Hi Everyone - We have a ton of irons in the fire, and the lessons keep stacking up. This week I dive into the decision Warren and I have to make about staying a newsletter or becoming a media company.

This week:

This week we added 170 subscribers, down 49 from last week. Not a whole lot to read into this. Meta deleted one of my ads without warning and it was a huge pain in the butt. Now Our ads have to be learned again which is a slow process.

Click through rates and open rates are on the rise again. We have been iterating on our subject lines and I think that is really helping. We have also been A/B testing which is a solid lift.

We will be launching a few new guides in the next month. Hoping these will do well, more on these when we release and get some data. The one on growing your business with a newsletter may be relevant for this community as well.

This is similar to the conversation from last week about organic vs paid, but it is a bit more pressing.

By definition, if we have a newsletter we are a local media company. The question is do we want to lean into becoming a multi-media company.

For the interviews, I’ve been recording them all in my home studio like they were podcasts. We have the capabilities to turn these into high quality podcast content. The question is: “Is the juice worth the squeeze”.

Editing is time consuming, podcasts have unclear ROI. Is it worth spending time building this out when we have other avenues (guides, community, etc.) that likely have a higher 1yr ROI?

My thoughts on the topic are this:

1) When do we start hitting diminishing returns on sponsors, guides, and ads? When the potential return on money is higher for other media it is worth going all in on that.

Unfortunately, I don’t see this return happening for at least another year.

2) Can we delegate this work? The other case for working on this would be that we have enough profit to spend it on editors or someone to manage this work. Then this becomes primarily a financial cost and not a time / attention cost.

This is a closer time horizon. If we land some whales, I think this could be a real reality in the next 3 months.

So last week I wrote this beautiful piece about how our new meta ads were performing.

This week that ad set got deleted. All the data, all the optimizations.. gone.

I also was not as organized as I should have been with the content. I was able to re-create it last night, but the results are starting slow.

This is part of the game, my big lesson with meta is:

1) Never delete anything - Just turn things off if you aren’t using them

2) Keep meticulous records - Have a naming convention so you know exactly what goes where

3) You can always re-create it - There is some art to this, but advertising is really a science. If you keep improving, your ads will as well.

This week we are focusing on: