From 40 Followers to $1m: Dave & Marsden Kline Built a Creator Business in 3.5 Years

Summary

Growth In Reverse: Episode Summary Episode: From 40 Followers to $1M: Dave & Mara Kline Built a Creator Business in 3.5 Years
Release Date: April 2, 2025
Hosts: Chenell Basilio and Dylan Redekop
Guests: Dave Klein and Mara Klein

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the Growth In Reverse podcast, hosts Chenell Basilio and Dylan Redekop delve into the remarkable journey of Dave and Mara Klein. Transforming from individual professionals into a powerhouse creator duo, the Klimes built a million-dollar business centered around their newsletter and coaching programs in just 3.5 years. This in-depth conversation uncovers the strategies, challenges, and insights that fueled their rapid growth.

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Background and Beginnings

Dave Klein transitioned from a successful management career at Bridgewater to becoming a social media influencer. Starting with just 40 Twitter followers in 2021, Dave amassed over 60,000 followers in eight months and grew his newsletter to 40,000 subscribers. Alongside him, his wife Mara played a crucial role, working behind the scenes to enhance their content and products.

Notable Quotes:

• Dave Klein [00:51]: "Quantity leads to quality, but when you find a winner, you have to double down."
• Mara Klein [05:57]: "It's easy to justify one more week, one more month of research, but we wouldn't be here if we hadn't taken a few of those leaps, pushed or otherwise."

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Transition to Social Media and Content Creation

The Klimes initially purchased a website to leverage SEO for growth. However, a significant algorithm change by Google halved their business within six weeks, prompting them to diversify their presence to social media. Encouraged by Mara, who had minimal prior engagement on social platforms, Dave enrolled in Sahil Bloom's Twitter growth course. This decision marked the beginning of their exponential social media growth.

Key Moments:

• Dave Klein [02:44]: Discusses the impact of Google's algorithm change and the pivotal moment of shifting focus to social media.
• Mara Klein [05:27]: Highlights the importance of taking risks and making decisive moves that deviated from their cautious nature.

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Building the Newsletter and Creating Value

Shifting from Twitter, Dave and Mara launched their newsletter, "Management Playbook," in January 2023. Their approach was methodical, expanding on their popular Twitter threads to create in-depth content that resonated with their audience of leaders and managers. They focused on universally applicable management principles, enriched with personal stories and actionable insights.

Notable Quotes:

• Dave Klein [16:37]: "We started with delegation, which was the thread that launched, you know, the entire business."
• Mara Klein [19:02]: "You can't take me through three framebooks, you can’t go through frameworks without a story. It just won't sit very well."

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Growth Strategies and Community Building

The Klimes employed several strategies to grow their newsletter:

1. Leveraging Existing Social Media: Dave used Twitter threads to drive subscribers by offering deeper content through the newsletter.
2. Mutual Recommendations: Collaborating with other newsletter creators like Jason Pfeiffer, they engaged in cross-recommendations to expand their reach.
3. High-Quality Content Production: Maintaining rigorous standards ensured their content remained valuable and engaging, fostering strong subscriber loyalty.

Notable Quotes:

• Dave Klein [22:21]: "We have a 43,000-person active newsletter list with a mid-40s open rate and 4-5% click-through rates."
• Mara Klein [24:25]: "We are actively pursuing ways to teach others that can't join our live programs. We're hopeful that the newsletter can have this unlocking effect for anyone that it reaches."

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Challenges and Lessons Learned

Despite their success, the Klimes faced several challenges:

• Technical Hurdles: Managing email sequences and optimizing subscriber engagement proved time-consuming, leading them to seek external help.
• Balancing Quality with Growth: Maintaining high content standards while scaling the business required deliberate focus and strategic delegation.
• Navigating Social Media Dynamics: Adapting to platform changes and understanding audience preferences were ongoing learning processes.

Notable Quotes:

• Dave Klein [25:19]: "Our lackluster running of this business is very funny. We're very committed to the quality of the content, and we haven't…"
• Mara Klein [29:41]: "If I had thought about scale when it was new, those lessons would have been accelerated."

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Insights and Key Takeaways

1. Consistency and Volume: Producing a high volume of content increases the likelihood of finding what resonates with the audience.

   • Dave Klein [39:48]: "Quantity leads to quality. Put it out there to figure out what works."

2. Authenticity and Storytelling: Genuine, relatable stories enhance engagement and build a loyal community.

   • Mara Klein [19:02]: Emphasizes the necessity of weaving stories into frameworks for better relatability.

3. Adaptability: Flexibility in strategies, such as moving from Twitter to newsletters and incorporating AI, is crucial for sustained growth.

   • Dave Klein [35:06]: Talks about integrating AI into their management playbook.

4. Community and Collaboration: Building partnerships and engaging with like-minded creators can significantly boost growth through mutual support.

   • Dave Klein [22:21]: Shares the success of mutual newsletter recommendations.

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Future Plans and Expansion

Looking ahead, Dave and Mara are focused on expanding their offerings:

• Development of a Membership Program: Aimed at providing curated resources and interactive support without overwhelming their team.
• Integration of AI: Enhancing their existing frameworks with AI tools to offer more efficient and advanced solutions for leaders.
• Continued Content Excellence: Maintaining their high standards while exploring new content intersections, such as sports metaphors for management principles.

Notable Quotes:

• Dave Klein [35:09]: "Our thesis emerging for us is like we think this business could be pretty big, impacting lots of leaders without taking us out of the primary seats."
• Mara Klein [38:28]: "Our goal is always to have like an immense amount of value behind the offer."

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Final Reflections and Advice

When reflecting on their journey, both Dave and Mara emphasize the importance of taking actionable steps and not overcomplicating processes. They advocate for iterative growth, learning from failures, and staying true to one's core values and vision.

