Inside a Top 10 Spotify Podcast Business, Local Newsletters To Agency Funnel, Will AI Change Email Marketing Forever?

“I think if you have a services company, they are one of the best opportunities out there right now. There are obviously people who are crushing it at local, like, strictly local media selling ads and stuff like that. I think it's harder, for a lot of reasons that we could get into, but the simple one is just like your market is capped, obviously. But if you have a services business, and this is the main way that the Austin Business Review has always monetized. I'll help founders with their newsletter.”

“So there's a woman here in town. Her name is Kirtana Reddy, and she writes a newsletter called Selling Austin, which is awesome. It's like a great weekly newsletter, pretty brief. There's, like, a handful of kinda market updates about what's going on in Austin, and then she'll feature a house or something like that. We haven't connected in a while, but at year one, I believe, she did something like $300,000 in what do you call it? Real estate fees? With clients who came to her via the newsletter. So the and that was with less than a thousand readers.”

“Anytime somebody starts to do relatively well in local, they always think about taking it to another city. And I think this is the challenge that a lot of the big companies have had, which is finding the talent to pull it off in the other city. Because the heart of a local newsletter is a connection to the local community. And so I don't believe that you can really write these from afar. And the challenge is if you can find somebody who can really write it locally, they could just do it themselves.”

“The only reason I started my local newsletters because the vision was I wanted to or I want to open a deli. And I was like, how does it how do you, on day one, get a line out the door? You have an audience. I think, so far, my plan is we're gonna do a pop up soon. I do think it's a real opportunity, and it is a real pathway. If you wanna start a restaurant or if you wanna start a brick and mortar, I think you can derisk it by building an audience first, and a local events newsletter is very easy to execute.”

“I think what's gonna happen now is that content will start to matter more than it ever has, and it may be a new way where because it's now being scanned by AI, not just humans. So Gmail or whoever isn't just saying, like, is this a good sender? Is the email passing authentication? Do people generally engage positively with their emails? Okay. Let's put it in the inbox. There's now this new curator in town who is AI, and they are looking at the content of the message and doing things with it.”

“Make sure what you're asking them to reply is quick and easy. So I've probably even suggested, hey. Ask someone to reply to your email. What's your biggest challenge right now? Which isn't a bad question, and you would probably get some interesting responses. But she had the good point that that's gonna take someone some time. They're gonna have to sit and think about that. A lot of people are not going to reply. But if you just say, reply hi, or, I'm curious. What email provider do you use? Reply one, if you use kit reply two, if you use Mailchimp, whatever people will just really quickly do that.”

“Google, Gmail, they have a tool called Google Postmaster Tools. It's free to use. You just enter your domain. You have to verify that you own the domain by adding a TXT record to your DNS. Once you've done that, it will start to populate with the data Gmail has about your domain reputation, your email sending. I'm helping thousands of email senders a day, sending billions of emails. It is the go to tool for me and my team to diagnose what's going on with someone's deliverability.”

“I don't think the word viral in podcast should really sit in the same sentence, like, most times. Obviously, there's clips that pop off and things of that nature. But, in my experience, that doesn't lead to, like, you know, you just being a continued success thereafter. You get that pop, you see it in the data, and then it kind of flatlines back to a a new baseline. Chris has been podcasting for, like, seven or eight years now, and it wasn't until year, like, five that things really started, like, you know, chugging along for him.”

“The single biggest test I ran that converted the best, and this might be unique to My First Million, is we ran a cross promotion with another show. The show that we did it with was just like this guy was a my first million die hard, and he happened to have, like, a really strong audience. He's in the personal finance space. And that single test that we ran was the most successful campaign we ran probably across the entire show. The reason was is, like, if you listen to the ad read, it was literally this guy saying, like, this is my favorite show in the world.”

“One thing that we've actually we're starting to do a lot more is just having a pre call with the guests themselves and trying to unearth what those moments would be. I learned this from Tim Ferris years ago. He had an interview with Edward Norton. And he started that interview with a question about, like, surfing. Tim Ferris describes this as basically, like, the bottom little footer of Wikipedia is where he found that. So try to find those, like, you know, nestled in Wikipedia moments that are very deep, but have potential for that person to get really animated and excited about.”

“We have, like, 12 core partners that we work with. Those core partners get a guaranteed number of impressions across the podcast and YouTube. And then with that, we basically include one to two newsletter features and then one to two Instagram story sequences. We could charge an extra 100,000 just for those things throughout the campaign, but we don't want it to come at the expense of okay. Now this brand's been an extra $250,000 with us and they're not seeing the ROI they want. We'd rather over perform for them.”

“There's a guy named Grant Owen. He's got a show that is relatively new. If you go to his Instagram, his first post is like a pinned post, and he lists out, my goals with the show. One of the bullets says, keep your head down for five years and then look up. So it's like, if you love this medium and you want to do it long term, you kinda have to have that insane mindset of, like, just fucking grind on it for five years, really go hard, and then assess, is this working?”