297 - Best of 2025! 50,000 Subscribers. $10M in Revenue. 1 Insanely Creative Business Idea with Michael Clark

0:00What was your revenue last year? 4.5. And the year before that? 3.2. Okay. You're growing really fast. This year, I'm hopeful we'll end between 8 and 10. 8 and 10 million? Mm-hmm. Holy crap, dude. 33 people signed up. I'm like, who are these? And so we started doing a little advertising. By the end of the year, we had a few thousand people signed up. We're sending about 130 ,000 letters a month. I'm just doing the math right here. If you have 110 ,000 letters a month going out, and on average, a little over six unique pieces per letter, That's over 8 million unique pieces a year that you guys have to batch together and send out.

0:34That's nuts.

0:38I'm super excited. Michael Clark, theflowerletters.com. For those of you, go look at the episode that Chris and I did. We did a whole CoBros episode. I'll link to the show notes. But we talked about this business that was sending letters in the mail based on like World War II love letters. And they've like broken it out now. What a cool business model. And then you commented on YouTube and you're like, hey, that's me. This is my business. I was excited that someone like found our business randomly and started talking about it. I was like, hey, this is cool. But like when you were doing the analysis, I was like, this is pretty good analysis.

1:11Like pretty good. Oh, yeah, that number's almost right. That's what we do. Like we find interesting things and we're like, okay, what are the data points of what could we estimate this business actually does? So to do a better job of breaking it down, theflowerletters.com and your guys' business model is you mail out to a month to subscribers what started as World War II love letters. And you charge a subscription fee. Again, I'm going to say the things that I did. I've done research now. I know that's wrong. You're right. $10 a month, 30 plus thousand subscribers. You do all the fulfillment in-house.

1:42You do all the handwriting. And so as I was like doing the back of the envelope, that's where we got that number from. What did we get right and what did we get wrong? cool yeah i mean a lot of was right most of the numbers were under and so except for your net the net one was uh is a little bit interesting the cost structure on this business is bonkers and that's probably one of the biggest challenges that we face but you're exactly right we tell stories through letters sent through the mail you get two letters a month for a year and it's a story so like when people say hey what do you do because i was like in fintech and technology before like this is totally crazy you know what we're doing i usually say it's something you've never heard of but your mother is gonna love and uh so people are like are you insulting me like no no no no what'd you say about my mom i just said no no no but that's our that's our target audience are you know women age 35 plus but to kind of back up just a little bit our our origin we were my wife is an artist.

2:41She's a super talented, just the most talented person I've ever known. Sings, does everything. She's an artist. She's a writer. And April, 2020, I was doing some consulting at the healthcare financial services in the HSA space. And I was also working on a fintech startup centered around real-time payments. So my world is like tech, but I love stories. I love, and I'm passionate about business and entrepreneurship. We were thinking about how to build her email list. We're on a walk. She's like, what if I like, you know, someone signs up for my email list and I mail them a letter. And I said, the idea came like all at once, honestly.

3:21And I said, what if you told them, wrote a story and sent them a story? And that's where the idea was born. And immediately I saw World War II. This was you? Yeah, this is me. Okay. I mean, it makes sense. Like mid thirties male, you're either the Roman empire or World War two i immediately saw the emotion of what was going on because in the world you know april 2020 people are lonely they're isolated and i'm like what if someone could have something to look forward to a couple times a month you know and it's a story they can enjoy something light something fun you know i knew the first story needed to be world war ii so we started writing she says she thought it was a terrible idea because she's a writer and she's like how am i going to write a story that is compacted and contained in 24 letters anyway so we started writing we kicked off you know we built the business model you know decided it's subscription based you know month to month and we launched in august with 33 people signed up and one thing i always tell people starting a business is don't tell your mom because she'll buy 100 of them and she'll buy a hundred of them and then you won't actually know what demand is yeah it's like you know people starting these businesses like yeah we're gonna have a launch we're gonna have my family come i'm like nothing like a false positive to kick off your business yeah so anyway we decided we're not gonna tell anybody we just kind of put it out there social media did some crazy things and you look at our instagram or like leave rocks around and uh 33 people signed up i'm like who are these i don't know them you know i don't know who these people are i'm like maybe there's something here and so we started doing a little advertising which is something that i think in your analysis was missed we had advertised heavily that's been the key and we can talk a little bit about that we did a little ads try to like just dabble in ads and by the end of the year we had a few thousand people signed up and um you know over christmas and you know fast forward we're now in august 2025 we're sending about 130 000 letters a month and uh geez we're uh we're growing that's incredible we've got five stories we're launching a new story we think it'll be released early october pre-order it's hard to like you know would you send me your your i was kind of doing like a reminiscent looking back and you know how did we get here and there's a lot of a lot of ups and downs tell you what i think the first time i bought a business i look back on that now and i was like I'm like, I personally guaranteed my house?

5:55Oh my gosh. What am I doing? I could have like banked my whole family. You're doing 110 ,000 letters a month. About thereabouts. So we send two letters a month. So we're about, you know, 60 ,000, I think, current subscribers. Well, that was going to be my question is like, the research that I did said 31 ,000 subscribers. But you have some subscribers who have multiple subscriptions because you have multiple stories. is it about 50 000 subscribers yeah i have to look now it's between 50 and 60 right now my operations guy could be watching this like you're way off man samsonite that was way off it's remarkable it's an incredible response but there was a key when we first started this of like why we're doing this crazy business i never really anticipated the impact that it would have on people.

6:48I think my wife saw it. I think she saw the impact it would have. But just a couple months in, we started getting handwritten letters, emails, direct messages of people saying thank you for doing this. People who are terminally ill contacting us saying thank you. This gave me something to look forward to, gave me hope. Someone who had a chronic illness, she was like, I put it on my nightstand. And every day I look up to it and say, there's another letter coming i see these things i'm like what did we create like what is this and like at that point you know it was about january and i said we got to go all in on this and one the growth was tremendous but there was more of a purpose behind it you know we decided to configure a certain way which was for a long game because we could have configured as a lifestyle business and i think you know your listeners and you know the difference between the lifestyle business and like this is what i'm doing this is like all i do there's the passive stuff or there's really no such thing as passive but like things that don't take all your time and you can set it up and it runs and either the income comes or am i going to put my heart soul mind everything i have into this business and this is what i do that's what we decided we decided to do that so august you have the numbers I had was 38, but let's call it mid thirties subscribers by the end of the year from the research I have, it's like 5 ,000.

8:23So like at that point, 5 ,000 and let's just say at$10 a month,$120. So 5 ,000 people,$120 yearly revenue. You've got a business doing approximately$600 ,000. Let's just call it. Sure. Yep. It's not a massive business, but to go from august to by the end of the year you've got a business that's got recurring revenue and you know this you're in tech man recurring revenue six hundred thousand dollars for the year must have been a moment where you were like not only is this a thing but i'm also passionate about it let's go it was probably an easy decision am i wrong no well i was in the middle of a startup Oh, you were?

9:07I was, yeah. We were getting things off the ground with a real-time payments company. It was going pretty good. I mean, we had to pivot a lot during COVID. It's still going, but it was hard to say, okay, I'm going to transition now. Okay, so what happened to the payments company? So you launched this payments company. Did you raise? No. No. No. Okay. So you launch it, you bootstrap it, you're in the middle of it. Did you have partners or was it just you? I had one partner. We did raise. We raised a little seed fund. Okay. No significant. I had thoughts on that. tell you what well what did your partner say when you were like hey man i know we got this payment company but i'm going all in on letters he understood he understood i mean you know he's a really good guy good business partner just taught me a lot and he's still he's still going with it i think it's still you know trying to get some traction there but it's still moving as far as i know okay so in august when you were like let's try this because it sounds like august is when you launched how much of it was this is a test and how much of it was like you know we're going to go hard at this to see does that make sense like was it a yeah let's kind of just test this idea on the side or was it more deliberate than that it was hey this is a cool idea this is something we really want to do we have one story we can get people to sign up maybe we'll have a few people a couple hundred people sign up and we'll send letters you know twice a month be pretty simple that's sort of where i was interesting you know because i was still working i was consulting i was also doing the startup and i had a lot of different things going on and so a bulk of the start was you know on my wife for the writing the creative process and the ordering of all the inventory and stuff like that she did most of that um i built the website i built you know everything got everything ready from a technical standpoint payments and uh put it out there and i wasn't like doubtful i'm like this would be cool even if we had like you know 80 100 people sign up right yeah that'd be that'd be super fun it just started taking off how how did it blow up did you guys run paid ads was it all organic paid ads you did yeah okay where yeah absolutely meta the time facebook we started to dabble i'm like let's you know and uh we we kind of went in and started figuring that whole thing out did you have experience with facebook ads at time no no not at all but i worked with a guy or he was this guy as a kid maybe he's just one of the brightest kids i've ever met lucky enough to have him you know talk about it he's like hey that's kind of interesting i'm like hey you want to like run some ads for us like what do you think he came in and started doing it started working about november he's like hey i found this course about ads what do you think can we invest in that i was like sure you know i looked at it if we can invest in something like that and grow internally and figure that out.

