← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Lessons From Building a $100M Newsletter Empire—with Sean Griffey of Industry Dive
00:51:02
Loading summary
Transcript123 lines
- [00:00]
Sean Griffey
Launched it in 2012 with five publications. Grew that to a little over a hundred million in revenue. We kind of got big.
- [00:08]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, just a little bit.
- [00:10]
Sean Griffey
Listen, anyone who's in newsletters understands the power of when you hit send, things happen.
- [00:14]
Podcast Host 1
You can have 100,000 people sign up to your email list, but that doesn't mean that's your audience.
- [00:18]
Sean Griffey
People tell me they have a 70% open rate and these click rates. I'm like, I just don't believe you. I don't believe you understand what's happening to your newsletter. I've been over the last five years bothered by the creator economy term. I don't think there's anything new about the creator economy. Right.
- [00:34]
Podcast Host 1
Like, are you still bullish on newsletters, though?
- [00:37]
Sean Griffey
Well.
- [00:42]
Podcast Host 1
Sean Griffey of the Industry Drive, welcome to the Growth and Reverse Podcast. Excited to have you here.
- [00:47]
Sean Griffey
I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [00:48]
Podcast Host 1
So for the few people who might not know who you are, do you want to kind of summarize the last 13 or so years of your life?
- [00:57]
Sean Griffey
I'll go back maybe even further. Been 20 some years that I've been in digital media and primarily newsletters. So I started with a business called Fierce Markets that had email newsletters in 2004, primarily at the time covering the telecom space. And then we launched, and Fierce is known more now today for probably life science publications and healthcare publications. They have. But I started there and after about six years, some of my partners there, we grew the business, we sold it to a bigger media company and then we ran it for a while. And in 2012 we left and launched Industry Dive, which was our version of trying to tackle two things. One was a mobile opportunity. If people remember back to 2012, at this point, Facebook was all the rage. And the question on Facebook was, could they make money on mobile? Because they were a desktop website and people didn't know how to attract mobile. And so we said mobile would be one way to enter into new markets, be really great on mobile. And the other way was to build out newsletters and email, which is inherently mobile in its own right, which sounds silly now, but in 2012, those are the things we talked about. So built industry dive, launched it in 2012 with five publications and in different industries grew that to over 30 from zero to a little over 100 million in revenue, and then sold it to a company called informa in 2020. Kit.
- [02:30]
Podcast Host 1
Incredible. That's huge growth. Well, you kind of mentioned it. I was going to ask this before, but why launch with five verticals versus just one newsletter and kind of focus your energy versus splitting it across five.
- [02:45]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, I mean, the hard part when you launch with five is they all suck. You know, like, they were all. There's three of us in five publications, right? And some freelancers. So you can imagine what the day one publication was. But we had this, you know, we really had this belief that niche media could work and would really work, but that by definition, niche is small. And so if you wanted to build something really ambitious and we wanted to build $100 million business, like, that was the goal. You had to be in a lot of niches. And the one thing that I was really, you know, my partners and I were really afraid of, and what we've seen a lot is there's a lot of people that say, I'm going to do this one, and when I perfect it, I'll do the second. And when I. That one's great. I'll do the third. And then you wake up and it's been 10 years and you're still on the first because none of them are ever perfect. Right. And so we launched with five just to really stretch ourselves and say, like, this is the ambition. It's to do this more than once. And we can't get trapped into wanting to be great at one. Wow.
- [03:50]
Podcast Host 2
I'm curious, with three of you and five newsletters, you were doing these daily, right? Publishing these daily, or was it at the start just like a few times a week?
- [03:59]
Sean Griffey
They were all daily. Wow.
- [04:00]
Podcast Host 2
So five daily newsletters for three people. That's wild.
- [04:03]
Sean Griffey
And we had some freelancers.
- [04:05]
Podcast Host 2
Okay.
- [04:06]
Sean Griffey
To be. To be fair, there were people that. Other content people that wrote. But yeah, the mornings were really newsletters, and then the afternoon was how do we grow a business? And that was the first. You know, three years, for sure, was every morning was newsletters, and then the afternoon was get better.
- [04:24]
Podcast Host 1
Was there a moment where you're like, okay, this was. This is going to work? Did it take a good chunk of time to see, like, okay, we actually are onto something here? Or did you know right away?
- [04:33]
Sean Griffey
No, we didn't know right away. I'm actually really impressed and jealous by all the people who do it now that really monetize their newsletters in six months. Right. And they grow 100,000 subscribers right away. And you hear stories about this. That wasn't our experience at all. You know, like, we really didn't do, you know, much for the first year. It really took a year for us to have something that started to resonate with audiences. And when it started working, I tell us all the time, I mean, these are news publications covering niche industries. So we had one in the utility space, and we got a story really wrong. And within 15 minutes of it, it was on Duke Power, you know, which is the utility in North Carolina. And within 15 minutes of us sending out the newsletter, their PR teams were calling us. And I was like, hey, this is really bad, but this also means we matter. You know, like, there's something really great about this that, like, we screwed up a story and they were within 15 minutes, like, you know, tracking us down to tell us what idiots we were. And we were. It was a bad story, but it was like, I'm like, this, this has staying power now. People, People care.
- [05:46]
Podcast Host 2
People are reading, paying attention.
- [05:47]
Sean Griffey
Yep. Yeah.
- [05:49]
Podcast Host 1
How did you get the newsletters in people's inboxes in the beginning? Like, what were those early growth levers that you were using? Yeah, yeah.
