This Week in Startups - Paid newsletter pricing disruption, Instagram Reels underperforming + OK Boomer | E1562

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

Friday variety is back! First up, J+M do a Startup Breakdown and cover newsletter platform beehiiv and how it could disrupt Substack's pricing model (2:27). Then, they cover leaked documents from Meta that show Reels is underperforming (12:52) before Producer Rachel wraps the show with another edition of OK Boomer! (26:18) (0:00) J+M tee up today's segments! (2:27) Startup of the Day Breakdown! beehiiv charges a flat subscription rate for newsletter subscriptions, price comps with Substack (11:28) Indochino - Get $50 off any purchase of $399 or more by using code TWIST at checkout https://www.indochino.com (12:52) Leaked Meta documents show Instagram's "Reels" product is underperforming (22:51) Producer Rachel joins to tee up today's OK Boomer guest! (24:48) Zapier - Try for free today at https://zapier.com/TWIST  (26:18) OK Boomer: Josh Kaplan joins to break down his background and starting Smooth Media (35:14) WorkOS - Go to https://workos.com to learn how to make your app enterprise-ready. (36:43) Why newsletters are an efficient way for influencers to monetize FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun FOLLOW Josh: https://twitter.com/JKaplan1 

All right, everybody, it's time for our Friday variety show. What do we have on deck, Molly Wood? Bri, yay, we have got a super interesting series A all about a newsletter platform called Beehive, and it leads into a super interesting conversation about how you as your startup need to prepare for price disruption. Yes, I mean, look out the substack pricing at scale compared to Beehive, Ghosts, Review, all these other platforms is pretty shocking.

And it is an important lesson for founders to learn early about how to deal with disruptive pricing or maybe how to be a disruptive price yourself. Yep. And then we're playing a new game, a new Friday game, circle back. We're circling back to a big news story that was slightly underreported this week, actually. And then, you know, we're going to have our usual fight about TikTok like we do. Well, I mean, meta. And their Reels campaign is, spoiler alert.

They're having a hard time with this one. Slow going, let's say. Yes, they're not going. It's not as easy for Zuck. I think there's a reason why he's got those goggles on and he's in the metaverse. It's because the business verse isn't treating him so well. I think he's hiding from the real business reality. He needs to get out of Burling Game and the meta office and get back to the Facebook office

and ring the register and keep up. He just wants to go somewhere where he can just be the king and no one will ever challenge him. The business verse is amazing. And then of course we're going to wrap with another awesome edition of OK Boomer. Shout out, producer Rachel, stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Indochino makes custom-fitted suits, shirts, and casual wear at affordable prices. Shop for your next best look or book a virtual style consultation at Indochino.com.

Right now, you can get $50 off any purchase of $39 or more by using code Twist at checkout. Zapier is the easiest way to automate your work. See for yourself why teams at Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk, and thousands of other companies use Zapier every day to automate their business. Try Zapier for free today at Zapier.com slash twist. And WorkOS is a developer platform to make your app enterprise ready. With a few simple APIs, you can immediately add common enterprise features like single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and more.

Go to workOS.com to learn how to make your app enterprise ready. every day I'm trying to lock in, Molly, to segments Monday. We do we live in the future. Thursdays, this week in streaming. Every other Wednesday, crypto roundtable, Fridays we got OK Boomer. And we're going to lock in. We're going to try to lock in to Series A on Fridays. Love it.

It is Friday. What's our Series A company? This is so interesting. Newsletter publishing platform Beehive, B-E-H-I-V. no E on the end. Sort of wishing I haven't spelled that now. Beehive. It's two eyes, two eyes, B-E-E-H-I-I-B.

Everybody has to misspell everything. This is not good for me with my dyslexia, but okay, this is where we're at. Just do B-Hive.I.O. next time. I know, right? Anyway, newsletter publishing platform Behive raised $1.6 million as an extension to its seed round, which I want to ask you about NBC Sunday School at some point

because I'm seeing so many of these, bringing the total raise to $4.2 million. Beehive was actually founded by a team of early morning brew engineers. I'm not sure, you know, I'm assuming you know, most of our audience must know the Morning Brew newsletter. It's probably one of the most popular. For Millennials. Newsletters.

Yeah. And it was launched for millennials. Like it's a newsletter first product. The whole business is newsletter. So a team of early engineers launched Beehive to take on Morning Brew, presumably, substack more specifically, though. Take up Sub. stack, right? Because it's not content. This is a platform, right?

If I'm correct. Yeah, exactly. It's a platform. It works. It's really about one thing, by the way. It's about the referral program. The referral program at Morning Brew? At Morning Brew? Was it a big deal? Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, you got five people to sign up. They made you an ambassador. You got a t-shirt. You got this. So this seems like the team that built that then built this. Which at Weblogs Inc. We built all the blogs. And then we built Blogsmith, a blogging platform, which AOL also bought. So this is a classic playbook if you're in the content business to sell your platform.

And they are aiming to be the best place for creators and publishers to create and monetize newsletters. It claims since 2021 to have reached 30% month over month revenue growth every month and every month since 2021, I want to reiterate and is expected to exceed 1 million ARR by the end of the year. Sounds like a great business. If you look at it and the pricing, I think this is kind of disruptive to substack, which I said substack's going to have problems because they take 10% of revenue. If you ever get, is that right? I think it's 10. See, when you get to 10% on top of fees, so if you're paying 3 or 4% to Striping credit cards, they take 10%, so you're netting out minus 14. If you're Casey, I always forget Casey's last name, great writer. Newton, you've really forgotten his last name 10 times. I'm sorry.

Okay, the Newton was Apple's precursor to the iPad. Casey covers Apple, Casey Newton. I'm going to remember it for all time, and I created a mnemonic for all of you, called me Johnny Mnemonic. doing a bit? Is this a bit where you forget it's not a bit? I'm not like, we'll have Matt Damon on, but we ran out of time. It's not a bit. It's, I have dyslexia and short-term memory issues. There's also Casey Neistat, the really famous YouTuber, which is what I always want to say when I'm thinking of Casey.

Who moved back to New York. Good job, Casey. That's my dream. I wish I had the hootspot and move back to New York and or the ability to make my life. Redfin started feeding me properties in upstate New York all of a sudden. I don't know why. but I want them all. Oh, it's beautiful. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Anyway, okay, so substack is, yeah,

substack has been leading. Medium has not gone very far in terms of monetizing. It doesn't really have newsletters. Here's the thing. They have just undercut. So Casey Newton would be insane to stay on substack. Now, I know they paid him like a half million dollars or something. Remember they paid people like a million bucks to move over.

And they have like the brand recognition. It would be insane for. for somebody making more than, let's call it, 250K to stay on substack. That's $25,000 for the platform. The most expensive platform here with 100,000 subscribers is that $99 is $1,200. So I think if you get to $50,000 in substack revenue,

you're paying substack 5,000. The equivalent here would be paying 600. So it's 90% less to do this. So it makes no sense. No, no sense. Yeah, there's an amazing chart, actually, in the exec sum newsletter, which is hosted on Beehive. Liquidity capital made a table comparing the cost and benefits of keep B5. I wish to do this back at the envelope.

Yeah, you don't even have to. They already did add and substack as revenue gross. So it shows that by paying this flat fee, creators can 100% save money. So if you've got 2,500 paying subscribers and you pay 10 bucks a month and you make 25,000 A month. Substack takes 10%. Behive takes zero. Yeah.

So your monthly B5 savings are $2,500. And if you get up to that 100,000 subscribers or more, game over. And substack is taking $100,000 of your million dollar monthly revenue. Yeah. Beehive is taking $99. Like you're saving $99,000 a year if you've got over 100,000 subscribers or more. That's bonkers.

Well, and, you know, MailChimp cost a lot. I'm looking at ConvertKit. We're paying like $2,000 a month for convert kit over at Inside. And I'm like $24,000 for ConvertKit. We're paying like $1,500 for MailChimp over at launch. That's whatever that is, $18,000 a year. I'm like, I spend $50,000 on these.

Do I need to be spending this money? So I'm looking at lower, cheaper cost options or free options or moving our list off of it. And I found out review, which is the email newsletter platform. Twitter bought. Did you put it on your profile page on Twitter? Maybe. I don't know. You should put it on there.

I think I did turn it on. I did turn it on. Yeah, turn it on because you'll get like free emails. I get free substack emails too. I get like maybe 30, 40, 50 email newslet email signups a week on substack because people log in with Twitter, they see that they follow me and then it tells them put the email in. Review, R-E-V-U-E got bought by Twitter. They made it free.

So I moved my personal email newsletter over there and I pulled the emails down for MailChimp, and it saved me $10,000 a year. So the idea of charging people these outrageous fees is over. Now, ConvertKit and MailChimp do have some unique features that you might be worth paying for. But I think what's happening is this business is going down to like zero commodity or very low cost. So it's the end of substack. This is the end of this type of pricing because there's another company called Ghost, which is another platform for doing paid newsletters.

It's, I don't think, as well conceived as this one. but it might be, I looked at both, but why would you pay a percentage of your revenue that's so high? Review does take 5% of revenue, but if you got a free newsletter, then you pay zero. So they're giving you email services for free.

Email service is basically trending to free. The end, full stop. Yep, absolutely. That's a great analysis of what is otherwise a relatively small dollar amount in terms of the Beehive raise, right? But what it shows is like massive disruption coming. We got a little, we want to like a circle back.

You know, I'm sorry. And I didn't mean to throw shade at anybody else's business as a founder. I'm just talking about the competitive analysis. I don't have bad feelings for subsdack, MailChimp, or convert kit. I just think you have to lower your prices to be competitive. And I think that's what's happening here as a price wars upon us. And that's like I mean, that is a question for investors to ask, for startup founders to ask. Like what happens when my pricing model gets disrupted?

What is my value add? Big time. Because assume that it will, will, seems like the safest way, you know, to go forward in the world. Assume someone's, if you are successful, someone's going to come out with a cheaper alternative. You must look in the mirror and say, so what's the plan? What's the plan here? Do I provide enough value? And you can look and you can watch and see if you start losing customers. Substack doesn't lose anybody. Okay, by all means, carry on. But then if you were Beehive or Ghost or whatever platforms are or review, you should be doing air campaigns. This is what I would do if I was Beehive, review, or any of the free services or cheap services.

services. I would put that pricing chart into ads and I would spend money on those ads and I would target MailChimp customers, convert kit customers, whatever, and just say, listen, you're paying this amount. You don't need to pay that. We'll do it for $99 instead of $9,000 or whatever the comparison is. And then I would be emailing that every day to those people. I would be emailing Casey Neistat and Casey Newton. Just in case. Apparently, by the way, the chat told me it's NYSTAT. So, nice stat. So we've screwed up every single part of the Casey conversation. Fine, fine, fine, fine. And we love all cases. Cases are awesome. If somebody gave you in Casey, you're kind of obligated to be a cool dude. Yes.

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If you use my promo code, which is Twist at Indochino, let me spell it for you. I-N-D-O-C-H-I-N-O-C-I-N-O-D-com and then use that promo code twist, T-W-I-T. I love this idea of a circleback on Friday. Like, we want to circle back to a story that flew under the radar. Please. This week. So, do I say something we missed? Something everybody missed, to be fair.

It was a really big, I mean, not everybody, but yeah. Busy week. Something we didn't get to because there were so many other things, and sometimes we can't stop talking fast enough to get to all our stories. So we're going to circle back to a super interesting story from earlier this week. Some internal meta documents were leaked to the Wall Street Journal. What? And they showed that Instagram's efforts to mimic TikTok with its reels push, pushing everything

to reels so much so that even the Kardashians got mad about it isn't even working. Waw, wah. The data showed that Instagram users, cumulatively spend 17.6 million hours a day watching reels, which sounds like a lot, until I tell you that users cumulatively spend 197 million hours a day watching TikTok. Well, TikTok's going to get banned. I have a feeling. But go ahead. Only 20% of meta's 11 million US creators postreels at all.

Okay. And a third of the Reels videos that are created, were created on another platform first, and that platform is usually TikTok. Now, this is where we should say it's a long game and TikTok might get banned. And every time that meta has introduced something, sure, it's got slow growth at first

because it's like a clunky rollout and... It's a knockoff. Yeah, I mean, it's a crappy knockoff every time. But eventually, if the clunky knockoff is built into your default app or it's the only one because they successfully lobbied the government to get TikTok band. Four iterations is what I always say it takes. If you're going to do this knock off, four.

Four. Four revs. So if this is two revs in and they got to 10%, third rep, maybe they get to 30%. Fourth rev, maybe they get to 50%. It was worth doing. Like stories. Didn't they screw up stories for a long time? Wasn't stories kind of changing? Yeah, forever. I mean, stories have, were like considered a failure on Facebook, but to be clear, a failure on Facebook is still 300 million users.

And now stories, seriously, like, that's what it got. It has 300 million. Instagram, right? And now Stories is Instagram. Exactly. And now the pivot to reels is going slowly. But TikTok must be feeling some heat because there was a little story today that TikTok copied Be Real. Launched a Be Real clone of all things.

Amazing. Yeah. Well, the Chinese entrepreneurs have been known for being incredible, like Zuckerberg, at knocking shit off. They still IP like nobody else in the business. Yeah. It's kind of a thing in China, if you haven't heard. A looser view on IP, shall we say. A looser.

A looser view. Just IP. In China, the view of IP in China is there is no IP. Right. Anybody can build anything. Why would you get to own something? Yeah. There's no concept of property rights.

It's very democratic. It's not democratic. Yeah. It's fundamentally communist. I remember like we did a story ages ago at CNET about how China had stood up like a complete Intel fabrication. a clone of an Intel fabrication plant. And it was so convincing that the people who worked there thought they worked for Intel.

Like they had little like landiards. Intel on them. I think it was Intel. I mean, they had like the Intel motivational speakers. They copped the posters around the office. Like they were like, yeah, I work here. Smile at your coworker.