11:58We invested in a course to learn how to do it. By the end of the year, he was a top-tier media buyer. He was just doing so well. He's been fantastic throughout. People are like, hey, what's the secret? I'm like, you got to find yourself an Ethan. His name's Ethan. That's interesting. how much of it do you think was the offering and how much of it what do you think was ethan oh it's a good mix the offering i think it is compelling so when people see it it's not like yeah just give it a try you know this looks kind of good what we want to find are the people that see it and they get it they go from top of funnel to purchase right there's no like i'm kind of in here right and every business wants that but that's the customer we find we're finding so most of our people coming top of funnel to purchase really fast because they see it, the idea executes.

12:51And if you can position that in your ads and do a good job with your copy and your creative, it'll work. It works. So end of the year, you get to 5 ,000. How much did it cost you to get to that 5 ,000? Oh man, that's a good question. I should have looked at that. Our customer acquisition at that point was around 30. Okay. So you were looking at it. Had you built out the pricing at that point or were you still kind of? Yeah, our pricing was, we started at$12 a month and you could prepay for$124 or something like that. You know, when you look at the prepaid is really the key to the success because if you're paying$30, I mean, in Meta, if you've done any media buying, like acquiring a customer for under$20 is like really difficult at volume.

13:35And so you have to be willing to spend, you have to be willing to invest and kind of put money back in to invest in marketing and the marketing engine. And that's why, you know, if it's subscription based and it's just people are giving you 10 bucks a month and you're not making any money on that customer for a while, months. And especially if you're not collecting that cash, right? Right. Absolutely. That was key for us and being able to kind of get that to that point, figure out our pricing to make the prepaid attractive and people could purchase that. What was your customer acquisition cost assumption going into it?

14:11Did you think it'd be 30? Did you think it'd be more, less? I had no idea. You had no idea? Until we tested it, until we tried it. How long did it take you until you realized like, okay,$30 is the customer acquisition cost? It was probably November, around Black Friday. We started to really figure out this is kind of where we're at,$30. Unfortunately, it's been going up every year. It's a constant struggle to continually figure out that whole formula. So if in November you are like, oh, it's$30 to acquire a customer, and we know that you get to the end of the year, you have 5 ,000 subscribers, you spent$150 ,000 to get those 5 ,000 subscribers.

14:54Ballpark. Yep. When did you have the confidence that it was like, we just got to put this money in? And why did you have the confidence that like, yeah,$150 ,000 makes sense because this is the economic return? Like, how did you think about the economics of the business? I think differently. So I think of the money I made today is going to be invested tomorrow. If I'm not profitable today, I'm not profitable tomorrow because I have no money. That mind frame is like, okay, we've got to really dial in this advertising and marketing so that we're profitable every day. And so we're focused on profitability every day.

