Live from INBOUND 2024 with Alex Lieberman

26:46And it's just that other touch point, that other selling point. I mean, anybody in advertising knows it usually takes between seven to 10 touch points to really make a sale, especially if it's a big time sale. That's why the big companies are everywhere. Billboards, commercials, social media, et cetera. And so all these different touch points put you one step closer. And by the way, differentiate you from your competitors and is planting seeds for if it's not right right now, guess what? You're having a conversation with that individual for that customer, that client. It might not be the right time for them right now to pull the trigger and they just kind of go away and they may forget about you.

27:26And then three months, six months, six years from now, the problem comes up and they want to pull the trigger. If you were able to maybe get them to subscribe to a podcast that you're continuously delivering to them on this subscription basis that they're just consuming for free, you're going to stay top of mind. You're going to be there, and it's very meaningful. And I always refer back to this conversation with the Mercedes CEO. He said, you know what? We actually market intentionally to 10-year-olds, to 12-year-olds, to 14-year-olds, and that might sound weird because they don't even have a license.

28:01but I don't expect them to buy a Mercedes because they can't and they can't even drive. But 30 years from now, 40 years from now, when they're in their 50s, their 60s, and they want to buy a luxury car, I want them to have been thinking about Mercedes this whole time because I planted a seed now that will grow. And I'm not saying you should be looking at a 30-year time frame for yourself or your business, but you get the idea and the concept that this is a way for you to stay connected, engaged, add more value for free to your customers, to your clients. Yeah and I think such a big point that you mentioned there is when I think about every media channel that exists like the full stack and we can talk about this in a few minutes but like basically the way that I break down media channels in general is you have rented audience, owned audience and monetized audience.

28:52For folks in the crowd who have a company your monetized audience is basically ultimately the people who consume your content that buy your product, whether it's software or service, et cetera. Rented audiences, social media, owned audiences, email podcasting and communities. And it's a good way to think about how have you stacked kind of your media in the right way to get the benefits from all these different types of audience. But the thing I'll say about podcasting is it is the most intimate channel to build an audience, period. I haven't published my podcast that I was creating for three years straight.

29:26I haven't published it in six months. And I still hear more from the listeners of my podcast than any other channel that I create on, on the internet. Not only asking me when I'm going to be publishing my podcast again, but also like inquiries for opportunity in terms of launching businesses, employees for businesses, people who want to do consulting things. Like I hear more from my podcast listeners, even though I don't publish the podcast anymore. Can I jump on that real quick? So this is such an important point that he's making because even at this event right here, I've had people that have walked up to me and they said, John, I've been listening to Entrepreneurs on Fire for 12 years, for 12 months, for five episodes, whatever it might be, they've been consuming Entrepreneurs on Fire.

30:08And they say, this is going to sound a little weird, but I kind of feel like we're friends because I know your personality. I listen to your show as I'm walking my dogs, as I'm driving to work, as I'm folding laundry. And I always reply back, I'm like, it's not weird because I feel that way about the hosts of the shows that I listen to because it is this like one-on-one almost when you're just no longer this fly on the wall, but you are just having this amazing, like it's one-sided conversation, of course, but you're listening to this individual, getting to know their personality. And in a lot of ways, you're feeling you are interacting with them.

30:41And this is one thing about kind of breaking down that fourth wall that I always try to do in my show. I always refer to my audience, my listeners, as Fire Nation, because I want them to know that during this episode, during this interview that I'm having with an individual, I'm actually doing it for my audience, for my listeners, for Fire Nation. The questions that I'm asking, the value that I'm trying to extract from my guests is for Fire Nation, is for my audience. And so I will literally turn, both literally and figuratively, while I'm interviewing somebody to the microphone and I will no longer be like looking at Alex and I'll be saying, so Fire Nation, what Alex just said was so good, was so smart.

31:22And I really want you to take away from this, these points. And I really hope you're thinking about these points. And by the way, if this is bringing up something for you as my listener that you think is interesting, I'd love to hear from you via email, via social media, interact with me. And then I kind of turn back, all right, Alex, so off to the next topic. But so like that person is walking along the beach and now they're just like, wow, I kind of feel like I had this moment where the host was including me, was engaging with me. And I always love those moments as a listener. So I always bring those moments in my podcast as a host.