Notable Quotes:

• Dave Klein [42:50]: "When you figure it out is when you stomp on the gas and do that thing."
• Mara Klein [40:54]: "Writing more sooner, like owning that I was a co-founder…"

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Conclusion

Dave and Mara Klein's story is a testament to the power of strategic content creation, authenticity, and relentless pursuit of quality. Their journey from modest beginnings to a thriving creator business offers valuable lessons for aspiring newsletter creators and entrepreneurs aiming to build sustainable, impactful businesses. By leveraging social media, fostering community, and continuously evolving their strategies, the Klimes have set a benchmark for effective audience growth and engagement.

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Additional Resources:

• Visit the Klimes' Newsletter: growthinreverse.com
• Join Growth In Reverse Pro Community: Access exclusive content and recordings from the episode.

Transcript

[Christian Health]

Dave Klein went from a decorated management career at Bridgewater to a social media influencer with over 200,000 followers. He started posting on Twitter in 2021 and went from 40 followers to over 60,000 followers in just eight months. He since built his newsletter to over 40,000 subscribers and turned his following into a million dollar creator business in less than three years. But that's not the full story. Dave didn't actually build this entire thing by himself. His wife Mara has been working away behind the scenes, making their content and products insanely valuable. Until now. Mar is coming out of the shadows and her own personal brand. In October of 2024, she hard launched her personal brand on LinkedIn where she's been able to go from zero to over 71,000 followers in just five months. And that's completely outpaced Dave's original growth. So I thought it would be only fitting to have them on the podcast together to share their story and growth with us all and how they did this together.

[Dave Klein]

Quantity leads to quality, but when you find a winner, you have to double down. I wrote something six months ago and it did really well. 110,000 people who follow me on LinkedIn. What percentage saw it the first time? Maybe 5.

[Mara Klein]

What is interesting to a lot of people, what resonates? What are the pain points? And then sort of overlaying that with like, well, what can I add to the conversation?

[Dave Klein]

That would have been the smart way to start.

[Christian Health]

Why then did you decide to start creating a newsletter around these topics?

[Mara Klein]

Let's see how Dave remembers the reality.

[Dave Klein]

Like all good ideas, it probably involve Mar saying.

[Christian Health]

Just to start off like, well, I guess going all the way back. Dave, you worked at Bridgewater, Mara you worked at Google, among other places. And so you guys have this wealth of experience and knowledge in the business space, management, sales, all of that. And so you kind of decided you, you went on and you started a website first of all, or you bought a website, is that right? We did buy a website. Which when I found that out, I was so excited because I was like, yes, I've built websites in the past for like growing that kind of thing with SEO. So hearing your like trials and tribulations with that experience is funny. But now, I mean you have this successful or at least seemingly successful business from the outside, cohort based course newsletter, all kinds of things going on in your world. And so I'm excited to hear how you guys grew that in the beginning. I know it started off kind of with Dave enrolling in Sahil Bloom's course about growing on Twitter. Was there something in that course that kind of, like, sparked something for you to kind of change your. Your world from this website that you were trying to grow all the way over to, like, building a creator business around management, that kind of thing?

[Dave Klein]

Yeah, I would say a couple things. You're being very gracious in your description of how that all came to be. Like, we did buy a website. Google did change its algorithm and cut the business in half. Six weeks in. We temporarily recovered, which was good. We basically got our investment back out. But it triggered me in this particular case in that freak out saying, like, well, we should diversify to social. And Mar kind of smiling at me and saying, you know, you've never liked, reposted, commented or anything on social media before, but, you know, good luck, it'll be great. And I took Saul Hill's course, and I was convinced I was going to walk in and we were going to be able to make a brand account overnight. And within two minutes, he's like, if you're here to make a brand account, you're in the wrong place on social media. People want to talk to other people, so you're going to need to, like, put your picture on there, use your real name, and start having a conversation. And so I did, and for a while wrote into the void about everything, you know, education and music and parenting and occasionally a management nugget or a leadership story from those years at Bridgewater and other places. And those tended to be the things that got engagement, got a little bit of traction, spurred some conversations, and, you know, one thing led to another. We got a little bit of growth early on. I think I got to 3,000 people by the end of that year and met the folks at Maven, met Wes and Goggin, and they said I'd had this aspiration of also being a university professor. And they said, why? Why would you settle to teach to, like, 25 undergrads. Five billion people have a phone in their pocket. That whole world is your classroom. Everybody should be a leader. And we kind of laughed, but thought, well, if we could get 10 people to give us a few hundred bucks, that would offset, you know, thinking about this problem. And wrote a. Wrote a thread based on some of the principles we learned in Sahil's course, and it went magically viral. It was about delegation, which shocked me as much as anybody else. And we sold that course out overnight, which was wild. And so all of a sudden, we felt like we had a business, I.

[Mara Klein]

Think, like the Dave coming downstairs after the first course. And being like, we need to pivot, like, we can't actually write about the web business. I've got to write about something. And then that those different moments, right, like, we have known each other since high school and there was always, like, what? Like, what if we had our own business? Dave's father was like a serial entrepreneur in a town where that just wasn't. Like, I didn't know anyone else who had done that. But we spent a lot of, let's say, decades, like, oh, we don't have the perfect idea. And then this might resonate with others in your community. Those, like, you're sort of super careful, super a student about these decisions. But then buying that website was like, a fine, let's just do it and figure it out. Which was a little uncharacteristic for us. But then what it forced us into next. Even taking softhill's class, like, fine, let's just figure it out actually led to a lot of our better decision making, which is something we write about. It's easy to justify one more week, one more month of research, but we wouldn't be here if we hadn't taken a few of those leaps, pushed or otherwise.

[Christian Health]

That's a good point. Getting started is like the whole game, I think, getting started and continuing. So that course actually ended up with Dave. You ended up with 60,000 followers on Twitter in just eight months, which is pretty insane. That's really fast.

[Dave Klein]

Anyone who's on social media, you sort of see that there's these trends, these ebbs and flows. I mean, there's something on Twitter today with the launch of OpenAI's next round of visuals, right? Everything's this, like, Gibrali cartoon or whatever the thing. I don't even know what it is, but I'm like, it's all my feed and there's something to, like. I think I got. I had good content that happened to be in the right place at the right time. And so threads were really. Twitter at that moment in time was all about, like, if you could teach somebody something in, you know, seven to 10 connected tweets, which was effectively a small blog post, but in that format, you could get a thousand, two thousand, five thousand followers in a day. It was wild. If anything, my regret is sort of thinking that I could saturate 300 million people on Twitter and only doing two a week. Um, I think if I had been smart, I would have done four or five, six daily. Sorry, four or five, six a week or even daily. Um, and I probably would have gotten to a number substantially higher than that. Like, I definitely had a few friends who really went all in. Um, and you can see that reflected in their. In their growth. Mars growth on LinkedIn recently is similar. Like really lean.

[Christian Health]

I was going to say she's blowing you out of the water.

[Mara Klein]

He has to do more dishes.

[Christian Health]

But I.

[Mara Klein]

It's interesting about that time on Twitter too, Dave, because if we go back, which wasn't that long ago, people weren't writing with AI. These were like, let's call them, like super authentic. Like, experience, learn type threads. And I know the game has changed, but it's kind of interesting to think that like, those were the type of things that really went viral.

[Christian Health]

Did you have like a list of all of the threads you thought you could create and you just started like cranking them out? Or was it day by day or like, what was the, the process there?

[Dave Klein]

Yes to all. I could pull up my notion right now. You would see, I don't know, 70 to 100 half written threads. You'd see scattered list of other ideas. The nice part about the world we live in, right, like management and leadership, it's a perpetual market, you know, like we. Part of what compels us about this market is that 60% of managers fail. And that seems outrageous to us. There's just no reason. The best individual contributors get elevated and then fail at a rate higher than a coin flip. Like, that's crazy. But it also means every year they're making new managers and even the managers that aren't new are being asked to step up to higher levels. They're moving companies, they're starting companies. And so we have this, we have this perpetual market. And then when you click into, well, what do they need to know about? It's kind of endless, right? Like, how do you go get people, how do you develop people, how do you coach people? And you can spin the cube to sort of tell different sides of the same story. Like, these are the skills you should have, these are the mistakes you should avoid. These are the traps, you know, that you fall into, which are all effectively. I think it works for us because we're usually distilling it down into things that are as close to universally true as possible.

[Christian Health]

That makes sense. Yeah. And I feel like at this point you could probably just never write a new piece of content and still have a whole host of things you could post.

[Dave Klein]

It is helpful, you know, I mean, for. Yeah, I will say, like looking back now, three years into the game, having a catalog to go back to and say like, sometimes it just works and you're like, you know, whether if you're on LinkedIn, there's a billion people. And I wrote something six months ago and it did really well. The chances that like the 110,000 people who follow me on LinkedIn, like, what percentage saw it the first time, maybe 5%, you know, and so me republishing that like 1/10 of 1% might see it a second time. But it's already proven, it's already distilled, it adds value, et cetera. There's other times I'll go back and look at my catalog and say, like, I thought this was really good and it didn't hit. And so I don't have to rewrite a brand new thing. I can just figure out, was it a bad image, was it a bad hook, did I frame it incorrectly? And so yes, it is so much easier now to have that to work from and then fill in some of the gaps or write something new and inspiration.

[Mara Klein]

We had an alumni call earlier this week and it's always, it's always a bright spot, right? You pull together people from different cohorts, find out what's working, what isn't, and go live fire through questions. And both of us came out of that being like, oh, it's so helpful. Like this came up and it's sort of reoccurring in this way. What I have been surprised to enjoy, and I know you said you love the research aspect of your business. What, what is interesting to a lot of what resonates? What are the pain points? And then sort of overlaying that with like, well, what can I add to the conversation sort of creates this. Like, you have to enjoy the process or you won't stick with it. And so those ingredients really help, really help me.

[Christian Health]

That's interesting. I imagine there's like probably a hundred different concepts you could talk about and then you just apply a new story to it and it's like a wholly fresh new piece of content. So I could see how you essentially have a never ending catalog or library of things to talk about.

[Dave Klein]

And then there's even the Mar and I both have a love of sports. And so one of the other, you know, I think, but I think for anyone, whether you're writing a newsletter, you're writing online, someone said to me very early on, it's like, don't think about your lane, think about your intersection, you know, and so there's something to another way to generate a lot more content and make it more interesting. Content is how do you smash two things together? And so a lot of times we will draw upon sports because at least in our minds, the same dynamics play out. You have to recruit great people. You have to have a clear system. You have to have a strong leadership in there. You have to build a locker room culture. Except that especially at the highest levels, it's all public, you know, because there's reporters and people watching, and you're. And there's a really clear scoreboard. You get to figure out, like, do all those ingredients add up to a winning team versus business is fuzzier. Right. The rules aren't made for us. We have to invent our own scoreboards. Winning and losing is sort of in the eye of the beholder sometimes, but so you can sort of take those lessons. So that now takes our already limitless catalog and creates all these new interesting intersections and profile. You can profile coaches, you can stare at teams. You can go deep down the rabbit hole on one particular type of performance. So it's another way to then make the fractal even bigger of things you could write about.

[Christian Health]

Oh, I like that a lot. It's also baseball opening day today, which is so exciting.

[Mara Klein]

Exactly. Exactly. Like, I'm really in the lull for my football season. But when you're teaching a diverse room of motivated leaders, right? They could be founders, they could be part of a fang. Multiple different time zones and experiences. But sometimes we teach their story, right? And it's so awesome to see across the screen, like, people's eyes light up when you go to a sports metaphor. They're like, oh, like that. Right. You kind of have to snap out of the meeting room every now and again, which is the joy of teaching and storytelling. Right. So people even in the chat will be like, actually, I've never watched that sport, but that makes complete sense to me. Like, now I can. Now I can take that lesson.

[Christian Health]

Yeah. It's like a common thread you're pulling on, but teaching something new within it. That's pretty interesting, I guess, shifting gears a little bit. So you had been building this social presence through Dave's account, I guess we will say. I'm sure Mara had something to do with it on the back end, but you didn't actually start a newsletter until January of 2023, and you had been building on Twitter almost the whole year of 2022. So I'm curious, what was the timing and why then did you decide to start creating a newsletter around these topics?

[Mara Klein]

Let's see how Dave remembers the reality.

[Dave Klein]

Now. I'M worried. I don't remember it at all. Like, all good ideas. It probably involved Mar saying, dave, you should create a newsletter for 12 months. And then me eventually doing it, probably something to that effect. But the we sort of. I think there's like a very traditional, like, funnel for creators, right? You're like, oh, I'm on social. Then I try to get a more personal conversation via email, newsletter, whatever that's like. Then I can like get you to a digital product and then maybe you'll pay a premium to like interact with me personally or have me help solve a problem coaching, like, whatever version that is. And we just lucked out that we went straight from. From A to D in our original business. So it was like we were able to convert people off of Twitter straight into our flagship program. And so there wasn't an urgent need for a while. I think the thing that, if I'm remembering the timeline correctly, I feel like Elon bought Twitter or there was some. Or some. There was some. There was some event. Maybe it was a friend got shut down for a few days or something happened. I just remember thinking like, oh my gosh, our whole business is Twitter. And if this thing. So we weren't really on getting going on LinkedIn yet. We were just starting and I was like, if this thing disappears, no one's going to be able to end up in the bucket that actually drives revenue for our business. And so I remember flipping on the review thing for a while and just collecting email. So I had like a couple thousand to start with. But I remember it being tied to this instability around Twitter being the main thing that tilted me over from not hearing Mars advice to heeding Mars advice.

[Mara Klein]

That sounds vaguely familiar. I listen sometimes when you step back, it seems so easy to coach yourself. I think that one of the ways in which Dave and I are very similar, which can make working together easy, but create blind spots, is we have an incredibly high bar for being proud of what we've written. Around this time, there started to be more newsletters and we were recipients of newsletters we were reading. How do we commit to this and make sure it's excellent and make sure it doesn't feel like another one of those. Okay, so we should have a back backlog to start because you don't want to feel under the gun or not proud about what you're publishing on Wednesday. So I think it was like, I remember it as the confluence of those two things. And when you talk about the early days of threads, like it was hours of writing Right. The early me starting to figure out how to write and find my voice. An unspeakable number of hours went into each piece of content. So it wasn't like, oh great, let's just add a newsletter. So I wouldn't trade those hours because I think that you learn a ton from putting in that effort. But I feel like that was a piece that slowed us down at the time.

[Christian Health]

That's interesting. I get that though. So did you just decide to take your best performing Twitter content and expand on it for the first couple issues or how are you thinking about the connection between those two properties at that point?

[Dave Klein]

That would have been the smart way to start, super practically, because it's the MGMT playbook. Right? It's the management playbook we honestly started from. What were the concepts that were resonating most with the leaders we were working with? I'm not going to have the perfect sequence. Right. But I'm like, I think we started with delegation, which was the thread that launched, you know, the entire business. So wrote a more in depth playbook on that. And then, well, the thing we teach in the course is like actually to get delegation, right, you're going to want to take a step behind that and actually have set really clear expectations with your people. And so then we wrote a playbook on that and then, oh, if you're going to have clear expectations and delegated work, you're probably going to want to check in on it. And wow, so many leaders don't run good one on one check ins. And so we sort of added that. And so we were for the, I would say for probably the first eight to 10, we were just building out a bit of the map of whether you want to call it minimum viable management or you want to call it high velocity management. It was like the most nutrient dense pieces that if I were talking to a new manager or seasoned manager, I'm like, get these seven or eight pieces of your system right and you're going to be better than 90% of other managers. That's where it started. Now a few of those I had written threads about, so there were some I could borrow concepts I could sort of take, you know, what was one tweet and sort of blow that out into a section and be more, you know, in depth about it or add, you know, a couple personal stories to make it like really click for people. But that, that was the starting point.

[Mara Klein]

Yeah, I feel like the first one was almost like a letter to the shareholder type approach. Like you're, what can you Expect from me, right? It was about setting expectations, and each opens with a genuine story, Right? It's just how I remember things, right? When we, when we were first designing the curriculum even, or like, iterating on the newsletter, it was, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you can't take me through three framebooks, frameworks without a story. It just won't sit very well. Like, it won't click in. And then even Dave's like, it can't just be another newsletter. So again, back to sports. And like, there's a playbook. There's like, I have a problem. Like, here, you can go run this play. So just like the filters before you publish. Like, is it relatable? Is it actionable? Could someone go do something after they read this one?