I work for Intel. Thumbs up for our Intel stars. Intel employee. They put an Intel employee of the. month poster up with actual Intel employees and their 20 year history of the employees of the year. Absolutely. That's how much they copied it.

They were just like, whatever. I mean, honestly, like, if anything, kudos to Zuckerberg for learning so much from his Chinese counterparts about how not to give a crap about it. Remember when he learned Chinese to try to get into China and they were like, oh, that's so charming. See? Turns out what he was really learning was strategy. Well, he hit the brick wall.

He's like, hey, I'd love to be part of this. And they were like, okay. Would you like some dumplings or can you want to go to a tea ceremony? We'll take you all around. We'll show you every city in China. If you want to build some glasses or, you know, a laptop. He's like, great. I'm going to do that for you.

And he said, no, I want to bring Facebook here. We're like, they were like, oh, no, no, no. No. Also, to be clear, both Instagram and Snapchat are reportedly working on Be Real clones. Of course. And TikTok just carbon copied it. Put it out overnight. So now TikTok is not only headwinds against Facebook.

Facebook and Instagram at their core businesses, it's better at copying stuff. It's better at copying stuff. Now I know I Zuckerberg wants to live in the metaverse. He wants to live in the metaverse because he's getting his ass kicked in the realverse. And he's spending all his lobbying dollars trying to get TikTok banned. That's all he's got right now. He's like, get him out of here. I'm with him.

Finally, we're in agreement on one thing. The article about TikTok copying Be Real was kind of funny. It's like, it sort of made the assumption that like Instagram and Snapchat were trying to like dress up their clone to not make it look so bad. That's like a PR thing. And they're like TikTok literally just copied and paste it and shipped it like next day. They're like, we don't care. Let's go.

Let's go. It's funny. It's awesome. They literally have less morals or ethics than Zuckerberg. We finally have a player here who cares less. I heard a really good breakdown of like if you wanted to create something to create influence, like TikTok would be the perfect influence tool because. because it's visual, right? And it understands what you want. And so their ability to make it

addicting and to make it influential and convince you of things, it's kind of the ultimate tool for creating a convincing platform. And so, as I said in a recent Forbes or Fortune story where they asked me my quote, I was like, you know, this thing could easily tip public opinion 5, 10, 15% in any election, in any news story. Like, it could make people feel one way about Putin and Ukraine or the other way. Just depending on which talks. Just exactly the way that Facebook has been doing for years and they know it. They know it.

Like Facebook measures sentiment and deliberately served people's stuff to make them feel sad and then was like, hi dad, we made them feel sad. The government doesn't run Facebook, as I pointed out. Like, they're not in there. So the Chinese government could go into TikTok. They're not. No, nobody's going, there's no person. Trump or Biden or Obama,

none of those people had access to the algorithm at Facebook or Instagram or anywhere or Twitter and could say, hey, tweak it this way. They might be able to do influence and email them and say, take this person down or we object to this. They could lobby them, and then that stuff would come out and the press would report on it. Whereas in China, they can just be like, yeah,

we choose this candidate, make young people vote for this person and make this person look foolish. That's what China's going to do. this is why it needs to be banned. Forget about how you feel about Zuckerberg or anybody else. Imagine in an election, China just said, huh,

these senators are pro-China. These senators are anti-China. This is a pro-Taiwan-Person. This is a pro-China one-policy. Let's just slowly dial the American public into believing that Taiwan is part of China and that they don't have independence. Let's just slowly, you know,

and who knows? There are Democrats and Republicans who are pro-China or hawkish on China. So it's not like it's one size of it. They could just do it across the board. You never know. They're probably doing it right now, as my guess. It's already happening. It's happening on every platform and in every movie that we watch.

But who's dial? Who's controlling the dials is what you have to ask. So if a bunch of left-wing people may control the dial with either money or an algorithm, but it's the same dial. Yes. And it's happening. is not controlled by one dial is not controlled by one political party. Here, we might have a group of people like MSNBC, you know, stay on top of Trump and every transgression and, you know, amp up every

subpoena and everything. And then you might have Fox who says every subpoena is a FBI, you know, deep state conspiracy, right? So you have these two groups of people. And then you have the other press sort of vetting them and the politicians trying to influence them. But you don't. You don't, have one political party that's a dictator controlling one knob in another country. That's the thing. It's like, imagine we could do this to another country. I know, I know. All right. We got to. We got to. We got to another country we could we can do this to. A lot more to get to. Is there another, but it's just this one final question. Is there a country that we could turn the dial on and control their media and how they think? I don't. I don't think. I don't

think so. I can't think. Yeah, but it's not all the media. I mean, I don't know. We could do this all day long. No, no. Could we influence? Could the United States, and influenced the French election. I'm curious. I don't know if we could or we couldn't. I mean, I know we've done ops campaigns in smaller countries, but could we actually take an adversary or another country? I mean, 100%. Information warfare is a very real thing. Everything we've ever done in Central America. Some kind of, I mean, I know someone whose father whose parent was like a spy, a CIA spy embedded in a journalist organization. Like, yes, we do this all the time. We, yes, but at the scale I'm talking about. Is there a way for us to have a hundred. You're only talking about,

be fair, TikTok. Yes. Right? So like, that's not controlling. Is there an equivalent of TikTok in the world? Is there another one of those? Yeah, Facebook. But it's not controlled by the government.

It's my point. But it's not controlled by a specific government entity. That's my point. Okay, let's move on. Yeah, okay. I know. We're going to just, let's move on. Let's move on.

We can do this forever. It is Friday. And we're going to, we're actually ironically, talk about media. All right. Who we got. So this week, I got to talk to Josh Kaplan. He is CEO and co-founder of Smooth Media. and it's funny, Josh is actually a Morning Brew alum, and he talked to me about his time there at Morning Brew, and he was actually there when the Beehive team was there as well.

Really? We did not even do that on purpose, but we absolutely have a, I love a thing. What are the odds? I'm delighted. Yeah, they're great. And Smooth Ops, excuse me, it was formerly called Smooth Ops. Now they're called Smooth Media, and they partner with creators, my favorite being Colin and Samir, Sean Johnson, you guys might know, she was an Olympic athlete. Miss Excel, who's a famous TikToker who does Excel. And basically, they help creators make media businesses. Hmm. Fascinating. Love this. Love this creator.

990,000 subs on YouTube. They are awesome. Yeah. Really, really cool, cool creators. But it's that conversion to like a lasting business that I think a lot of creators are still looking for. Yeah. And that's what this is all about.

It is. I think it's pretty easy right now for people to become creators. But I think it's kind of difficult for people that don't understand business to scale themselves as creators. So every YouTube video that goes in, if you're the only person working on it, considering you don't have an external editor, you're doing that. All the money you're making is you in front of that camera. And Josh goes in basically as like a third party CEO with smooth media.

And they go in and they help them look at their business and be like, okay, it makes sense to start a newsletter right now, which is like what he did for Colin and Samir. I believe it's like three times a week. It's an awesome newsletter about the creator economy. I think it's called Published Press. It's one of my favorite ones. I love it. And overall, I just think that a lot more creators can learn to scale themselves and Josh is hoping

them do just that. Awesome. All right. There are only maybe two or three apps that my teams cannot live without. One of those apps is Zapier, which makes us so much happier. It's a very simple, no-code way to connect all your apps. They have over 5,000 apps inside of Zapier. This is the API tool.

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Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. Thank you so much, Josh Kaplan, for joining us today on this segment of OK Boomer. Josh Kaplan is the co-founder and CEO of Smooth Media and has been my friend for quite a while. Thanks for having me. This is exciting. Yeah. So I've absolutely loved seeing your journey with smooth media. It feels like I've really been able to see you from like start to where you are now. And I've really, I've been wanting to have you on the podcast for a while now. And unfortunately, I didn't catch you before you left New York.

But I do most of the recordings remote anyway, so it's okay. And first, first things first, I want to go through your founder's story. So talk me through. I know you went to Michigan. I went to Penn State. So we're kind of rivals there. But what happened from Michigan to where you are now? At Michigan, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was in the business school.

I became friends with Alex Lieberman and Austin Reef, who are the co-founders of Morning Brew. And by happenstance through mutual friends, we became friends. We started doing work together. And so I became one of the early employees for a summer and then went to PWC for a year and worked at a company that's way too big

and got pulled back in as Morning Brew is going from the one daily newsletter, covering every day's business news to multiple products, to then multimedia, to so much more. So 2018, I joined and my job changed every three months. I got this incredible 360 degree exposure of a new media company. We were all learning together, doing crazy things, and growing really fast. And then I just was like, media's pretty cool. Media is fun.

This is a good place to be right now. It's working in the internet with information, with news, with journalists, with creative people. and that's what got me into this world and then into smooth afterward. Oh, that is awesome. So we've actually had another, I want to say like Morning Brew Alone, I guess, on the podcast before. Her name was Rachel Cantor on episode 1436. So other people are interested in learning a little bit more about people's journey there.