31:57And that's one thing that I really want to encourage, especially when you're going to be launching a B2B business podcast or even a B2C podcast, whatever it might be the podcast you're going to create. How do you dominate the niche? And because you're going to be in that narrow niche, realize you're speaking to a specific individual. You can really and meaningfully speak to that person like you know them because you're probably going to be right about a lot of what you're talking about when it comes to them because you know them. You're creating your show for them, that number one solution to their real problem.

32:28I love that. And, you know, basically what you've described, I think of it as like this really deep parasocial relationship. And what's cool about how you described it is like there's the you can play it on easy mode and you can play it on hard mode. Easy mode is you just create a podcast and podcasts as a channel by nature is going to create a greater parasocial relationship than other channels on the Internet. But then you can play it on hard mode, which is kind of like the technical skills that you just described, which is you can actually do things as a host and from a production perspective to make the parasocial relationship even deeper.

33:01Being a small business owner comes with a lot of challenges, especially now. It seems like everyone is working with smaller budgets, shorter timelines, and sky-high expectations, and that can make growing a business feel pretty painful. Thankfully, HubSpot can help. HubSpot just announced dozens of major product updates that'll make impossible growth feel impossibly easy, like Breeze, a suite of new AI-powered tools that deliver personalized insights to level up your work, plus AI agents designed to automate your work for you. Sounds pretty great, right? And Breeze Intelligence, which gives you the richest, most comprehensive picture of your prospects and customers, allowing you to serve them at a whole new level.

33:41Add to all this re-imagined marketing and content hubs with new ways to create breakthrough content, updated features to generate better leads, and support to help up-level your marketing and revenue forecast, and you've got HubSpot's all-on-one customer platform. Get ready for growth without the growing pains. Visit hubspot.com slash spotlight to see all the updates. I wanna talk now about growing a podcast because we've talked about content, how to think about content strategy, why there's value in niches or novelty, but growing a podcast is incredibly difficult. Discoverability is dog shit.

34:17People don't know how to grow a show other than I feel like the tried and true method for people was create good content, do it for 12 years, and it'll grow. How do you think about growing a podcast today, given it is so difficult? So back when I said that I would not launch Entrepreneurs on Fire in 2012, I really wouldn't because that kind of show that I created and built for 12 years would have a lot harder time getting product market fits in 2024 and beyond for a lot of reasons. And so when I look at like, how do you grow a show today in today's market? Listen, we're here for a reason. HubSpot is awesome.

34:54Inbound is awesome. Like when HubSpot approached me in 2021 and say, we're creating a podcast network for similar podcasts to bring them together and to promote each other. I said, heck yes, sign me up because I don't want to be in a silo. I don't want to be an individual in a silo, just trying to grow my show in an echo chamber. And so they brought together amazing podcast hosts that we're all like-minded. We all have similar audiences. And now what do we do? On my show, in the pre-roll, I'm promoting other podcasters. I'm promoting like-minded podcasters, and they're doing the same for me. Yeah, I love that.

35:31So there's a few things I'll say here. A general kind of timeless lesson in media that I've found is whether you have a newsletter, whether you have a podcast, whether you have a YouTube channel, when you do like channel cross promotion, it always works better. So just like John was talking about how there's cross promotion with other creators in the HubSpot creator network, or at Morning Brew, when I think about the best acquisition channels for new subscribers we've ever had, it's always been with basically high engagement newsletters that have complimentary content, but a similar audience to ours.

36:05So as you think about launching content within your business and you think about growth for it, like channel cross promotion can be a big thing. The second thing I'll say here is like I give HubSpot so much credit for developing the creator network because one, I haven't seen any other B2B or really B2C companies do it. The other reason is because it takes such a long-term outlook because I think the issue that a lot of B2B companies have with thinking about their company as a media company, creating content franchises, is the connection between creating content and actually driving revenue. Attribution is incredibly difficult.