[Dave Klein]

We didn't, we didn't call it a newsletter for a year. It was very intentional. It's funny. It's almost like a pattern that we've had over and over. And so if I were whispering to other people who may go through some of the same identity crisis, I would say, don't be asked. I didn't call myself a coach like an executive coach for probably 18 months, even though I was working with eight or nine CEOs as an executive coach. Because so many. When you'd ask people like, well, what. What image is conjured in your mind when you say executive coach? And they're like, oh, you went to some seminar and you learned how to be a coach? And I'm like, okay, that's not what I want to conjure in your mind. Like, I spent 20 years leading teams of, like, hundreds of people at really high caliber organizations. Like, that was hard. I have the scars. Prove it. And so I fought this idea of saying executive coach. Now, the downside to that is then no one knows what the heck you are. And the same thing with the newsletter we call the management Playbook. Playbook. Playbook. And we still call it that. But we will now, we will now admit it is a newsletter because people actually know what that thing is in the world versus this. Like, oh, we're not a lose letter game was confusing to people.

[Mara Klein]

A little too clever. Now, playbook, I adore. Eventually I had to say, but, Dave, you are a coach. Like, think baseball hat, coach, coach, lowercase C, uppercase, care what you want to call it. But you are coaching people. He's like, oh, maybe, Maybe.

[Christian Health]

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense all the terminology, right? Like, playbook, coach, like, is there.

[Dave Klein]

But we struggled with the same concept on community for the exact same reason of Mar's point of. We've talked about, should we have one? Do we want to have one? It's interesting. Our. I would say our world of leaders and managers are already short on time. They're already spending their entire days interacting. There's not like this in other. Other niches. There's lots of people who like, oh, I just. I'm lonely. I want to get together. I need to, like, bounce ideas off each other. It's positive sum. One plus, you know, one plus one equals three. And the leaders and managers are like, I need answers to my questions. I need to get in and get out. And you're like, oh, it doesn't sound community. Like, it sounds more like a. A tailored resource. It sounds like a. Like a membership. Like, oh, you can come in like, you. It's the library of good management practices. And you can talk to people, or you can look it up by reading it. You can watch videos. And it took us a while to sort of come around to that idea. And I was at a dinner with Jay Clouse and he was like, call it a membership, dude. I was like, oh, it's so obvious when you say, but, like, we literally wrestled with, like, not wanting to make the promise of a community, but not knowing how to communicate what we could offer two people that didn't elevate an expectation that we didn't want to, like, have tried to have to live up to, nor were they asking for. Um. So here we are again, repeating our patterns.

[Christian Health]

You gotta figure it out as you go, though. I think it's. It's wise to get started and, like, just make the mistakes along the way and you can figure it out as you go versus, like, you were talking about earlier. Just spending so much time thinking about it and planning, and you're never gonna get to where you want to be if you do that. So I think it was a smart way to go. Anyway, I'm curious. So you had this large Twitter following. You started the newsletter. Was it simply just like dropping a link in your threads to the newsletter and that's how you were growing, or was there any other strategy or growth behind it aside from that? At least in the early days?

[Dave Klein]

Early. I mean, honestly, no, that was mostly it because, again, you could. I can only do so much with a thread. Many times it would be as simple as I would write a thread on something like giving feedback. And then it would just be, if you want more, I've literally laid out a full free playbook here. And then instead of linking to the general playbook I would link to the specific and then make the first third of the content completely public and then make the other 2/3. It's free, but you have to register. And so that was the primary strategy for doing that. Probably for the first year, the two. I mean, really then. Yeah, sorry. The second thing in probably six months in. I started to use the recommendation engine with some of our. Some of my friends, like, oh, you have a newsletter. I have a newsletter. We're in adjacent spaces. I'll recommend you, you recommend me. And it's been cool. It's been like. It's like fun. It was funny. I was in there earlier today, just seeing, you know, people come and go. I'm like, are my recommendations current? Et cetera. I'm actually speaking at an event on Wednesday with Jason Pfeiffer, who's the editor of Entrepreneur magazine. And we got to know each other because we. We were recommending each other's newsletters and I was like, I think I've. He's driven three or four thousand people to me and I've driven like three thousand to him at this point. It's pretty crazy.

[Christian Health]

Yeah, recommendations are definitely a good, good way to grow if you are cleaning your list and that kind of thing. I feel like they're a little lower quality, but the volume is definitely there.

[Dave Klein]

It's. It's been rangy for me. Like, his specifically is like, actually similar open rates relative to our general open rates, and there's two or three others that have been similar quality, especially when you. What I found is when I went broader, you know, when it was like, oh, I'm an AI newsletter who wants to recommend a management playbook. Like, unsurprisingly, lower open rates, but so we've. We've run those experiments as well.

[Christian Health]

Yeah, that's interesting. I'm seeing the same thing. Like, me and Jay Claus recommend each other and his are definitely higher quality. And that makes sense because his content and his just ethos is higher quality, if you will. So I can see that playing out in your.

[Dave Klein]

The Venn diagram of what you two are focused on are so overlapping, you know, like, definitely the ones who are, for me, for management, business leadership, that space does really well. The fashion. The fashion references aren't doing so well.

[Christian Health]

AI and fashion, not so much.

[Dave Klein]

AI and fashion, not my sweet spot.

[Christian Health]

And then I guess, how are you growing the newsletter now? Like, has anything changed? I mean, you mentioned recommendations. Is there anything else on top of that?

[Dave Klein]

I'll admit, like, we're getting a little bit of Help now like we. If I could show you under the hood, Chanel, you would be so embarrassed for us.

[Christian Health]

I doubt it.

[Dave Klein]

Well, how about I will give you a stat and then you can see if you want to reclaim that. We have, we have a 43,000 person active newsletter list. Like our open rates mid-40s click through rates pretty solid, like 4 or 5%. Guess how many pending subscribers I have because I have double opt in enabled.

