Hey everyone - Big milestone this week. A new paid sponsor! It’s a great company and one we are excited to partner with (more on this later).

This week:

This week we added 248 subscribers to the newsletter. We are now comfortably in the thousands and can start using that in our marketing and branding. Pretty exciting milestone.

We hit our goal of getting a paid sponsor for our episode that comes out on Feb 2. We have also seen some trickle in from Beehiiv boosts (~$11) and ads through Beehiiv (~$10).

Getting the sponsor is a big proof of concept for us. Now we just have to see how much value we can deliver for them.

For the sponsor’s sake, I don’t think it is appropriate to share how much they are paying for our services. On the other hand, I want to be transparent about our profit and loss. I think the best way to balance this is to share our profit and loss numbers at the end of each quarter. That way we can share how much we make and spend in aggregate without losing the trust of our partners.

Now who is this amazing sponsor we have? It is noem.ai, a local AI startup that helps companies create chatbot interfaces for their websites. We got a demo of their product and were really impressed.

This lead came inbound from one of our forms asking our subscribers if they were interested in advertising with us. They seemed to have the best success demoing their product with new audiences, so we determined the highest ROI for them would be for them to do a free virtual webinar, and for us to promote that.

We are excited about this, and hopefully it turns into a longer-term partnership.

We also have 3 other companies in the pipeline that we have messaged and have expressed interest in some of our sponsorship slots. Very excited about how fast this is moving.

I think this is what most people are really interested in here. Since early January, we have been able to get high-quality subscribers from between $0.50 - $0.97. I say they are high-quality subscribers because we have maintained a >48% open rate and a >7% click-through rate with this being our primary channel of growth (84.3% subs came from paid).

Why paid ads?

For us, paid ads were the quickest way to test if AFF was viable. We calculated that if we could get subscribers at <$2 we could be profitable in the first 3 months.

Organic is great, but it is highly unreliable. There is a ton of testing and wasted effort. Meta ads were the solution we found to scale and test rapidly. They have also been very fun to experiment with.

A few weeks ago, I went in depth into my weekly progression for running Meta ads. This time we will talk about how I generated them.

The big change was me going from images to video, I’ll talk about how I was able to do that without being a professional video editor.

For context, you can see all the ads we run here.

How did I make my ads?

By far, our best performing ads have been AI. They are a walking POV shot past a recognizable scene in Austin with text on the screen. This is the exact prompt that I use in Gemini to make the video:

“A peaceful POV walking shot along Ladybird lake in Austin, TX”

I put this into Canva and add text over top of it. Each ad takes about 5 minutes to produce, and we try 6-8 variations of each one.

We are full speed ahead with sponsor outreach, will be doing a lot more of that!

I will also be reaching out to local restaurants with unique stories. Hopefully we can feature them in exchange for a gift card for our audience. I still want to use the gift card to incentivize survey completions which is also our best source for inbound warm leads for sponsors.