36:40But almost going back to the point that John was saying about, you know, the Mercedes-Benz CEO selling to an audience who's going to buy in 30 years. If you are only thinking about down funnel content like SEO or anything that basically sits lower funnel, what happens when the audience who is ready to buy today has bought and you haven't been nurturing anyone else out there who may be primed to buy your product a year, 18 months, 24 months from now, you're going to be shit out of luck. And so from my perspective, building a media company on top of your software business, B2B company, is simply just building up a top of funnel who are going to be lower funnel, you know, 12, 18 months from now.

37:21And so I just think there's so much opportunity. If companies are willing to take creative risk and also, let's call it some attribution risk, there's so many opportunities to build mini HubSpot creator networks that are a combination of shows you launch internally. But let's just say you've listened to John and you're like, damn, that sounds hard as hell. I don't know how we're going to do that in our company. There are probably already creators in your niche that are creating amazing content that you can find ways to partner with. So I'll just give you an example. I was talking at a marketing offsite for Carta, which is the the cap table management software business the other day.

37:59And one of their marketing folks was like, we're focusing a ton right now on getting in front of private equity CFOs, very specific, very niche. And I was literally, God, I'm so in the TikTok culture. I'm like, I said very niche, I was like, very demure. God, what am I doing with my life? And he was like, I'm a marketer. I don't know a ton about FP &A, strategic finance, like what CFOs care about, how can I try to create a newsletter or podcast for that audience? What I said to him is either you need to have a subject matter expert within your business that you hire to do that, or, and I told him, I was like, there's literally a guy on Twitter whose handle is secret CFO.

38:40He is a CFO of a multi-billion dollar company who creates content on the side. He has a newsletter audience of 200 ,000 subscribers. 75 % of them are CFOs. why don't you just buy him? Or why don't you just partner with him in some way? And so I think there's just not nearly enough creativity in businesses partnering with great creators who are already owning the niches that you want to own. And it's kind of this buy versus build strategy. Okay, so we've talked about growth. Any other thoughts for the audience in terms of they're thinking about launching a podcast, we've talked about content strategy, we've talked about growth of the channel.

39:17Oh, the other thing we didn't mention is YouTube, which is like, and I know you have some thoughts on if you think there's opportunity with YouTube. I would say YouTube is the other big opportunity for podcast growth. When I think of most podcasters I know, and John has been able to, I think, do an unbelievable job of growing his show even without YouTube, but I would say most shows today that launch, they rely on it being a video podcast from day one because like we were saying before, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, discoverability is really bad and sharing a podcast is really clunky. With YouTube, it's built on the largest search engine in the world.

39:57And there are so many podcasts I know who are actually growing their listenership and their views way faster by posting all of their episodes on YouTube versus in the audio only format. So to give an example, another show in the HubSpot Creator Network is My First Million. My First Million is growing way faster in their YouTube format right now versus their audio-only format. And so I think while there's a lot more work that has to be done up front to launch a video and audio podcast, it just stacks the deck in your favor from a distribution perspective if you're willing to do that up front work.

40:32Listen, YouTube is where it's at. It is where so many people are consuming so much content every single day. there as a platform just going from strength to strength. It is a requirement if you're going to be producing content in a video and audio format to be focusing on YouTube today. Of course, the podcast channels like Apple, Spotify, Pandora, no brainers as well. But YouTube is amazing. But again, it goes back to if you can create that number one solution to a real problem, then you have a chance of being found for that on YouTube but if you're gonna be you know just mr. or mrs. generic and trying to just be everything to everyone then you're gonna have a ton of competition of people that are doing it unbelievably well so that's why you especially in YouTube as in everything that you're doing is gonna say this is what I'm going to be known for this is what I'm gonna dominate this is the focus of what I'm going to crush with the content that I create with the solutions that I provide.

41:35So YouTube, all the way, it's critical. It just has to be done with that mindset. One more example on that note about just the value of niches in YouTube and just in general across media platforms. And then you want to talk newsletters after that? Yes. So this is gonna be a fun one. Show of hands, who has heard of Epic Gardening? One, two. She loves it though, but you love it, right? Right. Loves Epic Gardening. Who's the other hand over there? Do you like Epic Gardening? By the way, that is the perfect answer. I would actually have been extremely concerned if 20 % of the audience raised their hands because the exact one, it would make me look like an idiot and giving my example of a niche audience because it wouldn't be very niche.