It seems like that they are like this almost like PayPal Mafia kind of thing where everybody that comes out of Morning Brew is off to do really, really awesome things. and smooth media is definitely one of them. And what problem exactly is smooth media trying to solve? The problem or rather, there's a problem and there's an opportunity that media is changing very quickly. And the best way we think to build a media company in 2022 and the years going forward is with a creator slash influence or whatever vocabulary word we want to use today. And so there's a new model for media. The internet has changed drastically over the past 10 years, spending heavily on Facebook,

Facebook ads and Google ads is not the way. We are still adapting from radio and cable and traditional media before that. So just as media has changed really quickly, we think that we've got one of the better operating models, one of the better business models to partner with really great creators and build new media brands that can become legacy household names. So I know some of the creators that you join with. One of them is Colin and Samir, who I absolutely love. Another one is Miss Excel, who I knew of before you guys. guys even teamed up with. And I was like, wait, that's crazy. Can you walk me through exactly

what you're doing with creators like this and how you're helping them out? Yes, exactly. Colin and Samir, let's use that example. They are our first partners moving out to L.A. to be closer to L.A. and to work with them closer. They have been the creator's creator for the past number of years on YouTube. The Colin and Samir show has been a hit. And they've really appealed to that niche of people that want to become other creators. So there's a very meta, to the coverage that they've been doing and to the business that we do with them. And they had been doing a great job as a YouTube channel.

I was able to come in and help build the team a bit more, help think a little bit long term around the corner, be a bit more focused. That unleashed a lot of growth on YouTube. And so really just coming in as more of a business operator, say, hey, treat me like your CIO. Let's see what happens. And this was actually before smooth media was ever a thing.

This was me having just quit Morning Brew after the acquisition and saying, let's go do cool work with cool people. And actually, Alex Lieerman introduced me to Samir, and one thing led to another. And so along that way, as we started to think more about the business long term, I was saying, let's build a brand. So not every single dollar that we make is going to have to come from the two of you, being in front of a camera, writing, editing, producing, cutting, etc. And so we launched Publish, the Published Press, which is a three times a week newsletter now

about the creator economy. it has its own full-time journalist Hannah Doyle who's incredible amazing. Amazing writer. So fun to work with. Has built great connections in the space. Now she's able to be the real heavy hitter on the newsletter and we can now go into next year thinking about what other publish

media products can we bring in? Is it a podcast? Is it a show? Is it an event series? But now there's this brand that has equity value that we are the operators of with Colin and Samir. And so now they get this business that they own that can continue to create value and build within the media industry. So they still do a whole number of other things, but this as one of their projects,

I think has been a great success so far. It's loved by a lot of creators. It's very natural for them as an extension. And so we use that same template as far as let's build a really great media brand for the creators that should have media brands. Not everybody is fit for this type of thing, but that's the CREA. That's the Cohn-Smear example. I can move on from this Excel one, which is another fun one.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. Kat, who is Miss Excel, had been crushing it since the beginning of COVID on Excel courses, which is one of the best course categories on the internet. Her energy is just unbelievable. You see it in her TikToks. You see it in the way she teaches, the way that she treats people. And she had collected so much of an audience on TikTok and through these courses. And so we were introduced through a mutual friend that had been working on the course business,

said, hey, you might want to own your audience a bit more. You might want to have other touch points if you want to get into other types of content. Let's start with the newsletter as well. So she co-writes with another writer, a weekly newsletter that has part Excel tip and part lifestyle, entrepreneurship, motivational content that cat is very natural with. And so it gives her another avenue outside of that short form TikTok to go. And so many people wanted to work with her on the advertising side as well. So that's another great avenue for her to say, hey, I do have an ads business now, not just a course's business. and it's complimentary and she's got other people helping and working on it.

So we're building out the workbook, which is obviously an Excel pun, but also the name of her newsletter that is growing really quickly. And she's one of our biggest newsletters because of how large her reach is through the courses in TikTok. Yeah. I love to see that you're scaling these people, like these influencers and these creators, especially since I feel like I've been hearing a lot in the news lately

that TikTok might be seeing it at the end of its days. And like it could be going away as quickly as vine and yada, yada, yada. And like, it doesn't really matter anybody's opinion about that, I guess. But it does matter that, like, nobody should be putting all their eggs in one basket, especially, like, in the content field. The platforms are going to come and go, but everyone's going to watch or read or engage in similar ways. So if you've got really good content and really good personality behind it and you can access your audience in a number of ways, we think you'll be good.

So it's just we think a lot about what is the future of these media, talent, creator businesses. and it's exactly that. Like, we never want to be too dedicated to just one platform. We think the future is being multi-platform. And why would somebody go to smooth media rather than just hire their own COO? Because it's hard. It's hard to find good business partners. And we know that's an alternative, which is very viable.

And if they had a great general manager or COO, we'd say, great. We should be friends. We should trade secrets and notes and templates on how we do things. But what we've found is that there is a, a changing of business partners when it comes to this. And if we could find others, we would continue to grow our team faster and find more operators. But that training of how the internet works, how media works is not something that's commonly taught in school because the internet changes so fast.