[Christian Health]

No.

[Dave Klein]

There you go.

[Mara Klein]

Oh, no Name stadium we could sell.

[Christian Health]

Oh my God. It's got to be at least like 20k or something.

[Dave Klein]

You're so close. It's 55,000.

[Christian Health]

Wow. So more people that are then are on your email list at this point are just pending?

[Dave Klein]

Yes.

[Christian Health]

Ouch.

[Dave Klein]

Steve. Told you, told you we could douse you with our lackluster running of this business. It's very funny. Like we're very committed to the quality of the content and we, we haven't. It's, it's right in this danger zone. And I'll say for me, not for mar, but really my danger zone of it's simple enough to sort out that I can probably figure it out, but it is not immediately rewarding in terms of like our business in, in like a direct way. Like if you said, Dave, rewrite these two emails because we need to get 10 more people in the course, I could like rewrite them, it would happen, et cetera. But it's such more of like the long investment game and so it's always the thing just below the line on the list. I'm like, oh, I need to fix the email sequence. Or you know, I need to have a, I need to have a nurture sequence after people sign up. Oh, we shouldn't have double opt in. We should do it this other way. Oh, when people go dark after five sends, we should do this recovery sequence. And like I know it intellectually, it just never makes it on the list. So that's why we finally got help to say like I know the things to do. I literally just need someone to be hands on keys and go in and like make the sequences, fix the things, turn off, double opt in, etc. So that the next time we're talking to you, I can say that that number is slightly slow lower.

[Christian Health]

That's, that's gotta be so painful. I'm sorry.

[Dave Klein]

Oh, well, it's just. I don't know. It is and it isn't. It's just lessons, you know, in the same way that I wish I had written a thread a day and I wrote Two, I'm like, I wish I turned off double opt in six months ago and fixed these things and I didn't like. It's okay.

[Christian Health]

Yeah. So I guess I'm curious, like, are you able to see. So now that Mar has this growing LinkedIn audience, she's going to eclipse you here soon, I'm sure. Are you able to see like, who's driving more subscribers from your, your social channel?

[Dave Klein]

Are you suggesting that we should use UTM tags to know where things come from and have that insight? Because that would be a great thing that we should also have someone help us.

[Christian Health]

That would be awesome if you just like walk into your kitchen and be like, Marjorie, 400 subscribers this week or whatever and Dave only drove 200.

[Dave Klein]

So true. I would say the answer factually is no, we cannot. The growth has increased in, in proportion to Mars growth. So she is definitely driving a healthy amount of that growth.

[Mara Klein]

Like, since we just were super honest, right. Like the lesson when you talk about things that were just below the fold, we felt energized, right. Like more ideas and time to do things during the day and building our business. Oh, I should write too. Oh, it shouldn't just be like. And here's more. Yep, yep, yep. I'm not sure if we shared the story with you before, but we were getting ready to teach a cohort. I. We would typically send just like a personal note before we're getting started, especially for people who had enrolled a bit ago. And I'm going through the names and like my face is kind of dropping because we are less than 10% women enrolled in a month long advanced leaders cohort. And honestly I was like, I, this is my fault, right? Like a lot of our volume was coming from Twitter at the time. Twitter was probably then 70, 30 maybe missed opportunity, like unacceptable that it's below the line. So we wrote about that and then I admittedly had like a few fits and starts and then I was like, okay, I'm like, hard start committing to this. And every time the our numbers improved after that. But I was just like, well that's. It was such a massive wake up call for me, right? So talk about a lesson learned the hard way, but a good nudge to pick up the pen. Honestly, like, we shouldn't bury the lead. We both enjoyed writing like we always have. We're the engineers that probably could have. I would have been a lot happier on taking other classes. I was writing my roommates English papers. Right? Like that's the part that I really enjoyed. So coming back to it and learning how to write in a certain medium was like a cool new challenge. But that was really the push. It wasn't just like, oh, this, we should do this. It was like, I must do this.

[Christian Health]

Gotcha. So you're saying because you weren't writing, you felt that there was less of a presence of females in there because they didn't see you as like the face or one of the faces of the brand.

[Mara Klein]

100%. 100%. And then we, we were able to learn empirically from earlier cohorts. They're like, oh, this is great. Like, I, someone might say, I have someone on my team that's just like, Dave, like, and just like metabolize feedback, extremely systematic, never emotional. And I'm like, hey guys, I'd love to say, I'm like, exactly like that. I aspire to it. Logically, it would be easier, but like, here's how I have to work at it. Or if I'm on your team, I'll take the feedback, but it might take me a minute. Right. And so people later would say, like, just having that same scenario, two takes was incredibly helpful when they went back to lead a diverse team of talented people.

[Christian Health]

With you guys both working on the business, is there anyone else helping you? Any other team members or aside from people helping with growth and that kind of thing, or getting those other stuff done that you were talking about?

[Dave Klein]

No, you, you're, you're hanging out with the whole business.

[Christian Health]

That's awesome.

[Dave Klein]

It's a little bit by design. I mean, we, we, we've, we've debated, you know, we've debated whether. I think it's very easy to get seduced by like driving up your top line number and lose sight of a profit. But B, like, what life do you want to have surrounding that business? Like, we, we teach management. Management's really hard, you know, like keeping people, getting the right people, keeping them motivated, keeping them inspired, having them hold the same standards you would hold, etc. And I do think the, the reality of not having an existing business at this moment in time, with AI seemingly transforming industry after industry by the week, we've sort of challenged ourselves to say, well, how big a business can we make that's still massively high quality and doesn't actually require a lot of people to be involved? And so we're just really selective of, hey, can we get this? There's someone with expertise on email sequences and newsletters. I don't want to figure that out with AI. I'd like to have them help fix that problem. But in terms of ongoing employees, like we're. The thesis emerging for us is like we think this business could be pretty big, impacting lots of leaders without taking us out of the primary seats. Yep.