42:17But you look at Epic Gardening, started by Kevin Esparito as a blog. It has a YouTube channel now with three point something million subscribers. The business does$75 million a year, half through brand partnership. half from selling seeds, like literal seeds. He acquired a seed company a few years ago. That is half the revenue of the business. And so I just think as the internet becomes more fragmented, as creating content, the cost of creating content, approaches zero and the risk of creating content approaches zero, the long tail of needs and passions and things that people treat like religion in their life and in work, you're just going to have this long tail of niches.

42:57and what you learn is every niche ends up being way bigger than you think it is at first. And by the way, if you're sitting back there and saying, well, my business or my company or myself, I provide a lot of solutions to a lot of problems. That's great. And there's nothing wrong with that by any way, shape or form. But how are people going to first find you? And they're going to find you by actually wedging in to that number one solution to a real problem. They're saying, wow, Alex really provided so much value on this specific problem challenge that I had. What else does he talk about? What are some other things that he provides?

43:35Now I know him. Now I like him. Now I trust him because I've seen his face. I've heard his voice. He's actually helped me. Now they may take a deep dive and explore other things that you have. And that's when you say, well, my business, my company actually does provide a suite of options, a suite of opportunities, a suite of solutions. and now your foot's in that door. Love that. Let's talk newsletters. Newsletters. Let's do it. How many people in the last week have been in their email and read a newsletter of some kind? Raise your hands. See, this is the biggest response. I mean, it's literally close to 100%.

44:11I will say I'm actually a little surprised. I'm not. Even though I've been in the newsletter for 10 years. And maybe it's just like, you know, newsletters go through cycles of people saying newsletters dead. and then so I'm like oh maybe I'm 10 years into this maybe people are reading newsletters less and maybe like again it's a specific demographic of professional you know early mid late career professionals here but it's like it's crazy to me it's like 90 % I'm it's like 90 % and I'm not surprised at all unlike you because for me like my day begins and ends and a lot of in the middle is with going to my inbox and communicating there and seeing there and generic newsletters are dead, boring newsletters are dead, bad newsletters are dead, but like specific intentional newsletters are on fire and they will be and should be for the foreseeable future.

45:01Like whenever I'm a, I'm a massive college basketball fan. I went to college locally here in Providence, Rhode Island, Providence College Friars, love it. And I am obsessed with getting a newsletter from a specific reporter who only reports on Providence College, the recruits, the upcoming season, the current team, interviews with a coach. When that newsletter comes in, everything in my day goes away, and I just read that entirely, watch all the videos, click on all the links, and I love it. If a week goes by and I haven't got one of those, I'm upset because I love consuming that content. I'm passionate about it.

45:38It's a specific niche. It's one college basketball team in the entire country, but it's my college basketball team, and I love it. And so how are you creating that content for your audience where they will consume it in a newsletter? So back to you. So, yeah, I think I'm going to say something a little spicy, and then I will help with solving the spicy problem. I think, you know, a lot of people come to me and they say, do you think that there's still opportunity in newsletters? There's more newsletters than ever before. My inbox is cluttered more than ever before. And they're like, is there still opportunity?

46:18What I generally say is I think of newsletters a lot like I think of podcasts, which is you have a certain number of slots. That number of slots is not changing. there are more newsletters than ever before but what i'll also say is like most newsletters really are dog shit like i i don't know how else to say it like most of them are really bad and i'll explain why i think they're bad in a second let me jump in real quick so keep that in the line of thought there are more newsletters than before but also way before we as the receivers of these newsletters had no way of filtering them now there's unsubscribe very very you know there's filtering options with Gmail.

46:58Gmail's, you know, another newsletter and other email providers as well are doing their own form of spam filtering, all these different things. So like my actual inbox is unbelievably clean opposed to what it was five and 10 years ago because of the opportunities that I have to keep it that way. So even though there's more than ever before, I don't get spam. Like I don't get crap. I get what I want. Yeah. And so I think, look, you have those five slots. If you have a newsletter, you are competing for one of someone's four or five slots. My general view is say there's like two or three slots that a newsletter subscriber has that they're like, you know, they're ride or die with that newsletter.