And so I think it's just there's, that is the opportunity to answer your very first question that there are not a lot of great operators of media companies in the space that we've met. And so it's made our opportunity to meet creators and say, hey, like, we would love to work with you. They're not choosing from 12 of us. They might know a couple others that they've tested before. And some already have awesome partners. They say, that's cool. Now we're peers.

Let's help each other. So, yeah, that's, I think is the competition at the end of the day. And hopefully more people will join the space and we'll have more competition in that end. Listen, if you're an enterprise app, you need to offer SSO. What's SSO? Single sign on. Single sign on. unlocks the ability for all those enterprise users.

You know the ones that spend the money to log into your app with their company's identity provider, which is probably required. It will get them in quicker and you can show the value of your product. Now you're probably thinking, hey, I could build this myself. I'm smart. Yeah, you could also build a server. You could also build a data center. Why on earth would you waste your cycles on building SSO when you can have it

all done for you. I want you to check out WorkOS. I want you to show it to the team. It's basically, here's how you explain it to everybody. Are we going to rebuild Stripe? No. This is Stripe for enterprise features. Okay. Now everybody understands why you would use this. A simple API plugin that lets you move faster, spend way less money on developers, and you don't have to worry about maintaining these integrations. You could use WorkOS for just $49 per month per organization. And they don't just have SSO at WorkOS? No. They have other APIs for things like multi-factor authentication and much more. You're going to go to WorkOS right now.

Workos.com. W-O-R-K-O-S.com. I want you to write it down. Put it in your notepad, put it in your Slack. And if you want to learn more about their different integrations, check out the WorkOS podcast, huh? Just go to WorkOS.com slash podcast. I've heard of managers, obviously, like with creators and things like that,

but I definitely haven't heard of like a third-party CEO type of thing coming in and helping people scale. So I think this is really interesting and awesome that you guys are doing this. And I've noticed that one thing that has like trickled over to multiple people that you work with is the newsletter. And obviously you are at morning brew before this. Why newsletters, like a lot of people that I talk to say, newsletters are dead. Who's reading me is I'm personally am a huge fan of newsletters. I've talked to you about this before off off of this podcast.

I read newsletters. I organize them on feedly. I got an iPad, literally basically to just read newsletters. Like, I'm a newsletter free. But a lot of people don't agree with me. So why do you think these influencers and these creators should be looking at that avenue? Yeah, I think it's a great combination with a TikTok or YouTube page. TikTok and YouTube, you get to see and hear a person on the other end. The platforms have algorithms built in, so you're getting the opportunity to go viral. Production is really hard, though, getting the right title thumbnail on YouTube, getting the right hook on TikTok.

These are really work-intensive mediums, and you don't really know if you're going to reach all your followers on a certain post. So they're great for certain things, and newsletters are also awesome because you get to push to your audience. You know you have that email list no matter what. You're getting a certain, I think it's a medium-long form. It's not a book, but it's more than a 45-second. in short form video.

And so you get that depth and you know where it's going to be. It's in an inbox. It's in a more private place than a social media feed where you have potentially hundreds or thousands of people that you follow. So that is the email thesis that we know and love. But it's really hard to grow a newsletter without a bigger audience somewhere else. And so I think that's where some of the hate is coming in for newsletters right now where you're saying, I can't get over 15,000 on newsletter.

I can't get over 20,000 on newsletter. I'm like, you're talking to YouTubers that have. millions, hundreds of thousands plus. And so that combination of the two, I think, play really well together. It creates this habit with an audience across those touch points that is really not just saying, why do I like, I wouldn't, we actually don't want to build a newsletter-only business. It's a great first product.

It's very consistent. It's lower lift than some video and production shoots. But we don't want to be newsletter only. We want to say, hey, this is a great component of a media company, especially when you have something that has voter to a viral feed. No. And I know you have experience in. podcasting.

You have experienced the wonderful Kinsee Grant is on your guys' team as well who is an awesome podcast host multiple fronts and journalists. Your guys' newsletter for him is so good. But because this is a podcast and I've seen a lot more people, especially

during the pandemic, break out into the space. Where do you see audio, I guess audio influencers? Like where as somebody that has such a business mindset, How would you grow a podcasting space? Do you think this is a platform that has to move over to YouTube? Do you think this is something that needs to make TikToks or a newsletter?

Podcasting is hard. Growing a podcast is really difficult. You don't get that algorithmic discovery. You don't have a referral program. It's really hard to spend on advertising and see whether something is working or not. And we love it. I listen to a ton. I'm sure you listen to a ton.