[Mara Klein]

And so there we might have traded some speed for refusing to not be the hands on person present handling every, each and every email inquiry from our students. But that again was intentional. Like let's learn, let's not assume, let's like be incredibly close to the people we're lucky enough to work with. And it doesn't, you know, we're not attorneys where like the course ends and that's it. Like we've connected people with other job opportunities. We've helped people interview, we've had people come back through because they're going through a transition. Like I love that part. Like it's just built, it's building relationships. So there's no end point. Yes. In trying these different things about like what resonates and how should we grow and how can we be helpful to most people and still be on sidelines and in the, in the audience for every theater production for our kids. I think that like the email expertise is the perfect example. Like bring the science, help us reach more people. But we're still going to be doing the writing.

[Christian Health]

Oh, that's so good. I like it. Yeah. I mean you're just building something that you want to be a part of anyway, which is like if you grow it too big, maybe it doesn't changes out of that realm and you don't want to be a part of it. It's not as fun. So.

[Dave Klein]

And we both did the big thing, you know, Like I, you know, Marv, I don't know, eight, ten years. I did it for over two decades of just, it transforms. It goes from. I remember coming home on weekends after working at Bridgewater and like wanting to do something like in the garage that I could physically build and complete over the weekend. Because so much of my work was like overseeing people who are overseeing people who are overseeing people who are doing work, you know, and you're so, it's, it's cool, it's like strategic and all those other things. But you're like, it's not tangible, it's not real. It's hard to see when it begins and ends. And now we have that in our business, you know. And I, to your point, I'm not, I don't think Mara are thinking about like what's our exit. I'm like, I don't imagine not doing this. I don't imagine not writing. I don't imagine not speaking. I don't imagine not coaching anytime in the near future. So I'm not trying to figure out like how I wrap a multiple around that so I can stop.

[Mara Klein]

Yeah, right. I think it, it means so much to me that when people write to us, not just the day the course ends or the week after, it doesn't say things like the frameworks in the management accelerator. It says like, Dave and Mar listened to every question. I felt like they could solve my problem. I felt like they've been in my shoes. And so we are actively pursuing ways to teach others that can't join our live programs. We're hopeful that the newsletter can have this, like, unlocking effect for anyone that it reaches. But for now, yeah, the. The goal is to just stubbornly and thoughtfully work together to see what we can grow and still balance that with spending a lot of time outside and being fit and being present with our kids. So I think. And it's an amazing time to be building a business because there's a lot of leverage at our disposal.

[Christian Health]

Definitely. So I know we teased a little bit about this membership. So you have, you were just mentioning the newsletter. You have this cohort based course that I believe you're still running through Maven. Yep. And now did you guys actually end up launching a membership off the back end of that?

[Mara Klein]

Not yet.

[Christian Health]

Okay. I know Dave has mentioned it before in passing, so I was curious.

[Mara Klein]

It's true. No, the high bar has slowed us down, admittedly. So, yes, we teach the management accelerator, which is a month long. That's for more experienced leaders. Those alums turned to us and said, but what about the person I've newly promoted on my team? Like, what is the 8020 solution for them? We've developed fundamentals and we'll teach that for the third time coming up. Intentionally, sort of a shorter program again, kind of the 8020 you can spend forever reading, like, here, go do these things. The third piece of like, how can we support you in a way that is like all signal and not noise is. Is now my rock. Right. I don't think every, every founder has their own system, but Dave's smirking because as of yesterday, I don't think it was clear quite who owned that rock. But it's mine now. I woke up and it's mine. It's on the whiteboard. Oh, 1:00 here.

[Dave Klein]

I'm sure you run into this. I'm sure tons of people who listen run into this. Like, we are not short of good ideas. You know, it's like, how do you say no to a lot of good ideas to say yes to a couple great ones? Like the reason Mar ended up with that rock, because we still think it's a good idea. It's a good idea to have a well curated set of resources, the ability to interact with us at a lower price, to get your questions answered, etc. So we need to see that through. At the same time, we were constantly experimenting. And so in our last management accelerator cohort, the conversation unsurprisingly shifted into AI way, way, way more than it had even four months ago. Where it was interesting in doing a little research for that crazy stat, or crazy two stats, 91% of managers are asking their teams to use AI, experiment with it, use it in some way, try to find cost efficiencies, you know, whatever. 15% of managers themselves use AI. So you have this like giant chasm. And I was at, I was at a speaker training earlier this week or earlier last week, and someone did a 20 minute keynote on how speakers could use AI for their business. Now granted, this room has got, you know, 150, 200 speakers in it. I would bet you that 25% of them write about AI. So you would have thought you would look around the room and see those 25%, like yawning and boredom, frantically scribbling. And I'm like, oh, okay. It feels sometimes like when you're on, when you're writing a lot on social media, it feels like AI happened already. And in reality it is so, so, so early. That hearing that conversation with our leaders where we had some who were literally using it daily and some who asked what ChatGPT was and we thought, well, we're not deep, deep AI experts, but we could, like we have with the rest of the programs, we could play with it, we could come up with real applications, we could take the frameworks we know work in a timeless way and say, how could today's AI make that a little bit faster, a little bit better, et cetera. And so my rock, the reason I don't have the membership thing is also like now going back through our programs and adding in sections on, okay, yes, those practices we just talked about, now here's how you supercharge them with AI. And so those are sort of the two kind of big, call it improvement projects in the house of Klein right now.

[Mara Klein]

And we're excited about it. I think sometimes we can overlap shared ownership, right? It's much easier to just say like, okay, this is yours. So it makes a lot of sense that the relationship lover maximizer in me is now in charge of building out a community and I also have very low tolerance for like noise in my inbox. So making sure things are high signal. We will be putting just. Our goal is always to have like an immense amount of value behind the offer. So when people take our course, they say it's worth 25 times what they paid. That's the goal of the membership. And sort of in that model that Dave disclosed, it's not about people wanting to hang out and get a lot of answers from many on their questions. It's like, I have this problem, how can I solve it? Or I'm looking to hire this talent, how can you help me? So more details to come, but it will be. We've our, you know, we're so fortunate to have this group of like true fans and they are actively help shaping exactly what they'd like to see.

[Christian Health]

More to come, more to come.

[Mara Klein]

Maybe I need a few more hours. Not a lot.

[Christian Health]

Okay, so I have two final questions because this has been awesome, but these, these ones should go pretty quick. So if you were starting again today, is there anything you would do differently? And I know we talked about a couple, but I'm curious to hear like what the main one would be for each of you.

[Dave Klein]

You want to go first?

[Mara Klein]

I should have written sooner. I think every time we've taken a bet, whether it's the newsletter or Dave has been like a sought after coach for so long. Why not like connect him with the right kind of CEOs and just actively writing more and sooner would have been a big amplifier for our business. Not thinking through. I was still a person that like loved to hold things in my head. Like I knew all of my, I knew all the students like personally, like where they were going, what, what they were interviewing for, what was next. And I should have thought ahead to the scale of like how can I support all these individuals I care for so deeply right after the course? So now obviously we're retrofitting that. So if I had thought about scale when it was new, which was harder to do, I think those lessons would have been accelerated. So writing more sooner, like owning that I was a co founder, not just like hopping in and just thinking about people well beyond the slides in a more programmatic way, I think I would.

[Dave Klein]

Have said and quantity leads to quality. But when you find a winner, you have to double down. So I think I was too precious early on about like, oh, the perfect tweet the perfect thread. And like, just as an example, the most viral thing I ever wrote was about my dad and his sort of like, breaking the chain on alcoholism. It has nothing to do with my lane. I wrote it because one of my friends, Blake Birch, wrote something about his dad on Father's Day. I wrote it in 15min minutes and it was just like genuine and it was authentic. And I like shouted off into the ether. And then I remember sitting there 12 hours later with Mar being like, my phone is going to melt. They had like 25 million views. It was the craze, like an order of magnitude bigger than anything I'd ever written. And the thing is, like, it was such a good lesson for me. It was my dad sort of winking at me. I'm pretty sure he was just like, quantity leads to quality. Like, you had no, like, no part of you. If you had thought about that for 10 more minutes, you wouldn't even posted it. And so you got to put it out there to figure out what works. And then the sort of back to the threads point when it works is like the time. So many of us are like, okay, now what's the next thing? Like, what's the next shiny thing? Like, oh, I've kind of figured out Twitter. What I should do is go to LinkedIn or I should start a newsletter or whatever else. And like, no, when you figure it out is when you stomp on the gas and do that thing. And so I think that's the other of. I think behind the scenes there's probably a handful of like, dead ends of things that were, if I can look back critically at myself, say, like, oh, you were sort of wasting 25% of your capacity, like, chasing shiny objects that had actually worked ever going to be meaningfully better or additive to the thing that you had already figured out. Like, you have a program with an 83 NPS and people think it's worth 25 times what you pay. The only thing you should do is try to get more of them in there and like, have more evangelists. You know what I mean? Like, so. And if it wasn't lined to that, like, why were we doing it?

[Christian Health]

Such a good nugget. I love that. So true though. And that was a great thread. Like, so heartwarming and like, thoughtful and just makes you think about your own life and loved it. So I'm glad you wrote that one as far as. So for the final question, I always love asking people about their tech stack. So I know you guys use Beehive for Your email and then obviously you're using Maven. What other kinds of tools are you kind of using on a day to day basis or just in general?

[Mara Klein]

Well, I spend most of my mornings with a lot of coffee and Claude, but I do.

[Dave Klein]

Yeah, we're wild. I mean, in many ways, wildly unsophisticated. Part of that is, part of that's by design. Like what we, what we teach at like a systems level. Like we take a very systematic approach to management. Most systems fail because people overcomplicate them so genuinely. Like our, we're in notion for like tracking content, having content, calendars, things of that nature. We use fireflies because a lot of these conversations will generate nuggets, will generate new thread ideas, will generate things that we can turn into content. Or it also gives us a lot of leverage to go back to, to dos with our CEOs or our leaders, etc. You know, there's some other things around the edges. You know, like we will use type form for the occasional survey. We'll use loom for recording like, you know, snippets of videos. But again, it's all. We're not super, super sophisticated. You know, a few plugins for social to like be able to like find my people and their posts in a more easy way.

[Christian Health]

It's awesome. I love the coffee and Claude thing. It's great.

[Mara Klein]

He's an incredible intern, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think that it's been such a fun and fast arc for me from dabbling to like committing to the leverage that you can get. Right. I mean, we'll always type faster than you can and poke holes in your thinking. Incredibly grateful. Pretty cool to watch our teenagers use it too.

[Christian Health]

That's awesome. Well, Dave, Mar, you guys have built an incredible business. Thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing some of your story with the audience.

[Mara Klein]

Appreciate you, Christian Health. Thank you.

[Christian Health]

All right, thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, we also had Dave and Mar come into the Growth in Reverse Pro community where they graciously shared a bunch of LinkedIn growth secrets, including doing live audits of three members, LinkedIn profiles and content. And when you join Growth in Reverse Pro, you can watch the recording right away. Thanks for listening and we'll see you in the next episode.