BUILD CLIPS

“There was an article that I came across on Twitter that I think we should talk about, which was about the fact that views are dead and virality is dead. And the alternative to virality is what he calls niche maxing, which is essentially what TPBN did. They went, here is a very small audience that we're gonna own. And they said it on our show. They said, our cap is 200,000 tech employees and people interested in in technology and business. If we ever have 10,000,000 subscribers, we did something wrong.”

“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.”

“I am almost allergic to a, like, really well edited video right now. I, like, can't I don't want it. I I just wanna see something real. The first one, I think, is the messiness of live. I actually think the messiness and the real time nature of live is so much more exciting to watch as an audience right now. I actually kind of wanna see you stumble a little bit. I wanna see you think. I wanna see some of the pauses. I want the realness because we're in a world of hyper produced, of really slick AI generated content of great graphics. Like, this is the antithesis.”

“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.”

“He started out in, like, a pretty minimal cool set just performing by himself. And then in the middle of the set, pulled up a stool to a laptop, went on YouTube, and started pulling up his old YouTube videos and singing along to them. And then after he was singing along to them, he also just started pulling up cool YouTube videos. It was Incredibly intimate and in front of a 150,000 people. And the camera that they had was a super wide camera sitting basically on his laptop. So you are essentially in between him and his screen.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Because everyone can make anything now, like, your software is probably not unique and can be re recreated. Everything about the next era of business is story. It's all narrative and positioning. And so every company needs help with narrative and positioning. Again, back to the anthropic job offerings, like, they're they're hiring a ton of storytellers right now. They need storytellers.”

“I think there's another reason, though, that live is taking off. What is it? It? It's that we don't wanna give you our full attention. We don't wanna have to give you our full attention. And live content does not ask for that. You can chime in. It plays in the background. You can still be on your phone if you're watching on your TV or your computer. I don't have to watch everything that happens for me to understand it.”

“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.”

“Scott Galloway did this analysis of their media output and showed that, yes, the live is being viewed by seven to 10,000 people in a session over the three hours they're live every day, but the clips have an average viewership of 200,000 views. And these are clips of them talking to Mark Zuckerberg, them talking to Mark Cuban. They talk to Travis Kalanick from from Uber. So these are very notable people in tech that go out, and the clips end up generating the traction in the audience.”

“The first 50 episodes had no guests. It was just about them too. And then they even when they went live and started having guests, the first 90 was always just John and Jordy talking. I think this is something I'm noticing in the world of podcasting, the world of content is that it is no longer at all a competitive advantage to book guests on a show. Like, almost any like, not anybody, but so many creators can book guests on a show.”

“This version of I'm a company that needs better marketing and storytelling. Let me just grab a creator and pull them in house. That is that is, I think, going to be a growing trend. It's happened before. HubSpot bought the newsletter company, The Hustle. HubSpot also bought the podcast starter story. It's like, if you reach my customer, then I want this media product. But I think what hasn't happened yet as much is you have a show. Great. But you're also just a great storyteller, so come in and be my marketing department.”

“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.”

“We all know too much now. Everybody knows what the upload button can do. You can become a millionaire, even a billionaire. You can become famous and your life can change overnight. The heaviness of that knowledge has changed what people create. When you're aware of the outcome, you optimize it. You don't share your craft. You share your well thought out product. The thing you make becomes strategic, not honest. And that's why so much of what we see online feels the same.”

“Then Sam Altman in an Axios interview said, these guys are genius marketers, and we could use better marketing. That to me is, like, the most simple form of why this deal happened is that Sam Ullman quote.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”