- [05:58]
Sean Griffey
You know, I mean, I think one of the things that's funny is that, I mean, the secret of audience development to me is you've got to be in like 20 channels all the time because, like, what works today is not going to work tomorrow. There were all kinds of things in the early days, like, you know, if you go, if you go back to the newsletter People of 2005, we were, you know, all pay per click gurus, right? There was an arbitrage on, you know, Google AdWords that you could do. By 2012 that was sort of gone. The SaaS people started bidding up all the words and you couldn't, you couldn't afford to be in Google AdWords anymore. And so we did different things. I mean, I think for us, one of the biggest things that we did which doesn't, you know, again, doesn't work today, is we bought LinkedIn groups, right? And so for business audiences, right? Like, LinkedIn groups are kind of a wasteland of spam now. But in 2012, there were actually real people in there. The, the funny thing is, is that a lot of them were started in 2008 by people who were unemployed that just wanted a job in an industry, right? And so they would start the, you know, retail industry professional group. And by 2012, it had 200,000 people in it. And you could, you know, that weren't being monetized, weren't being leveraged at all, that were just sitting there. And so we would buy these LinkedIn groups off of people and use them as audience development channels. You can't do that today. It used to be LinkedIn. Let you send one mess, one email a week to the members of the group. And, and it was, it was literally on a clock to the second from the last email you sent. And so we would be there like waiting, you know, because you didn't want to wait an extra hour and then lose like, you know, if you lost an hour every week, suddenly you'd lose a message over time. So we would, you know, 1101, you know, one week, 1101 in one second. The next week we were sitting there with our message, which was audience development, subscribe to our newsletters, you know, and go, so.
- [07:56]
Podcast Host 1
But that's so funny. Yeah, yeah, I heard you actually mention this on another podcast. And so I went on LinkedIn today and I was like, all right, let me look at these groups. Because I had to see there are like 70 that industry dive has, if I counted properly, and they're still posting in there.
- [08:14]
Sean Griffey
We still put content in and they still drive some, but it's not like it was before, you know, yeah, we'll do it because sometimes, you know, the content will show up in people's feeds and do things. But you know, when you could send a direct message, I mean, listen, anyone who's in newsletters understands the power of when you hit send, things happen, right? The power of sending messages to these group members was like, you know, really great. In 2014, 2015, at what point were.
- [08:40]
Podcast Host 2
You starting to invest in like paid growth? Like this sounds like a real organic strategy for, I mean, you bought the groups. Yes, but then the messaging was very organic. You weren't like paying to get in front of them in that regard. So when did you start scaling up with, with paid growth?
- [08:57]
Sean Griffey
Well, I mean, I think we always did a little bit of paid growth, but. But we were bootstrapped business, so we didn't have real budgets to do it. And we weren't, you know, we weren't as sophisticated as some of the people who are doing it as the arbitrage today. Right. Like, you see some of the folks that really have their LTV and CACs and all of this down to science, and they're willing to, to bet on the mechanics of it. I think we were a little bit more organic. I mean, we did paid. But I'm still a believer that organic, you know, needs to be the biggest channel that you have if you want to have a real audience. Right. If you want to have a long term audience that feels connected to you and your publications, organic needs to be a good part of it. So we spent a lot of Time trying to optimize the organic outreach. Spent more time trying to get people to think we had a good product and that they wanted to share it. Yeah. And that when people saw it, they wanted to care. Like, I always thought that was much more important. But we were probably spending, you know, a couple thousand, you know, I mean, you're probably under 10,000 a year the first year. Okay. So maybe, you know, 500 to a thousand a month, you know, on paid channels, like even from the beginning. But that was big money back at the time when you didn't have any money. Yeah, absolutely.
- [10:12]
Podcast Host 2
I don't doubt it.
- [10:13]
Podcast Host 1
So it sounds like. And you. I, we are in agreement with this, that content and getting people some kind of deliverable that they are super excited to share is like one of the most important things. I have been calling it insanely valuable content. And it sounds like you have kind of the same mind frame around that. I'm curious how over time the content got better. Like, what things did you improve upon or add to add the extra layers of quality to it?
- [10:40]
Sean Griffey
You know, for us, and these are news. And we were hiring journalists. Right. And so it started with us and a couple freelancers. But it's a virtuous cycle, right? Like the audience grows, you know, you can monetize them better. You invest more in content. Invest more in content, the audience grows. And so for us, I mean, I remember our first editorial hire was, you know, an editor that like basically managed all freelancers. There's one person managing all five publications. All of the publications were written by freelancers. And like, we, we, I mean, the best thing we did with the content was I stopped writing, you know, and like, people were good at it, started doing stuff. Right. But you know, as the publications grew, we put more of it back into hiring teams and, and additional people and we pushed for more ambitious stories. Right. So it's, it's not a. Hey, we're just covering what happened. Like now we're doing more in depth interviews and we're doing real research and we're doing better photography and all of it sort of improved. And that's still kind of the industry dive model. I mean, some of our publications will have seven or eight people writing them, some of them will have two. And the people that have two want to have seven. Right. Like they, they want their publication to be bigger and, and the hardest thing to tell them is like, we've got to grow the publication first.
- [11:55]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah.
- [11:56]
Sean Griffey
You know, like, we can't, we can't hire seven people, you know, and Be losing money off of this. Like you got to earn your way to it.
- [12:03]
Podcast Host 2
So what was your. In the beginning there or around that time frame where you start saying you're starting to invest in talent, what would you say? The kind of. The rough ratio between investing in people and quality and content versus investing in like, say something like paid growth or any kind of growth. What would that look like?
- [12:24]
Sean Griffey
So, so growth. I think there's like two, two forms of investing in there. Right. One is investing in paid growth for the paid channels, like for the platforms or marketing spend wherever it is. The other is investing in people to manage the paid, like to manage growth and how we hired people before we spent money on it. And again to the point of, listen, if we can optimize the referral program, if we can optimize landing pages when people come, like, if we can optimize partnerships, you know, with events and other prop people that have it. We spent money on people to do all of that before. We spent money like real money on, on paid channels. Right. The channels were, you know, paid channels, just one of like five or six different channels that we, we'd be in. And we spent money optimizing the other four first. But I also say like, you know, the one thing people never talk about that we spent money on is sales. Right, Right. I think there's a, you know, there's a, there's a real thing of like content and audience and you know, in media in general. Like, you know, I always fear that there's like a lot of people that say if I create good content and I draw an audience, the rest will take care of itself and it doesn't. Right. Like, you have to think about monetization at the exact same time as you think about who am I writing for and what content's going to resonate for them. Right. Like all three of those things have to work. And so, you know, in the early days, we hired sales reps too. Like we hired salespeople to go out and try to raise, you know, try to sell our products. I think there's, you know, among, among folks who launch newsletters, you know, and, and are in the early stages. I don't know if they think about that as much.
- [14:07]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, I, I think you, you've said this before of like traffic versus audience and building extremely valuable content and being able to put out a product that people are interested in sharing and referring is super key. And I don't think this gets talk talked about enough today is like, you can have 100,000 people sign up to your email list, but that doesn't mean that's your audience. Like, they could have just signed up through, I don't know, recommendations or like a very low quality channel. And so I think I really enjoy how you, how you frame that.
- [14:38]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, I think, you know, like, I've been over the last five years bothered by the creator economy term in the sense that I don't think there's anything new about the creator economy. Right. Like, you know, Joe Rogan and the barstool stoolies aren't much different than what Howard Stern had 30 years ago. Right. And Martha Stewart was selling things based off of her brand and Oprah was 20, 30 years ago. Like, that stuff's not new. Kiplinger was like the OG of newsletters. Like they mailed them 100 years ago. Right. It's all there. But I do think there's a, a piece now that resonates with me more that it's like a community economy and it's a connection economy. And I think where a lot of the newsletters that just get a hundred thousand without having a connection, I think that's what they miss out on. I think the best people in the creator economy really have a connection with their audience in some ways and that those audience feel a part of. I mean, there's something powerful with a newsletter. It says I'm a subscriber. Like you're identifying yourself as part of that. Right. And. And the people who deliberately subscribe and who seek it out and who want to be a part of it, I think are so much more valuable for us than the folks that you kind of just jam in in a frictionless way where they don't have real intent or connection with you.
- [16:06]
Podcast Host 1
Do you think there are any additional ways that you can build loyalty with an audience versus, I mean, aside from the content piece?
- [16:13]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think, like, you know, it's really interesting that I've, I've always looked back at, you know, people like Morning Brew and how do people. Why did people feel so connected with it? And how do they tap into a zeitgeist at a time? And I don't know if it was a referral program where they got ambassadors there who felt like they were representing they were a piece of it. I think there's, I think there's a, a million different ways you can make people feel connected somehow to you. I mean, I think the best podcasts that we all listen to, we feel connection because it feels like you're invited to participate in a conversation and that, you know, the people even. Even though you have no way of actually participating in the conversation. Right. It's like a one way sort of thing. And so I think, you know, when I think of newsletters today, I think of what is the hook that's going to, going to change us from talking at the audience to feel like they're participating in it. Even though there's, you know, other than replying, there's zero ways to participate in an email. And I think there's some people that do that really well and some don't. But that's, you know, if I knew that magic bullet, like I'd be doing it again.
- [17:20]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think Morning Brew did super well in the beginning. Well, at least for me when I first came across it, I remember there was no one delivering news like that. The personality was there. They were explaining things like I was a youngin who didn't know what I was talking about, which was very true. And so I think they just hit on a nerve where everything else was so stale and this was like, here's. It might not be like a person behind it, but there's a brand here and they actually understand how you think about things and what you care about. So I think that resonates a lot.
- [17:51]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, it didn't feel like you're reading like the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. It was a little bit more edgy, a little bit more. There's more personality. The Hustle did that really well as well when they were kind of battling it out with Morning Brew to kind of get those sort of younger 20 somethings business people engage. So yeah, I think there's a lot behind that.
- [18:10]
Podcast Host 1
Do you think there were any or are there any unscalable things you did in the early days that you would recommend people doing still or that maybe just worked then because of the time.
- [18:20]
Sean Griffey
There was a period where we emailed every subscriber and asked how we were doing. Like you would get an email from me and I would respond back and forth. If you, if you responded to it, I would respond back and forth. Incredibly not it labor intensive and not scalable. But there's a fight to like make people realize that there's people behind this and that it's not a corporation sending, you know, sending marketing material or sending something that there's real humans in there. So I would, you know, every subscriber would get an email from me asking for feedback and questions and what they liked and didn't And I would spend hours like going back and forth, like, you know, I mean, it felt important to do that at the time. And I wanted people to reply, but I didn't want them to reply a second time, you know, because I'm spending so much time on it. So I'd send out this email, they'd reply, I'd acknowledge their email and have a thing. And it's like, if they'd like come back again the second time, like, oh my God, I'm gonna have a new best friend that like wants to email me all, all week. But you know, I like, that seemed really important at the time.
- [19:27]
Podcast Host 1
Do you remember anything like major that came out of those conversations that like helped you either change something or add a new content type or anything like that?
- [19:35]
Sean Griffey
You know, definitely stories and where, you know, what was important to them. And I think some of it was eye opening in like what we were missing in the industries. You know, I mean, we were writing these for people who were experts in their industry. Some of them had 20, 25 years and we weren't. I mean, candidly weren't and still aren't as, you know, expert in the industries as the people who've spent their whole careers in there. And so just the feedback on like, what we're missing in the stories and the angles that we don't see and how naive we were and some of our takes on what's going on were incredibly helpful in making the product sharper than it was before. I also think the things that came out of those, not just that they then would build trust and they'd start to share us with other people or talk with us, but we had real partnerships that came from, you know, discussions that led to access to new audiences or money. Like, people would come, say, like, well, I'll promote your newsletter if you do this for me. And suddenly like, we'd hit like a growth curve because the something them promoting the newsletter was like really big for us. And what they wanted was nothing. You know, just having people root for you kind of changes how things go.
- [20:56]
Podcast Host 2
I've got a bit of a follow up to what you're saying there when you're talking about the industries and being experts in it. So I heard you mention, when you're launching a new industry, you have to have a minimum of, I think, an editor and a reporter.
- [21:08]
Sean Griffey
If that's, if that's correct, that's what we do now. I mean, that wasn't day one. Right?
- [21:13]
Podcast Host 2
Right.
- [21:13]
Sean Griffey
Yeah. You got to that point and do.
- [21:16]
Podcast Host 2
You, when you were Hiring those people, how important is it that they know a lot or a little about that industry?
- [21:24]
Sean Griffey
So in general, we try to hire one person that's got experience in the industry. Among those two roles, it doesn't matter if it's the reporter or the editor. We want one of the two of them to be experts in our world. I think the number one thing I always look for is people who would get wonky on something. Right. Like, I would. I would hire someone who didn't know the industry, but if they. If they could come in when we're talking to them and interviewing them and they would show that they got really wonky about something, any topic, it could have. It could have been like, you know, college football, that they're, like, studying high school recruits and they're, you know, and how they project and they go. It could be something about a totally different industry or a passion. But if. If you. If you really demonstrated that you liked to get deep into something, all of the industries, like, you know, it's like you look and say, like, well, this industry is boring or this industry is boring until you dig at it a little bit, and then you find that there's, like, they're all really fascinating on some level. Right. And so we always believed, if this is someone who could get really wonky about something, as soon as they get their teeth into this, they'll get wonky about it. Right? That's always worked interesting.
- [22:34]
Podcast Host 2
And by wonky, you just mean, like, they get a little bit crazy about, you know, the depth of.
- [22:39]
Sean Griffey
They just go down the rabbit hole in the depth and what is going on here and why and what does it, like, mean? And, you know, my. My co founder, one of my two co founders, Ryan Wilmson, used to ask people, like, among your friend group, what are you the expert of? And it was. It was. He was getting to the same thing. He, like, wants to know, like, what. What do they turn to you for as, like, oh, this is something crazy. Dylan's the person to ask that about.
- [23:06]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I get that. That's cool. So it's more almost somewhat of an expert. Being an expert is important, but more so almost like a characteristic of the person, like their, their level of almost insanity when it comes to, like, how. How deep they're willing to go on something that's. That's interesting.
- [23:26]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, it's like a. It's combination of curiosity and tenacity. You know, like, it's. It's sort of. Do you, you know, are you so curious that you can't let it rest.
- [23:36]
Podcast Host 2
Right.
- [23:37]
Sean Griffey
And that, that, like, works really well for journalists.
- [23:41]
Podcast Host 1
I love that as a question for people who. Come on. That's such a good one. And I, I don't hear a lot of people mentioning that one, but it's a, it's an interesting one. Like, what. What are you willing to go down the rabbit hole for? And like, how deep have you gone? How many Reddit subreddits are you part of that kind of thing?
- [23:56]
Podcast Host 2
And I feel like those types of people are more rare than they are common. I remember Sampar from the Hustle saying in a keynote speech where he had hired some. Somebody for the Hustle. I think his name was Zach. And he just wanted to like, guard this guy and protect him under all costs because he was wonky, right? Like, he was going out there getting these interesting stories and scoops and like digging and digging in, and then he could also write, so then writing a really good story about it. So I could see that being. When you find those people, you gotta, you gotta hang onto them, hire them and hang onto them.
- [24:27]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, absolutely.
- [24:28]
Podcast Host 1
So I guess moving on to monetization of sorts, a lot of the people listening are probably running some kind of sponsorships for their newsletter, their media business, whatever. I know you guys in the early days were practically 100% sponsor supported, if you will. I feel like that's changed slightly, but I think that's still a heavy portion of the sponsorship or the monetization model. Is that right?
- [24:50]
Sean Griffey
I mean, I, I'd say still 100% marketing supported. Right. In that marketers, by and large, pay for everything in just in different forms and in different ways. Some of it's not directly tied to the audience, but tied to our, you know, now the expertise we've built about the audience and, and about the industries. But yeah, it's al. Always been marketing supported. It just felt, you know, that that was the, you know, that was what we knew. You know, I think there's. Some people are really good with subscriptions, some people are really good with events. Some people we, we knew online advertising, marketing and lead generation. So we built it around that.
- [25:32]
Podcast Host 1
It's awesome. You guys have done a million different things in terms of sponsorships. Like, I just subscribed to one of the newsletters a couple hours ago, and on the thank you page it said, go check out one of these three reports. And two of them were sponsored. And I was like, no one does this stuff.
- [25:49]
Sean Griffey
Those. A lot of the things we did. And again, like my co founders, you know, were better. My co founder, one of my two co founders, was great on the revenue side, but one of the things that we really had is that the revenue opportunities outpaced the size of our audience. Meaning, like, we didn't have a sales problem. We had like a, how fast can we grow the audience and what can we do for the audience? And so a lot of the things that we did were sort of, how do we do things that the audience really wants that can capture some of these dollars and the co registration, you know, on the signup pages where they come in and capture leads, and then, you know, in some of those cases, we'll nurture those leads from there. Those were one of the things that we did just because we couldn't, you know, the audience wasn't big enough to serve all of the demand our advertisers had for putting their content in front of it.
- [26:42]
Podcast Host 1
So I think a lot of.
- [26:43]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah, I was gonna say first world problem.
- [26:47]
Podcast Host 1
Great problem to have. I think a lot of people get stuck with just like thinking, oh, it's, you know, there's a sponsor place and placement inside the newsletter. Maybe we have something on the. The landing page or whatnot. But there are so many things you guys are doing. Is there. Are there any specific ones that you think are super underrated or that performed really well that you think others should be testing out?
- [27:09]
Sean Griffey
Well, I think one that's actually proven really popular with the audience and then also is really popular with the clients is a product we call our trend lines. And again, like, you know, a lot of our. If you think a lot, you know, these are. A lot of our customers are SaaS, software providers. Right. So they're in the HR, you know, our HR publication. There's a lot of payroll and HR software people, the work days of the world, and others that want to get in front of HR executives and they want lead generation. And the trend line was one of our ways that we repurposed old content to create lead magnets for people. And what we would do is we would talk with our editorial team and say, what are the five biggest trends that you guys are covering today that you want to talk about in this case, the HR industry? And they say, here are these five trends. And say, okay, so if we're covering these pretty religiously, we probably have a lot of content. Like, sure, we absolutely have a lot of content. And so we've ended up creating micro sites around those trends that are gated and they're sponsored by individual clients and they get updated, you know, every Two months on, here's what's happening on X Trend. And our audience will go through the gate and they'll say, okay, it is sponsored by Paylocity or whoever it is, and we're welcome to give our need because these are trends that we really care about. And what we're saying is we've got sort of a microsite that captures everything that's going on in the trend. So it's been really popular with the audience because it's literally the biggest trends in their industry. It's updated regularly. We talk about what's changing in the trends in these small microsites. And there may be six stories, you know, behind the microsites that kind of tell the 101+, you know, the deeper stuff, what's going on. And then the advertisers just really love it because their solutions often, often relate to one of those trends. And so they can get something very specific in front of something very specific around a specific topic. And it's worked out for both. And for us, you know, it's reusing content that we've already written.
- [29:28]
Podcast Host 2
Right. Is this kind of like almost like an advertorial type of play, or is it.
- [29:33]
Sean Griffey
Not quite. It's all editorial content. Right. So it's not, you know, our journalists aren't writing about the vendors. They're writing about what's happening in the industry. It's really just news stories. You know, it may be talking about M and A. And we'll say, here's the five, you know, biggest trends in, you know, in the food industry on, you know, ingredients. Like, here's. Here's what's happening in ingredient M and A and how that's shaping consumer. Consumer interests are shaping what ingredients people care about and what that means in M and A. And suddenly, you know, our audience really wants to read it. But there's people who want, you know, ingredient companies who want to want to know who cares about this, because whoever cares about this topic is our customer. And so it's worked out really well.
- [30:20]
Podcast Host 1
So as you update those, do people just. The readers get tagged as, like, that interest, and then you just send them the new ones? If you update it or add a.
- [30:27]
Sean Griffey
New article, we can, but it tends to be, you know, it's not the same. You know, usually it's not the same people. It's new people that discover it. We'll talk about it in the newsletter that it's been updated and some of them are the same, but often it's new folks.
- [30:43]
Podcast Host 2
And then is that data from the people that are going to those sites is that shared with the advertiser.
- [30:50]
Sean Griffey
When they log in and register? Right. Just like a lead download page. This is the only thing that we do that's. Well, one of the only things we do that's gated, and so people will come in. And I think it's really important when you're giving someone's name to an advertiser that they actually know that you're giving their name to it. And so we try to be incredibly upfront with that, you know, and. And the. In the trend lines in particular, there's like a. A big logo and a big acknowledgment and checkbox that says we're sharing this. Yeah.
- [31:25]
Podcast Host 2
So it's all on the up and up. That makes sense.
- [31:28]
Sean Griffey
Yeah.
- [31:29]
Podcast Host 1
This is awesome. I just found one for the banking industry that's a really, really cool, cool product. Great way to repurpose and make money from it as well.
- [31:39]
Sean Griffey
Yeah. And it's, you know, honestly, it's a. It's a great way to make sure our content teams are aligned with what the sales teams care about and for us to check that the audience actually cares. Because, you know, for us small teams, we always talk from an editorial standpoint, like, what stories are we going to own in the industry? Because we can't cover every story in the industry. So we, we talk with our editorial teams a couple times a year about what are the stories now that we think matter, that we want our audience to know we're experts on. And if something happens related to this trend or story, they come to us. And so we talk about that all the time. And then we talk with the sales team about is this in alignment with what, you know, does the audience that cares about these trends align with who our advertisers are trying to reach? And we'll never tell the editorial team, like, what stories they have to cover or who they need to write about. And we'll never tell them to write a good story about an advertiser or do something. In fact, I don't tell them to write about anything. But we'll tell them which audiences they have to write it to. Right. And we're saying, like, you're writing for this person, this job title, this job function, and if that doesn't all align with the three of them, we make changes. And the trend line is one of those sort of perfect alignments of if this works, it's because we've got everything aligned.
- [33:01]
Podcast Host 1
Makes sense. Yeah, I like that. I guess on the topic of sponsorships, do you feel like it's getting harder to. Or like, do you feel like the market's a little bit less easy to get sponsors from at this point? Like, what does the advertising market look like for you compared to, you know, you've been doing this for 12, 13 years. So, like, five years ago, 10 years ago, is it better, worse, easier? What do you think?
- [33:26]
Sean Griffey
I don't think it's ever easy.
- [33:30]
Podcast Host 1
I'm glad you said that.
- [33:33]
Sean Griffey
You know, people who are doing this today don't think you've missed the easy time. Like, none of us thought it was easy before. I think if you have a publication that resonates with real people, the easiest thing that happens is the marketers who are trying to reach that audience also read your publication and they see that it's great and they want to be a part of it. Right. The CEOs want to be a part of it in our case. Right. I know not everyone has a B2B publication, but for us, it's like a lot of our best clients came because the CEO of a publication told their marketers, you need to be in retail dive, or you need to be in, you know, this dive. So it's. It's certainly not easy. I mean, there are times where marketing dollars go up and down and newsletters come in vogue and out of vogue. But what's always in vogue is like, reaching a really specific targeted audience. And if you can prove that you have it and people know, then you're gonna find, you know, you're gonna find partners.
- [34:29]
Podcast Host 2
Yeah. What's the other? Because I know you've talked as well about some other things that you have done. Like, one thing that caught my interest was you mentioned a cyber security company. At one point, at least, you guys were kind of doing a white label newsletter for them with your content team. So can you talk a little bit about that and. Cause I think there's a. There's a whole other unlock here for people who have maybe a smaller content team revenue opportunity that they could explore as well.
- [34:57]
Sean Griffey
Yeah. You know, I mean, it started for us of thinking of, okay, are our customers or marketers? And so then thinking of, like, what are their challenges that they have as marketers and what do they have budget for? I mean, those are the two things. Like, what are their challenges and what do they have money for? And for us, you know, the start of this, it was always, they want to reach a specific audience and they have a hard time reaching them. And that's what we did really well, at the beginning was, was we, we built an audience of people they wanted to reach and then we gave them access to it. But other problems they had is they have complex stories of their own to tell and they're not great at telling it. You know, what we said is we'll help you tell your story, you know, and, and so we built content teams that help them create content that told their story. The other part of it is we, we generate a lot of leads for people in the newsletter. They get these leads and then they say, now what do I do with it? And say, well, you need to build a relationship with it. And we're really good at building relationships. Right. You know, we're really good at connecting them and say like, we'll help you keep the relationship with all of the people that you've, you know, you've paid to acquire as leads or your customers or your potential customers. And so we've done custom newsletters for folks. We've done, you know, full on publications with websites and, and video and more. We will do social campaigns for folks. You know, as the company has evolved, it was how, how do we become partners with, with marketers? And so we have a content studio that I think is one of the best, probably the best in the industry. And I'm pretty biased saying that, but it's actually true. They're the best in the industry and we can sit down with a CMO and say, what problems do you have? And here's how we can solve it. And we've got incredible content creators, we've got incredible marketers, we've got incredible ops and audience development people that can plug in and help your team solve it.
- [36:54]
Podcast Host 2
How big is your team?
- [36:57]
Sean Griffey
Well, also let me say like I stepped away from the day to day of industry dive earlier this year so there's a, you know, another team there. But, but we, you know, overall when we sold the business, there was more than 500 people at Industry Dive with offices in, you know, DC, New York, London, Bangladesh. Like we kind of got big.
- [37:19]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, just a little bit.
- [37:21]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, it's, it's hard to imagine because I mean at one point it was three of us in like a corner grocery store. You know, our first office was like a convenience store that, you know, abandoned convenience store that we rented. We, we got leftover IKEA desks from a, you know, from a startup that had more money. It raised money and like could afford nicer furniture. We took all their stuff. That's wild.
- [37:45]
Podcast Host 1
The good old days, huh?
- [37:46]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, yeah.
- [37:48]
Podcast Host 2
Then six years and $100 million later and you know.
- [37:51]
Sean Griffey
Exactly. Yeah, it's, it's hard to believe. Yep.
- [37:54]
Podcast Host 2
That's amazing.
- [37:55]
Podcast Host 1
I'm curious, the content Studio, just real quick is what if you're willing to offer what percentage of revenue compared to sponsorships would you say that is? Like, what's the mix between those two?
- [38:07]
Sean Griffey
It's not that I'm dodging like there's such a blurred line kind of between some of this. Right. And some of the, some of the best campaigns that we tell people was, hey, listen, we're going to create a marketing strategy for you. We're going to create content and then we're going to distribute that content. Right. And by the way, you know, part of, part of it for us is we have all this first party data on your customers, on your potential customers. So we're going to take all that first party data and that's going to inform the content, the marketing strategy that we're going to create with you that then is going to create the content that then is going to do the distribution and we're going to iterate that the whole time. And so some of these campaigns, you know, you stop and say like, I don't know, is this a, is this an advertising campaign or is this a content creation campaign? It's like a bundle. But if you had to put a number in it, I think the studio is probably 35%, 40% of our, you know, the revenue goes through the studio in some way or form. 60%, 65% of it is outside of it.
- [39:11]
Podcast Host 1
That's so interesting on the, for the customer data, like I know you talk about, especially in B2B, like you have to know who your customer is. Like, have a bunch of first party data about them. What do you think? Like the most important piece of data you could get about your customer is? Or maybe one or two.
- [39:28]
Sean Griffey
Well, I mean, listen, like the number one thing is email address, right? Yeah. You know that, that like is the biggest one there. And, and I say that cheekily because that's your permission to reach out and contact them, which is more important than anything in the push. But it's also important because it's personally identifiable, right? Like there's one email address per person. And so that's like, you know that that's one thing that you say, like, okay, this is your email address and I can sort of build off of that and I can, if I send you an email, then I can say this is your phone and then I can say this is your laptop, you know, and, and go there. So, and, and honestly, for a lot of business, you know, work email addresses, I can stop and say, like, if you sign up with, you know, @salesforce.com I now know your company, I know your industry, I know your company size, I know a lot of information off of the domain. So for B2B, like, that email address can be really important for all of those reasons. But at the end of the day, I mean, I think, you know, job title and job function are really important in B2B. Like what, like what do you do and what can you spend money on? It's one thing to say like, okay, you, you work at Pfizer, but if you're an HR director at Pfizer, that's something a lot different than if you're in drug development at Pfizer. Right. And what budgets you control and what value you have is, is like way different knowing your job title. So I put email and then I put job title. Job function kind of is what we.
- [41:00]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, Now I appreciate it.
- [41:04]
Sean Griffey
You know, I can, like, I, I, I start to get really wonky on, like, the business of all of this. Right. Like, I'm way in the weeds.
- [41:12]
Podcast Host 1
Well, it's clearly paid off, so I think we can all learn a little bit from that.
- [41:17]
Podcast Host 2
I'm wondering what kind of metrics you or the team in general were kind of, like, obsessed with, especially in the early days of industry dive.
- [41:28]
Sean Griffey
Yeah, it's not so different than what everyone looks at now. I mean, I think there's a real balance between being incredibly sophisticated in the, in the metrics you're keeping and then the, you know, keep it simple, stupid kind of philosophy on this. Right. I think we're probably more sophisticated than most, but we're not as sophisticated as some people. Even some people that were most was way smaller than us. We, we really cared about. Are our engaged subscribers growing? We would spend, you know, more time than anything else. We would spend time, like, building out filters on our analytics that would say, here are the job titles we care about in this industry. It, are they, are they engaged with a story? Right. So for us, we would get, you know, something would go viral on Reddit and we would turn the ads off because, you know, the Reddit traffic wasn't who our advertisers want to reach. And so it was almost like work, like they'd get a negative, you know, return on their spend by generic traffic. And so the, the, you know, for us, I mean, it was always like our email list growing. Are the people engaged. But then is it, is it the right people? Are they engaged? We looked at a ton of other metrics, but at the end of the day, like, if you ask me what I care about, engagement of the right job, you know, the right people and however you want to look at, that's the only thing I cared about, right?
- [43:01]
Podcast Host 2
So you'd say, like, that's kind of like the North Star metric. Is the engagement being opens, clicks, replies. And if that segment job title was at least not churning, but if not.
- [43:15]
Sean Griffey
Growing, I think the opens and clicks. And then what did they do with us? Would they register for an event? Would they download content? Would they do different things? And, and you know, I will say the other thing we really cared about, like, I'm, I'm militant about all the bot traffic, about making sure these are actual humans and that our clients were reaching humans and not reaching machines and that we weren't getting lost by that. And I think that's something that a lot of people still overlook. Right. You know, email, that, that's something that's. It hasn't happened recently, but 15 years ago it wasn't. There wasn't as much bot traffic on emails as there are as there is today, right? The, the number of artificial opens and clicks that people have and then they trump. That's around it. You know, it's like, I don't believe any, like, you know, people come in and tell me they have a 70% open rate and these click rates, I'm like, I just don't believe you. I don't believe you understand what's happening to your newsletter. And if I put, you know, if I filter out automated traffic, like, we'll find your real open ring, which is probably still really good, but it's not 70%. I cared about that a lot.
- [44:30]
Podcast Host 1
That's. I mean, if that goes away, your business is dead anyway. So that should be the North Star metric, in my opinion.
- [44:36]
Sean Griffey
Yeah. You know, sadly, if you go to the online ad industry, right, there's fraud everywhere on the web, right? Ad fraud and the rest. And it never was sort of in email. Email was sort of this like, kind of pure sort of spot to it. And, and now it feels like there's bad things happening in email and smart people know it and some of them are ignoring it and other people are, are doing like, some people are oblivious to what's happening. Particularly if you email business, like, if you email business domains, there's a lot of spam filtering devices that go through your email right away and they'll open it and they'll click it and they'll click everything. And you register that as all opens and clicks. And it's like, look how engaged my is. And like, I think there's some people that are naive and don't realize it's happening. They report it back to their clients. And then there's some people that know what's happening, but they think their clients aren't smart enough to know it. So they report it back to their clients to say they're doing good. But for, for me, it was always like, I have some, like, not all of my clients know what's happening, but some do. And I'm going to make sure, like, we're serving the smartest client that actually knows what's happening. And we can, we can go to them and be proud of, like, the results that we say we're getting for them. And we can say that there's humans that are interacted with them. And so we, we spent a lot of time filtering out, you know, fighting bot traffic, fighting the tracking. You know, there's a lot of businesses that put fake subscribers in just because they want to track your newsletters and they want to see who's advertising and what you're clicking. Like, all those things. We spent a lot of time, you know, filtering those folks out and fighting that just so we knew that we're humans.
- [46:20]
Podcast Host 2
And at the end of the day, to some degree, doesn't really matter because if you're not driving results for your advertiser, then it doesn't matter if you had 100 open rates, if nobody who clicked through, converted or did and took any action.
- [46:34]
Sean Griffey
Right, yeah. Assuming that the advertiser is sophisticated enough to track that. Yeah, right, right. Like there's a, there's a sad part, is that there's some people that say, like, look, I was in so and so newsletter and I got a bunch of clicks like, victory. Yeah, there's still a lot of market, there's still a lot of marketers who view that as a win, you know, and you're doing them a disservice just because they don't. They're not as sophisticated as some people who are measuring it further down the line.
- [46:59]
Podcast Host 2
Yep, that's fair.
- [46:59]
Podcast Host 1
So I know we're coming up on time here, we got about five minutes left. But I just wanted to ask, you've been in the space for a long time. There's now a lot more AI tools, all kinds of things happening. How do you, what do you see for email marketing and the Newsletter space in the coming years, do you see any, like, major changes or. I don't know, are you excited about certain parts of it or not excited about others?
- [47:21]
Sean Griffey
I'm excited about all of it. I mean, I think the AI tools give everyone an opportunity. I think it's a really incredible time to start something and build something because it feels like the snow globes being shaken. Right. And everyone's going to be on the same footing. Every now and then something happens major with technology, and everyone's on the same footing. And when you're small, you can compete with the incumbents until someone builds an incumbent advantage. And I think there's a real opportunity right now with everything that's happening with, you know, the, the intersection of, of the tools and technology, but also with audience behavior and expectations and the rest. So I'm. I'm like, really excited to see what people are doing. You know, I spend a lot of my time talking with entrepreneurs who are in the early stages of it and like that, that I get my juices going every time I have a conversation and hear what someone's doing, because there are people doing really cool things out there. But I think, you know, for me, you know, I kind of ranted a little bit on the community aspect and the connection economy. Community economy, and so the creator economy. And I think there's. There's just a real opportunity to not connect with your audiences, but help your audience connect with each other in ways that we, you know, in media and publishing haven't done before. And I think. I think that's gonna. I could be wrong. It could be something small, but I would really be like, trying to figure out how I did that next. And I think someone's going to do something really. We're going to look back 10 years from now and someone's going to do something really cool that is different than, you know, building communities in ways we haven't seen. And maybe it's something like Adam Ryan and the Workweek folks and other people that are building community. They might have the secret sauce, but there's others out there that are doing different things and I'm following all of them.
- [49:19]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah, they're doing a lot of great stuff. Over at Work Week, Dave Gerhardt with Exit 5 seems to be growing his community pretty well. So it's always interesting to see other people doing that.
- [49:28]
Sean Griffey
Absolutely.
- [49:30]
Podcast Host 1
Yeah. Well, I guess. Are you still bullish on newsletters, though, as. As all of that has just been said. But do you think that there is still an opportunity to start, you know, a big newsletter business or even just a smaller one that can sustain multiple people?
- [49:44]
Sean Griffey
Absolutely. Absolutely. None of the reasons why it was great 20 years ago are gone now, but there's only new reasons why it's great. Right. Like, it's easier now to do some of this, like, from a tooling perspective, from the technology. I mean, we fought building newsletter templates that were mobile optimized. Like, that was hard, you know, in 2012, getting responsive newsletter formats that looked good, those kinds of things. Like, you don't fight with that stuff at all. So I think, you know, I think there's a lot of easy stuff to. That comes now with all the tools that are out there. But the reasons why newsletters connect with audience and win and why they're valuable, all of those have stayed the same. None of that's been invalidated. It's only gotten better.
- [50:34]
Podcast Host 1
Love it. Yeah, yeah, no, that's great. I agree with you. Yeah, totally. Stop listening to this podcast and go build something.
- [50:41]
Podcast Host 2
That's right.
- [50:42]
Sean Griffey
That's right. Yeah. I think they heard me, you know, 30 minutes ago and stopped listening to this podcast. So. But other than that, I doubt it.
- [50:51]
Podcast Host 2
I doubt it's been great.
- [50:53]
Podcast Host 1
This was awesome. Thanks. Thanks for coming on and sharing all your wisdom with us, Sean. It really has been a pleasure.
- [50:59]
Podcast Host 2
Appreciate it.
- [51:01]
Podcast Host 1
Awesome.