I'm sure people listening obviously listen to a ton. but the real perspective that we have on it is you got to have something else. It's another great compliment. And so the future of podcasting is maybe it's short form video clips. Maybe it's also being a YouTuber at the same time. But I believe you do need a bigger audience somewhere else in order to then have a successful podcast. The way that I'd back into it is saying if you go through any of the top lists on Apple or Spotify in any of the categories, look and see who, is native and almost only a podcaster. You're going to see celebrity names that have big audiences.

You're going to see YouTubers. You're going to see media companies that have exposure elsewhere or the NPRs of the world that had a crazy radio footprint. And so the proof is right there that there's not a lot of homegrown podcast superstars. It's other people coming into audio. The only one I can think about that I did not know of at all before they were podcasting is Lex Friedman because he was a computer scientist at MIT, and I'm sure he has, like, YouTube videos of him speaking. But I think that's the only one now that you say that, that I've listened to that didn't have, like, a name for himself

in, like, the media sense. Like, obviously he's a very, very, very popular computer scientist and has done insane work with MIT and the AI field, especially. But that would be the only one. So that's really interesting. I think he's done great interviews and collaborations with people. And so that cross-pollination also helps when he goes somewhere else or he has. But I think he is a great example.

But to your point, he might be an exception to what I think might be the rule of the best podcasters are somewhere else. Completely. One in a million. So for those wanting to break into media now, you've kind of already touched on this where you have to be insanely digitally native. Like it's not enough anymore to go spend money on Google ads and call yourself like a media company. if you're talking to young people that are really interested in breaking into the business side of media,

what tools do you think they should have in their toolbox? Oh, wow, the tools they should have in their toolbox. We look at our organizations as content and revenue, obviously. So we don't think there's a CMO of a new media company down the line for sure, but in that early phase, content needs to grow organically. And so that's where you go back, to which platforms have the best opportunity. Who are the most creative people to work with?

There aren't that many trained editors. We would talk about this, and Colin and Smir talk about this all the time, that there are not that many great producers and editors. The way that tech companies rush to train and hire engineers in the 2010s, I think we're going to see a similar, maybe smaller, but a similar vibe to the media world where we need more. We need more people doing it.

So your ability to build a really good content team with creative people, with trained people, is going to be one of the best. accelerants, I think right now from what we've been seeing out there. And then on the revenue side, you've got to make really good ads. We talk about ads versus subscription versus community versus product versus whatever, but ads are, is a massive industry. And we're talking about ad effectiveness. And that matters how creative you are and which brands you partner with. And so that ability to be a really savvy marketer is is something that I'm not seeing as much as I thought

that I would. We're like, newsletter ads don't work anymore. YouTube ads. I'm like, no, you just got to make better ads. This is a competitive internet. This is a competitive world. Go get better marketers to partner on those campaigns and think through it. So I think those are the things that come to mind the most. And also knowing how

to use technology, but not building it is one that we talk about a lot, where media companies sometimes confuse themselves as tech companies and want to build their own systems and their own funky stuff. And we're vehemently against building any tech ourselves. So we've got great friends, one of our old morning

We were friends has built a tech company, Tyler, with Beehive. Yeah. And that's been an incredible accelerant to our business as well. And congratulations to their recent raise. Yeah, they're freaking killed. I actually, they're killing it. But yeah, I know exactly what you mean that if it's between a media company and a tech company sometimes, the line is blurred.

Pick good tech. Make friends with them. They're humans. There's somebody on the other side. We just, we don't want to end up managing a code base. So I could go on and on about that. I have stuff. And I think like being aligned with the people creating the content and making sure that

they're owners that they're going to win with you. is a really good way to keep incentivizing that creativity, not just in the beginning, but throughout the life cycle of the company. I love that. I think people who are working with you are just absolutely killing it. It's been so cool, again, to see Colin and Samir as somebody that watched their content before you guys came on board. And now to see the impacts that you guys have made, and I was one of the first people to subscribe up for that newsletter. Before I even realized that you guys were working on it, which was crazy. I was like, wait, I love this newsletter. There was another person, actually, a crypto creator that I didn't know you guys worked with that you mentioned.

I was like, wait, what the heck? So you guys are obviously just spanning in to so many different fields. I'm super excited to see where you guys go. Where can people find you and where can people find smooth media if they want to reach out? Smoothmedia.com. There's all of our information's up there. Twitter, J. Kaplan, one. I've been doing less tweeting.

I've been trying to do less. I don't know. It's been a crazy time. But Twitter is probably the one that I use the most. And thank you so much. Yeah, love listening to the show, big fan of the segment. Really appreciate this. Awesome.

Thanks, Josh. Thank you. And remember, we're back on Sunday with VC Sunday School. And this week in climate startups, it's going to be an amazing episode on Sunday. You get your Saturday off. You catch up on Saturday. Relax. Action packed.

It's going to be great. Stay tuned.