs and have become like the king of their categories, king and queens of their categories. And those people I do believe will command high ad rates, but I think it's a lot of the smaller to medium-sized people that are going to struggle. And yes, I agree with you. There's a huge opportunity to be buying some of these up. I'm personally interested in buying some of these up. And so if you are selling, holler at your boy, it's just an interesting framework to look at in general.

It's a good framework to be like if there's a bull market, like what are the opportunities that people aren't seeing? And if there's a bear market, what is, you know, what are the opportunities that people aren't seeing? And that's just a framework for coming up with how I can actually build something that's going to be long-term. and lasting. Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm in the, I'm in the newsletter of business, and I, I, I would welcome a bear market to it. And you, you know, one thing you said was who, who are the ultimate winners? Well, the ultimate winners in any bull market is the picks and shovels providers, right? So we've seen convert kit, we've seen substack. We've seen, many other newsletter operators themselves, kind of being, really leaning into that growth and

and helping to push that growth as much as possible, and they are making millions in revenue off of that, just by being the picks and shovels providers to that. But being in the newsletter space, I for sure would welcome a prolonged bear market in that industry to kind of wash out some of the weaker players that would make it easier to reach subscribers in inboxes with newsletters that will persist.

So like you, I'm going to be on the hunt over the next 12 months for picking up newsletters. that don't want to do it anymore in my category on the cheap. Yeah, and I think there'll be opportunities also for investors. So like, for example, maybe you find a newsletter that has 150,000 subs. You want to buy it, but you don't want to fork over whatever it costs to buy it. You know, maybe there's an opportunity that, like, wouldn't to be cool if you went to your community and said, like, hey, like, I want to buy this newsletter.

Here's some of the, you know, open rates, click through rates. here's, you know, what I think it can generate over the next two years. Like, I want to raise $500,000 from you. And here's some perks that you're going to get. And I think I anticipate there being some interesting models like that that will emerge. Yeah. You could also structure the deal with the newsletter in some way to say, look, just give me the subs. I'll continue to run it.

And I'll give you some revenue split on this in perpetuity or for some. amount of time, that that would be a way to taking over a list with zero cash up front. And then you're then you're also sharing the risks that, you know, the open rate goes down or a sponsorship ads kind of clean up while still making sure that your incentives are aligned with each other. So you're absolutely right. There are ways to structure deals that wouldn't require huge amounts of capital out of your pocket to take over lists. All right, Brian, give me one last idea. So I've become a huge user and consumer of LinkedIn content. You know, for many years, I kind of ignored it as a platform.

It was like so many people, it was Justin Welsh that kind of turned me on to the idea of using LinkedIn. And when I think about LinkedIn has many characteristics that make it a great platform for creators to focus on. first and foremost, the competition there is still very low when compared to other platforms like Instagram or X or TikTok. They've become far more competitive. LinkedIn by its very nature is less competitive. It's also a growing platform that reaches over a billion plus users and it continues to grow. But the real overlook, think about that is just the way users act on LinkedIn versus other platforms. When you're on LinkedIn, you're there thinking career, you're thinking business, you're thinking, how can I help myself? You're also thinking my employer might be watching. So the number

of trolls on LinkedIn is like one one thousand. It is on Instagram or on, on Twitter. But learning how to master LinkedIn, learning how to grow on it, learning how to create content for it is certainly a unique skill set, just like every platform. There's always a unique skill set that you have to have to develop for getting there. So I think there are big ghostwriting opportunities to be taken care of on LinkedIn. I think you can, one other opportunity to take care of, to think about is finding even small LinkedIn accounts, connecting people on LinkedIn to other accounts on LinkedIn to do one-on-one transactions. Some of the value of those potential transactions can be tens, hundreds or even hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in value. So if you created

an agency whose whole goal was to take a high profile account and connect them to other high profile accounts, like if you were a chief marketing officer in one industry and you're like, I just want to connect with chief information officers in my same industry. And you had whole accounts that were just develop around connecting one account to say five or ten other highly targeted but highly valuable accounts. You don't even have to get a big follower account to go on there. But if you can make that connection happen in some way, there could be huge value added for their one idea there, Greg, as you know as a podcast host, what if you help them create,

help that account, just create a podcast? And instead of reaching out to people to do sales calls, you said, would you be a guest on my podcast and allow them to create an hour-long conversation with each other that had zero sales connotation to it, but allowed that relationship to start. That alone as a service could lead to super high-value sales and content down the road. So I think there's a big opportunity on LinkedIn for Ghostwriters to connect. And that doesn't even involve growing the account to having huge followings. Yeah, and I'm starting to see more and more ghostwriting firms, like, focused on LinkedIn pop up.

And I always try to think, okay, how do you, so I agree with like, you know, it goes back to the whale and barnacle. Like the whale is LinkedIn. How do you become the barnacle? And I'm kind of like the barnacle everyone's trying to be is the ghost writing agency. And I'm like, what is, and if you want to create a services business, what would be something that is more not obvious? I think that LinkedIn is going to be more and more video focused over the next few years. And the reason why is because LinkedIn is literally like three or four years behind everyone always. You know, they're just, that's fair.

Yeah. You know, they're just always, they're always copying features, but it's always three or four years. So in three or four years, it's going to just like how Instagram is video focused and Twitter X now is video. focused and TikTok, obviously is video focused. You know, I think LinkedIn will be video focused. So the question is, how can you reach out to LinkedIn creators or people who post? You know, I call them LinkedIn creators, but it's basically people who post on LinkedIn. And you say, I will help you create video content or repurpose your content to be video first.

And this is what it's going to cost. I think that is an interesting opportunity. Yep. video is a completely different skill set doing video the right way has much higher technical barriers 10x higher barriers than it does to just write a tweet or create some kind of quick little post on a text-based platform so i think you're right there is an opportunity to help text-based creators become video-based creators and i totally agree with you that overtime LinkedIn is going to gradually lean into that video content more more and more Brian

as expected this has been a pleasure um if folks folks if you like brian you want you want him back go comment on the youtube and uh if you're not if you're not if you're listening to this just go to the youtube and subscribe uh it's my name gregg eisenberg i s en b erg and let folks know you know let it let i think you you did wonderfully and you brought a lot of good energy and vibes to the table. Jimmy Buffett, like, come on. We had everything. Where could folks follow your journey on the internet? I'm on all the major platforms. So X, LinkedIn, Instagram, it's all YouTube, whatever your platform is. It's all under my name, Brian Ferraldi, and my company website is long-term mindset.com. I love it. All right. Later, Brian. See you.

Greg.