15:33Some marketing, you know, people don't look at it. They're like, hey, let's throw money in a month and let's look at that. Say, well, let's make sure we're profitable every day. So we've nailed that down and we're able to reinvest cash every day. In my mind, it wasn't like I'm putting 150 grand into this. In my mind, I'm saying I'm putting as much money as I possibly can within my KPIs to grow. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of, let's just say everybody pays up front that$124 and it costs you$30 to get them. Approximately a four time return on ad spend. Then the crazy thing, the COGS and operations.

16:12That's the biggest challenge in a business like this. Before we even get to the COGS and operations, is that four to one ratio good? Like, did you know that it is good? Really good. Yeah. I mean, a 4X ROAS, you're doing pretty good. What's a typical ROAS? We target like a three from a KPI standpoint for a new customer. We have a lot of people that are coming back. And so our true ROAS on a daily basis is, you know, in the fours and fives, but our new customer acquisition, our new customer ROAS, we target, we want to be about three. That gives us good profitability and from a new customer perspective to continue going.

16:48In the beginning, were you even looking at it like that? Were you even like, oh, it's a 4X ROAS. We should keep doing it. I was looking at it. I was like, what's ROAS? What does that mean? Ethan, what did you just say to me? ROAS? Oh, oh, ROAS. Okay, we're too long. I knew I'd been to business school, but they don't talk about WAZ. They talk about customer acquisition cost, but like, anyway. What's interesting is you have a tech background and this business is a subscription business. It's a very tech like pricing model. Was that on purpose or was it just because that's kind of the business that you knew?

17:19It made sense. I mean, we're doing things over time. And so it made sense to do it on a subscription. People pay monthly. We're operating on a monthly basis. And if they don't want to, if they want to cancel, then, you know, they can cancel it. That's fine. Very, very low cancellation, by the way. And this was probably the part that we got wrong. I'm looking at it, you know, 110 ,000 letters a month is approximately, I'm saying approximately $6 million a year. And there could be other things that you're selling in association with that, but it's approximately$6 million a year. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract.

17:55I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business. And you would like, subscribe, and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value. But I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. and if you want even share this with a friend and so chris and i are looking at that and we're like well what's the fulfillment for this it's got to be super easy right it's you just write it one story you're sending it out so this guy's got to be they got to be making like three to four million dollars a year who i wish man who when you said that i was like whoa man if i could get all the ad spend i've done in the last five years i'd be doing good yeah that is probably that's probably the one piece we missed the biggest on was the ad was the customer position yeah ad spend because that's a lot of money but also the the way that we set it up is interesting and you know we we wanted to make it a rich experience and so we're so focused on the experience and making a great experience because that's what it is it's not a product it's an experience the product facilitates the experience and so we're we have to sell the experience and deliver on the experience and so we made the product rich i'll pick out a random letter right so this is from our regency and to kind of show you what comes in it right this is called laterly magnolia so we sell a tin right so this is another uh product we sell people can store their letters in there here's the letter if this is all we sent you know that's cool okay but we've got a note you know you know then we've got uh these little kind of these old advertisements from the era this is public domain this is stuff that we kind of it was an actual advertisement but something like this for example all of this and he did all that so it's kind of like a post but on this side this is like a coloring page right so when you think about you step back and look at it and to kind of give you just run the numbers on the complexity and the way that i'll explain this i've been in tech i've built apps like i work with software developers building out require crazy requirements for apps and software this is by far the most complicated business I've ever done.

20:33It doesn't seem complicated. It's like, all right, I write a couple of stories. And again, this is from my own primitive, you know, caveman brain. Let's go chat GPT, write me some stories. Okay, cool. Slap some artwork on it. In doing my research, you've got, dude, you've got 24 employees. It sounds like you're doing the majority of the fulfillment yourself. It's not like you're outsourcing the fulfillment to other places. Walk me through from the creative process to sending the letter out. what does the workflow look like so stepping back and it's also something that i will recommend to a lot of entrepreneurs is don't let existing technology keep you from executing your business model and by that i mean you have shopify you have all these apps all these you know app people are trying to come in and kind of give you technology and different things to kind of you know make it work there's nothing like this in the world ever it didn't exist so we're inventing this model and trying to figure out how to make it work and make it rich and make it good if you think about it like there's a lot of different pieces that go into each letter series across our six stories there's more than 900 pieces 900 pieces across the six stories yeah so that's all the letters the telegrams the the cards the all of those pieces.