47:36They're going to stay with it for a while. So there's probably two slots and you're trying to win over one of them. I generally think most newsletters are bad today for two reasons. One is what happens, I think, in any like market with content or just businesses is when there's monetary opportunity, people flood into it to make money. And so what happened was, with Morning Brew selling, with the hustle selling, with there being a number of email newsletter acquisitions, people for the first time saw, oh, wait, I can start an email newsletter, I can work on it for a few years, and then I can sell the thing.

48:09And so it's led to a ton of new, and also the barrier to create a newsletter has never been lower, because you have Substack, you have ConvertKit, you have Beehive, et cetera. And so what this just means to me is there's like this messy middle of a lot of short-term opportunism of people creating newsletters simply for the purpose of flipping them in a year or two, but it does not mean that they are great newsletters. So it's like they exist, but they're not great. I think the second thing from a company's point of view is I still do not understand why most companies do not have a great destination newsletter.

48:41And here's, I'll explain the differences. There's two types of newsletters, destination newsletter and marketing newsletter. Marketing newsletter is historically what companies have thought about when they think about their email and how they handle email at their company. Marketing newsletter simply exists for the purpose of getting someone to leave the newsletter as quickly as possible to end up at some other destination, whether it's your website, whether it's a lead magnet, whether it's a white paper, whatever. Just think about how horrible of an experience that is. A customer has signed up for your newsletter.

49:13They've opted in to get value from you. And within 30 seconds, you're trying to send them away to get value somewhere else or really extract value from them. The other type is a destination newsletter. And I cannot claim that Morning Brew was the first destination newsletter. Back like 10 years ago, there was Daily Candy and there were a few early destination newsletters. The skim started before us and then it was like Morning Brew, The Hustle, etc. And a destination newsletter very simply is the newsletter is the product. We want to get someone to read our newsletter top to bottom or top to until they get enough value.

49:48We don't expect them to click away and go somewhere else. This is the destination, and this is where you need to stay to get the value. And I have not seen nearly enough companies treat their newsletter as a destination to build up top of funnel, to nurture their audience, and then to natively and subtly promote their products maybe 10 % to 20 % of the time. But my view is most companies would be way better off creating the perfect newsletter for the professional that's in their industry and make it the indispensable tool to help that professional do better in their career. And just by association of the company being the creator of that newsletter, you will get so many loyal customers.

50:27But I think companies are afraid to take a risk of moving from pure marketing newsletter that tries to extract value as quickly as possible to more of the slow sell and creating a destination newsletter. So if people are listening right now and they're kind of saying, I need to do a makeover of my current company's newsletter, my business's newsletter, my own personal newsletter, or I want to start a newsletter, what would be your recommended process? Yep. So I think we were talking about this before, but it all starts with market of one, right? So who is the one person that this newsletter is created for?

51:01I think this is particularly difficult for some businesses that have many profiles of customer because you're like, well, if I have five different types of customer, who do I write for? My answer would be definitely do not write for all five because you will write for none of them. I would say pick your most important customer that also you think from a content perspective you can add the most value to. So the first is who is your market of one? The second is what is your problem statement? So I'll give the example for Morning Brew. The problem statement for Morning Brew is that Aaron, the 28-year-old who works in private equity, lives in Connecticut, goes to New York, watched TED Talks.

51:36He wants to stay on top of the business world, and he wants to have smart conversations with his boss and not come off dumb when he talks to his boss at work, and he hypothetically doesn't know something that his boss expected him to know. And Aaron spends all day focusing on deals and in spreadsheets, working on private equity stuff, whatever they work on, and he doesn't keep up to date with what's just happening broadly in the business world. That is the problem he's experiencing. So you have to figure out for your audience, what is that specific problem? And I generally think there's like five problems that have been proven to, if you fix one of them or several of them in the newsletter space, you can build a great newsletter.