21:55And then if you go think about it this way, we let everybody sign up. We sign up people every day. Everybody starts on letter number one. We send 900 pieces of people signing up every day, twice a month. And you have to figure out how to batch them, how to keep it straight, how to organize it. And it's complicated across six stories. So in our warehouse, we're managing over 900 pieces of inventory. I'm trying to do the math in my head. So 900 divided by six is going to be, what, 150 pieces per? Something thereabout, yeah. 900 divided by six. Yes, 150 pieces. There's 52 letters. 24 letters in each story.

22:42I'm such a stupid dutting. Okay. 24 letters. I could do math. 24 letters in each story. so each letter has on average six pieces six pieces what are the pieces okay like i'm just thinking you have a letter yeah here we go i'll pull up another one so just make this one a surprise so this one this is the letter okay and this letter is one two three pages front and back then you've got this card it's called lucky six pence this is just part of the story just that was part of the story. It's got a little kind of extra. The design is to have an immersive experience. Yeah, I was just going to say, it makes it totally immersive.

23:29And then you have this one. This is an embroidery pattern. And so people get this, and they're like, I do embroidery. I'm going to make this. And we've had a lot of people make this, and they share it on social media. It's pretty cool. So we have that. So then there's this design to make what's called a reticule. So back in the day in Reed's era, you see this lady down here. She's got this little bag. So we gave them a pattern and instructions on how to make one themselves. You're just totally enriching the story experience. It's not like, dearest Martha, I went to the Red Sox game this weekend.

24:08Actually, that's not a Red Sox. What's a Red Sox? Yeah, I went to Boston Yacht. Anyways, I went to the Red Sox game and it's like included as a ticket stub from the red socks or exactly advertisement yeah yeah so it makes it feel you're there like so like in our first story you know there's a train ticket right it's super cool you're like oh we can we design this whole train ticket it's super fun people get like this is so cool it's immersive and fun doing that just makes it that much more complicated and expensive that from a cost structure but that's that's us going all in if that makes sense right and going in it's like we know the story's rich so now our challenge is going to be how do we get efficient enough to make sure that we continue to be profitable but also continue to provide a really rich experience for the people because all of those pieces if you're just listening he's held up a bunch of different papers they're all different sizes they're different colors they're different layouts on there it's not like oh hit the printer and now I've got my six pieces is there's a lot that really goes into it.

25:15Do you print this all on site? Is any of this done through third-party fulfillment? No fulfillment. We do all the fulfillment. We have always done the letter fulfillment. There's no machine that'll do this. There's machines that'll do part of it, but we have a team in-house that we stuff all the letters and get them ready. Is that what the 24 people is for? Is all the fulfillment? Customer service too. I mean, you think about the, in order for this to work, the letters have to arrive in order. Right. And so you have to make sure you're sending the right letter at the right time. Our team's incredible.

25:50The mail system's incredible. Like our error rates, like maybe 1 % sub 1 % error returns standpoint. And you just have to dial in. You got to make it work. You got to be good at what you do. Please tell me your customer service is manned by a bunch of theater kids. And they all just like take on a persona from that period. Like they're calling for world war two. and it's like, hello, dear, how can I help you? What can I put your call through? Oh, we messed that up. I'm sorry. Not a bad idea. No, we do so far. We haven't, we don't take calls yet. It's all through email. We do call people from time to time, but it's all through email.

26:26But yeah, we've got to, I mean, you have to get it right. A lot of people, and you also think about our customers who are, I think are just some of the best people on planet earth when you interact with them. They're just like the kindest. Sometimes I make a mistake ordering. They put in the wrong address. Like, oops, I, you know. And so we have a system for that. But you also have to be willing, you're working with the postal service, you kind of put it out there. There's no real tracking that's there. And so when you look at, if you look at our reviews, the bulk of the negative reviews are two things.

26:56Very few people don't like the experience or the story, like very, very few. The issues come with delivery. And then there's some people who can't see the writing. We have solutions. you know we're working on solutions for the writing but like delivery is really really important and so we resend letters a lot if someone missed the letters like hey i just didn't get it it's like well how do we you know we can't really prove that you didn't get it because it's not tracked because it's going through the mail system and so we just you know people say i didn't get it we say okay no problem we'll resend it and so that's kind of factored into kind of what we do but if you don't do that it's like it doesn't work people have to get their letters in order and it has to work.

27:38I'm just doing the math right here. If you have 110 ,000 letters a month going out and on average, a little over six unique pieces per letter, that's over 8 million unique pieces a year that you guys have to batch together and send out. That's nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is, okay, I'll give it to you. I read that quote when I was doing the research and I was like, well, of course a tech guy is going to think any business is complicated next to, I have software, pay a recurring fee. that's a lot of like different skews basically that you have to be fulfilled for it's a lot yeah we've got a great printing parter is so good it's really helped us grow and become more efficient and really that's where it comes down to is how how efficient can you be in your cost of goods and obviously with grow you can't do that unless you have volume and that volume you're able to grow because you get unit cost comes comes down significantly so where does that put your net margins at then chris and i were like three to four million dollars but if you were on a percentage basis where we're done no no so the way that we i run we put almost everything back into the business and so we want to reinvest and invest and so you know there's been years where we've been decently profitable and then some years where we've lost and because we we want to reinvest We're putting money back into growth.

28:59We're putting them into equipment and more marketing. And so, you know, from a net standpoint, I won't tell you exactly the exact numbers, but, you know, it's not in the millions in our net. Interesting. That is one of the interesting pieces of your business I wanted to ask you about is, like, you have to expand the storyline because once somebody goes through those 12 months, story's over. Right. You had a good 12 months, but if there's not something else for them to buy, then obviously that's a one-time customer. I mean, it's a one-time customer, but it's over the course of 12 months. When did you realize you needed to have other stories?

29:36Oh, like probably February of 2021. Okay. January, you go all in and you're like, February, you're like, yeah, we probably need more stories. We released another story the next year. We've done one story every year. I'm assuming then that each like it's yes there's the story which is Brian and Martha are from this town and he lives here and she lives whatever but then there's also all the artifacts that go into enriching the story and bringing it to life as well so you've got to not only storyboard it but then also think about what are the little pieces that we're going to send to people to get them fully immersed right yep and that's where the genius Hanny comes to play she is it's incredible incredible what she produces and what she can do.

30:21She's just immensely talented. She's figured out a way to tell a story in this way that is truly an art form. It's a unique art form. Early on, we had people like, oh, this is kind of like a book. I'm like, this is not a book. You know, oh, it's kind of, it's a magazine. You're just sending things like, it is not a magazine. This is an experience. And so you're writing a story, but you're writing an experience. And so when you're writing, you have to factor in the components that make that experience rich. and for her she's like this is a blast i love it because i have creative i can be creative like to tell a key plot point i can send the telegram that's you know 15 words that moves the story along really well and for the the user you think about it they put pick up they're like they're holding a telegram it's in their hands it's not being described they're reading it there's details like a date a stamp you know where it came from they're reading it and they're kind of putting themselves into the shoes of someone getting a telegram stuff like that do you have a team of writers is just her no it's just her do you plan to get a team at some point or is it just like no she likes doing the stories it's just one story a year she can totally do the story my crazy mind i modeled out a writing team and i like there's a model where we could release a story a month at this point right now for us this is it's kind of like our baby it's her baby really these these stories are like babies for her and she she loves it and she's so good at creating these stories that i worry that if we were like hey let's bring a team of writers in that somehow would just maybe lose some of that magic it's funny i had a whole set of ai questions i was going to ask you but you've already answered the questions you know what i mean why aren't you using ai for this you've already answered why you're not using ai for this we just released a story orc in may where AI made up a small piece of some of the images.

32:14It's not like this whole thing is AI. It's like, oh no, that image in that component is AI. But no AI is in the writing or story. Just maybe some of the artistic components in that story. Every other one, there's no AI. I think somebody could launch a really cheap knockoff with high churn of this business using AI. But I also think I got into an, arguments is the wrong word, debate with my brother-in-law, who's an editor. He's a creative genius, very creative. Yeah, amazing. And I come from the perspective of like, well, why wouldn't you use AI within the creative process? It doesn't mean that AI is writing, right?

32:57But maybe your wife's writing about the mid-18th century England and she wants to do some research. And it's like, hey, tell me about Hyde Park looked like during the mid-1800s. Or what would a story be within that period of time? So utilizing it in that capacity, I think, makes a ton of sense for AI. I think sometimes people are being led astray. it's like almost to the point where like we trust ai to give us the perspective on a situation more than we do about the person in that situation it's crazy i'll do that sometimes i'll ask ai question and i'm like well what do you what do you think ai it can be a good resource right at this point in order for ai to actually work like in a business you yourself you have to hit a certain competency in that business for it to even play a role because if like all right i'm gonna code an app using grok it's like okay do you know about design do you know if it's good or you just rely on grok to tell you that it's good yeah because grok is like maybe maybe it knows maybe it doesn't if you don't have competency like if you don't know how to code yourself or you're not learning along the way and you're not learning, it doesn't work.

34:13So you have to have a certain competency level in order for AI to actually work. So like reading comprehension, like you have to be able to read and understand how to dissect information. Like if you're doing research and you're pulling up something, it's like, okay. But what's even more important is you've got to be willing and know that it's like, okay, that's one source. Let's start digging into more let's go deeper i actually think and talk about this a lot ai is not yet capable of novel ideas i'm sure it'll get there at some point but it's not yet capable of like thinking of something totally new and inventing and someone's probably gonna be like actually it can if you do it like that but i'm just talking broadly speaking the way that we use it it doesn't do that sometimes people use it for that what it's really good at is taking a lot of data synthesizing it give us giving us analysis or maybe even pulling out findings that we didn't see the first time.

35:07So if you're using it for creative tasks, then at some point, and this is my brother-in-law's argument, at some point, everything just looks the same because it's all the same model. It's all trained on the same stuff. And so it's just regurgitating the same crap. So you have to know how to use it in the right way. And that's effectively what you're saying. Absolutely. You know, even look at in storytelling for our market, right? We'll never use AI to tell a story like it it's just not in us right first you have to disclose it like you know you can't say that you wrote it i don't think that's dishonest well you don't have to disclose it but yeah you should for people that you know are thinking about just doing this through ai it's like the people that are going to sign up for these letters will sniff out ai a mile away they'll know it's not like i see i see some people that have popped up and i'm like that's ai it's easy to see because i'm i'm a i'm a creative like i'm a storyteller like my wife's the main storyteller but we'll see something like that's ai if you watch a lot of movies right ai starting to kind of play the factors into the uh the cgi and like to the train to the trained eye they're like that's ai right or if you look at a lot of photos you're like that's ai it's it's easy for people with trained eyes to pick out and to sniff out.

36:29And if you're creating something that, you know, is for a particular market, and if they're not expecting something to be AI, they'll sniff it out a mile away. And I think you'll lose. What was your revenue last year? Good question. It was 4.5. And the year before that? 3.2. Okay. You're growing really fast. This year, I'm hopeful we'll end between 8 and 10. eight and ten million holy crap dude we'll see we'll see if one we can do pull off because metas i mean anyway there's a whole advertising thing that we're working through well what i think is really interesting about what you're doing is like you said you're reinvesting everything back into the business and you didn't say it this way but the way i see it is you're building a moat you're building this like catalog this library of stories yeah so it's like every year we release a story.

37:23Cool. But if you stopped today, let's just say you stopped writing stories today and you've got six stories, you could theoretically have a customer stay around for six years at that$140, whatever the number is per year. So you've got a pretty sustainable, consistent, at least for, for five years, you've got like a real asset. Just think about how that compounds every year that you release a new story. I would, I mean, I would bet this becomes very profitable. If you stopped right now, you'd be very profitable, but the compounding effect of it just gets even more profitable as time goes on. Do you think of it in those terms or is that just, you do?