52:15You either need to save someone time, save them embarrassment, make them money, save them money, or provide analysis, provide a way of thinking that they would have never otherwise seen. And I can give examples of successful newsletters that have done each one of these things. So you have the problem, then you have the solution statement. The solution for Morning Brew is we want to help Aaron prevent himself from being caught off guard in a conversation with his boss by giving him the most important stories in the business world in five minutes in a way that feels like he's talking to his conversational best friend, right?

52:50Market of one, problem, solution. The next step is setting up your content strategy. And I basically think like you can play the newsletter game again, going back to easy mode and hard mode on easy mode or hard mode. If you study the most successful newsletters over the last five years, there's a generally formulaic approach to like the types of content that goes in newsletters. Like just to give a few examples, there's news focused content, There's analysis of important stories. There's evergreen tools and strategies. There's news adjacent stuff. There's games. There's list of links of things you should know about, but we couldn't cover in depth in the newsletter.

53:28So there's a lot of, if you just study Morning Brew, The Hustle, The Skim, and like three or four of the other big newsletters, you'll start to see these patterns and the type of topics they cover. Hard mode is you basically attempt creatively to solve the problem for your market of one in a new and innovative way. So I'll give an example of three newsletters that to me are playing on hard mode because I haven't seen anyone do what they're doing before them. The first is called Smart Nonsense. Smart Nonsense was created by buddies of mine. And basically what it is, is they took the comic strip and they brought it to a newsletter.

54:08And so what their newsletter is, is it's for the intellectually curious who wants to understand and how things work in the world. Basically, they understand how things work in a cartoon format. So, say someone is intellectually curious about how thunderstorms and lightning works, through their cartoon in three minutes, you can understand it. It's almost like how stuff works, the TV show or the podcast, they did it in newsletter form. The second one is called Marketing Examined. Talk about being niche. This guy, Alex Garcia, his market of one is a mid-level content marketer at a B2B SaaS company.

54:41I guess I'm natively plugging his newsletter for the group. He basically took Harvard Business Review, which does case studies into current companies and basically what are the strategies they use to be successful. He does that for contemporary companies and what are the content strategies that they're leveraging to be successful with their business. And it is a very visual newsletter that kind of demonstrates these case studies, but in a not text-heavy way. The third newsletter is called Five Tweet Tuesday. It's by my buddy Sean Puri, who also hosts My First Million. And that is the definition of a newsletter that succeeds because of curation.

55:19Curation has never been more valuable because we were just talking about how there's more content on the Internet, in podcasts, YouTube than ever before, which means search cost is going up. For anyone in this audience to try to find a new show they like, it takes a shit ton of time. And so what Sean basically decided is finding the content on Twitter that you really like is going to take a while. So I'm going to curate the five best tweets that I find in a week. So I will take on the brunt of spending time to find these tweets. And I'll do two to three sentences to contextualize them and add some of my color.

55:51By the way, I think smart curation, like he's doing it in the niche of Twitter, it can be done in so many other contexts as well. So just kind of going down the list quickly, it's market of one, problem, solution, content strategy. Are you playing it on easy mode or you're playing on hard mode? And then again, in terms of execution of the newsletter, my general view is if you have a five-day-a-week newsletter, you're going to need two writers who kind of pinch hit as editors. If you're doing a once-a-week newsletter, depending on the depth of the newsletter, it has to be close to one full-time person's job.

56:24Who would you say is the second best newsletter to your newsletter? Thank you for asking that way. Well, can I answer the question? Yeah. There is no second best. And that's kind of like a Michael Saylor quote. There is no second best. And that's such a key thing to remember is somebody that's subscribing and reading Alex's newsletter on a day-to-day basis, that's what they're consuming. They're not consuming a second one on top of that because his newsletter is providing what they need. Then they're moving on with their day. There is no second best. So you need to be focused on not being second best to infinity.

57:05And don't let that scare you because it's not scary because the reality is this. You can become the best within that niche in whatever vertical you want to go into. You can just say, he does all these things the best but within that i'm going to take one slice of that and i'm going to become the best within that like this epic gardening show that you're talking about within epic gardening there's a slice that somebody could come out with and i'm not going to like spout out what those possibilities could be but they could become the best yep within the epic gardening niche oh there are niche within that and that that exists here exactly right there is someone who crushes orchids.

57:43Orchids? Oh, this is a sore subject. My wife and I got a few orchids. We can't keep the things alive. So we went down the rabbit. It's really a sad story. Yeah. Love our orchids until they die. And so there's a YouTube channel that has a million subscribers that is solely around. There's actually a technical scientific name for the practice of keeping orchid, like of taking care of orchids. They've gone super deep in that niche. And so, yeah, I think to your point, just like how can you crush your niche and be the best in it is the ideal thing. And one anecdote I would have is, again, people look at Morning Brew and look at it as the model.

58:21I don't think, especially for this crowd, if you're trying to create a newsletter for your company or a specific niche, I don't think Morning Brew should be the model. Because another way I think about content is there's basically three levels of content in terms of depth of content. Level one is super large addressable market, and it's generally harder to monetize the audience or the lifetime value of your audience is lower. And so that content I would define as political content, pop culture content, sports content, general business news content. Level two content is where you start to get in the niches.

58:54So it's like at Morning Brew, we have retail brew, marketing brew, CFO brew, HR brew. So you get more niche. The value of every single subscriber is significantly higher. And then level three is like the super niches. So this would be if at Morning Brew, under our marketing brew franchise, we launched social media marketing brew or content marketing brew, or for Epic Gardening, there's an Orchid channel. And just to give you context of how much value is in the niches, for Morning Brew today, we have 4.5 million subscribers. Let's use the example of HR Brew. HR Brew, I want to say today has like 200 ,000 subscribers, we can charge almost as much for an advertiser to run in HR Brew to 200 ,000 subscribers as what we charge to get in front of 4.5 million subscribers for Morning Brew.

59:39And so to me, the goal for this audience isn't how do I create a great newsletter and get it to 2 million subscribers. It's actually how do I write a great newsletter, the best newsletter to help a CHRO succeed in their career. And I don't want 500 ,000 people. I only want 75 ,000 people, but I want them to be the 75 ,000 CHROs that work in the U.S. And if I just convert one of them, one of them every few newsletters, the investment in this newsletter has paid for itself. And one thing I want to give you as an idea that you could do if you're kind of struggling to be like, well, what's that one niche that I could dominate?

1:00:16Like the Orkut idea is you could take two niches and combine them and now by combining those two niches you really have created a special niche of your own and an example of that would be somebody's into yoga and then you have a vegan over here and they're doing their own thing and you can't maybe be the top influencer on yoga or content creator yoga or the same with veganism but what if you created the yogi vegan and so now you've taken two niches you combine them and you better believe that every single vegan that now wants to get into yoga is going to probably be searching for yoga plus vegan and they're going to find you because you're dominating, you're owning that niche.

1:00:58And back to one of the things that you shared as we kind of end up winding down here is choosing hard mode. Please remember that the higher the barrier, the lower the competition. Like the reason why Entrepreneurs on Fire is still crushing it 12 years later is still interviewing entrepreneurs seven days a week is because it's really hard to do what I do. Like, it's really hard. So because of that, the barrier is so high, and that means the competition is so low. If it was easy what I did, as soon as I attained success, I would have had a million copycats that were doing basically the same thing, and then we all would have failed because nobody would have succeeded in that kind of environment.

1:01:39But because I went with such a high barrier of entry, made it so hard, I am dominating in that and continue to do so because that barrier is so high, that competition stays so low. So how can you do that as an individual, as a business, as a company? How can you create that barrier to be so high and maybe this is a good transition to continuing the conversation backstage? I know we covered a lot of ground here in terms of, like, technically, how to crush it with podcasts and newsletters. If you have any questions for John or I, we're going to be, what is it called again back there? It's the HubSpot Media Creators Club.

1:02:13It's right behind us, literally. We'll be there for a while and we'll be taking any questions that anyone in the crowd has. Yes. Thank you, guys. We're going to be walking right there. So you can just kind of walk right back over there. We're going to be sitting down kind of in a setup like this, taking questions, any questions you have, specific answers. We're here for you. It's an open Q &A. Let's go have some fun. Thank you guys so much. Appreciate the time. Thank you. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolfe and Nathan Lanz, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals.

1:02:46Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier. AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts.