← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Turning a Niche Newsletter of 30k Subs Into a Full-Time Business
01:01:21
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- [00:00]
Matt Johansson
He represented two newsletters of over a hundred thousand subscribers. And then I was over there with 12.
- [00:04]
Chanel
You were the downsell and I was fine with that.
- [00:07]
Matt Johansson
People used to pay me to like hack into their companies and tell them how I did it.
- [00:10]
D
We were pretty prolific on short form video on all the platforms. So juggling that, following the news, creating the content, like how does that all work?
- [00:16]
Matt Johansson
It's called burning out. No, I'm just kidding. So yeah, I actually dislike over edited videos. What I have found, and this is really unfortunate and I'm sorry for everyone listening, but I have found, at least in my experience that.
- [00:35]
Chanel
Matt, thanks for coming on the Growth in Reverse podcast.
- [00:37]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
- [00:39]
Chanel
Yeah. Excited to chat through your story. I know you've been through a lot of change recently, so why don't you just start by kind of explaining who you are, what you do and what your newsletter is about.
- [00:49]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, absolutely. So Matt Johansson, longtime cybersecurity practitioner, kind of like been a hands on hacker for a long time. Early in my career people used to pay me to like hack into their companies and tell them how I did it. And then I kind of switched to the other side of things and actually helped like protect companies from hackers. So like a very long like 18 year career at this point in cybersecurity. And I kind of realized at some point that along that whole time that I was doing cybersecurity, I was also talking about it on the Internet. Like you couldn't shut me up if you tried. And so I was like on the earliest forms of Twitter, of LinkedIn, I was like, I ran a blog back when that was cool. I've given just hundreds of conference presentations too and like webinars. I was on a podcast before that was cool in the mid-2000s. And so yeah, I've been talking about it the whole time. I've decided to take it a little bit more seriously in the last couple of years instead of just yapping on the Internet and, and realized that I was actually pretty good at it and could, could kind of make a career out of it.
- [01:58]
C
So here I am.
- [01:59]
Chanel
Nice. That's awesome. Um, I love that people paid you to hack into their stuff.
- [02:03]
Matt Johansson
Oh yeah, Lots of those stories if you want. I know that's not this kind of podcast, but.
- [02:08]
Chanel
That'S awesome. Uh, so now you run a newsletter called Vulnerable you. Right? And you have what, 30,000 subscribers at this point?
- [02:16]
Matt Johansson
I think I'm gonna hit 30k today.
- [02:18]
Chanel
Dang, that's a pretty congrats.
- [02:19]
Matt Johansson
Pretty cool Odometer flip. I'm gonna watch today.
- [02:22]
D
So sweet.
- [02:23]
Chanel
That's amazing. Love it.
- [02:24]
C
Yeah.
- [02:24]
Chanel
And you started this in 2023, correct?
- [02:27]
C
Yep.
- [02:27]
Chanel
Nice. So that's a pretty quick, quick growth story there.
- [02:31]
Matt Johansson
Not as quick as some of. Some of the. Your blogs that you write, but. But yeah, it's like, been a good, nice, steady upward and to the right graph. So.
- [02:40]
Chanel
So I guess just starting out, like, when you launched the newsletter, like, how are you growing it in the early days? Like, what. What did that look like?
- [02:46]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, so, like I said, I. I mean, I was on Twitter since it was born. I've been. I've been talking on the intern womb. And so I kind of had, like, a bit of a. A bit of an audience, you know, especially in my industry, I kind of had a bit of an audience. I never really called it that because I was never really using it as an audience. I just kind of existed publicly, and so I kind of had some bit of, like, industry clout. I guess you could say that I could lean on early days. Kind of like my origin story a little bit on the newsletter is, like I said, I. I made a lot of content, did a lot of podcasting and talking about everything for, like, the vast majority of my career. But then I went actually worked for some of the big banks. So I was the head of security for a fintech startup here in Austin that got acquired by Goldman Sachs. So, like, got forced into a big bank because of that. And then I left Goldman because some of my friends poached me at bank of America, and I decided to stay in banking. And I was like, oh, look, I'm kind of doing this security at big banks thing. The thing that no one warned me about is when you get to a big bank, the week you get hired, they basically sit you down and say, hey, you know that whole social media thing that you do, Forget about that you're never allowed to do that again. Oh, you want to go on stage and talk about what you do? Not while you work here. You're not going to do that. So they have, like, big, scary PR teams and they're very, like, worried about getting sued and what their employees are saying publicly. And so I kind of disappeared from the Internet for, like, five, six years because I was working at big banks, and I was just kind of like, I was using social media more like normal people use social media and just like, talking about my breakfast tacos or whatever it was.
- [04:21]
C
Right.
- [04:23]
Matt Johansson
But I couldn't really talk about my job much anymore. And so when I Left B of A. And I started working at Reddit. Reddit was like, we don't care. Go, go talk.
- [04:31]
C
Right?
- [04:31]
Matt Johansson
We're not heavily regulated and, you know, have all sorts of lawyers and all that kind of stuff. So I was like, oh, let me restart my blog. I really liked blogging back in the day. Maybe like, start my podcast again or something like that. And that's when I noticed that newsletters were having a moment. And, like, Medium seemed to be going on its way down. That's like, what I was like, oh, maybe I'll start a medium. And it was like, no one really likes Medium anymore. You know, newsletters are the new hotness. Let me start a newsletter. And that's kind of like the origin of it, right? And so then I was able to kind of lean on, like I said, some people that were like, oh, Matt's talking in public again about stuff. Like, we followed him for a decade, you know, and so that was kind of like my early bit of my audience.
- [05:10]
D
And that was circa, like 2023 when you kind of re restarted things.
- [05:14]
Matt Johansson
Okay, yeah, something around there. And. And then, yeah, I started, and I had a friend. I had like two friends in the industry that had started newsletters before me. One of them reached out when he saw I was maybe two additions in to my newsletter. And he reached out, said, hey, man, I just quit my security engineering gig at Robinhood and I'm doing my newsletter full time now. And I was like, wait, what? You can get paid for this. So I was just doing it for the love of the game, you know? And from that conversation, he really kind of set me on the path of like, oh, hey, Matt, this isn't a hobby. Like, take this seriously. And so since then, I haven't miss a single week of vulnerable you since I started it. And I don't think I would have had that consistency if I had not had that phone call where it was like, hey, take this seriously. Don't just like, yap on the Internet. Like, really kind of put your. Put your nose down into this. And that's what I did.
- [06:02]
Chanel
That's great. So you had, like, that friendly advice come to you, do you think? How many people do you think joined the newsletter just from knowing you in previous times? Like, what was that base like?
- [06:12]
Matt Johansson
That's a great question. I probably had about 10,000 followers on Twitter at the time. And that was one of my, you know, major kind of announcement promotional channels. And then LinkedIn was definitely still, you know, I wasn't really using LinkedIn as like a content outlet. But I did probably have, you know, a decent number of followers and connections just from a long career.
- [06:34]
C
I.
- [06:34]
Matt Johansson
If I had to guess, I'd have to go back and, like, look at my stats. But I'd say In like, the 1500-2000 was, like, a pretty quick jump for me just from, like, conversions maybe in the first few months of just, like, hey, me talking about it on my social media, I think I was probably able to do that without really thinking too much about growth or anything like that.
- [06:55]
C
Right.
- [06:55]
D
So socially social growth was essentially like your number one. Just sharing stuff about cybersecurity, things you. Threats you'd seen, stuff you're tackling, and then just like, tagging like a. You know, I talk about this in my newsletter, sort of, you know, CTA sort of thing, or.
- [07:10]
Matt Johansson
I don't even think I did that quite yet. Like, early on, I'm not even sure I was that smart.
- [07:16]
C
Right.
- [07:16]
Matt Johansson
I think I was just like, hey, I started a newsletter. Like, you know, like, hey, if you like me, I started bio. Yeah. Literally.
- [07:23]
C
Right.
- [07:24]
Matt Johansson
And so I think if you go to my Twitter right now, I think my pin tweet is still my announcement from when I started Vulnerable you.
- [07:30]
C
Right.
- [07:30]
Matt Johansson
Like, I pinned it. I was just like, hey, exciting news. Like, I'm getting back into content creation. Check it out.
- [07:36]
C
Right.
- [07:36]
Matt Johansson
And I think I was probably able to get, you know, like I said, maybe a thousand to two thousand just from, like, existing and announcing stuff like that.
- [07:44]
Chanel
How did you come up with the format for what the newsletter turned into? Or like. Like, you could have gone so many different directions with the cybersecurity world. You could have done, like, news or here's how to hack into this or that kind of thing. That probably could have got a little dicey, but I'm just curious how that came about.
- [07:58]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, it's not been consistent from day one.
- [08:02]
C
Right.
- [08:02]
Matt Johansson
So I've definitely kind of found my footing on. On the format based on just, like, what I see resonating with people who sign up. My thesis when I started was I'm also very passionate about mental health, especially mental health in tech workers and in cybersecurity. It's a very thankless job. Yeah, like, hacking into stuff is cool, but, like, when you're on the defense side, you're pretty much invisible until something goes wrong, you know, and then all of a sudden you're to blame. And that's. So it's been a very prominent topic in the industry for years of, like, burnout and stuff like this. And so I have some family members that are fans of Brene Brown. I don't know if you know Brene Brown, big public speake. She, she calls herself a vulnerability researcher and she talks about the power of vulnerability and security. We talk about security vulnerabilities all the time. And so that was like the intersection for me. And like when I kind of thought about this, I kind of made a joke about it years ago of oh, power vulnerability and vulnerability researcher Brene Brown. I was like, I'm a vulnerability researcher, right? Like, you know, like, what are you talking about? And so that's kind of how like the, the name came to be. And so my early format, I say all that to say my early format was I would write a blog about like kind of a traditional newsletter like you guys write of, like, hey, here's some blog this week or some topic that I'm going to talk about this week. And I would preview it in the newsletter and then I would do a few like news links. And I was kind of like half and half like the mental health thing and like here are some headlines and my thoughts on the headlines this week. And I had a bunch of other sections too. Like I was like playing with, you know, early version of Beehive and I'd have like a community spotlight section of like someone I was talking to on social media this week and all sorts of sections that have since like gone, gone the wayside.
- [09:44]
C
Right.
- [09:45]
Matt Johansson
And then, yeah, I found that as I went, I even started polling my users about like my readers about like which part of the newsletter they were there for, like, are you here for the news? Are you here for the mental health stuff? And I found like 70, 30, like more people were here for the news and my thoughts on the news and so like it's leaned more and more that direction as it's gone. I still try to throw in some like mental health kind of like tidbits every now and then. I also, we were talking about a pre recording. I just launched like the premium version of the newsletter just last week. I always kind of had it in my head that once I crossed like 25k that I would think about that. Part of my offering for the premium newsletter is to kind of bring that mental health aspect back to it. And I'm going to start interviewing people in the field and ask them some like hard questions to like tell like their low lights story. And like the whole theory being a lot of these people go on other podcasts, tell their highlights like, hey, come here and get their low Lights, right. And like they're, they're all just people, just like you. And so I'm going to try to bring it back in that way. But the newsletter itself, yeah, it's just people, people wanted my thoughts about the headlines. And cybersecurity is like a fire hose of news information in any given week about like data breaches or this or that. People find it pretty useful to be like, hey, here's like the like the 10 to 15 stories that like I think were like worth kind of your attention right now. And also like I try to not put the ones that are like the biggest story of the week. It's like you're going to see that everywhere. You don't need to see that with mine. I don't need to amplify the absolute biggest story of the week. It's like, okay, come get my thoughts about something else.
- [11:18]
D
So when we were prepping for this interview, I was going through some of your editions and I couldn't help but see how long they were. They're full of information. It looks like you're putting a decent amount of time and effort into it. Is this just you doing this or do you have like a team around you? Because you're also. We're going to get into this shortly. I think you're pretty prolific on short form video on all the platforms. So juggling that, following the news, creating the content, like how does that all work?
- [11:42]
Matt Johansson
It's called burning out. No, I'm just kidding. So yeah it's so it is by no means not just me on like my team. I have like a lot of help that I couldn't do it without at this point. But I'd say that the content creation is absolutely my like burden to bear.
- [12:00]
C
Right.
- [12:00]
Matt Johansson
Like yeah, I am the only one writing my newsletter. I'm the only one filming short form. I've been growing a lot on YouTube. This year is probably my biggest focus. So long form video. I'm editing my own long form videos. Like yeah, it's, it's the content is like squarely my job where I get help is all my sponsorship relations stuff. My cat like the calendar on, you know, any sponsors, the expectation from the sponsor. Can you go get that UTM link from them? Hey, do we have a logo for this person? Hey, like I need to balance. This sponsor wants me to do a YouTube ad integration this week and they have a non compete and one of our other sponsors is a compete. So we gotta like move the calendar like over there. All of that thankfully is not in My brain. So, like, that. That's what my team is like, very, very helpful with. I also read a book by Dan Martell called buy back your time. I think I've recommended it. Maybe. Maybe in this group. I've recommended to a lot of people that, like, look like us and, like, kind of run our solo businesses. Following some of his advice has been extremely helpful for me as well, to kind of like, oh, get some of this stuff that doesn't absolutely need to be done by me and get it off your plate. The stuff that absolutely does need to be done by me is looking at the camera. And so I'm trying more and more to make that really the lion's share of my time.
- [13:16]
Chanel
Yeah, that makes sense. So you mentioned you started mostly on Twitter and then you've moved into other places. So, I mean, we might as well jump into the short form thing now because that's kind of where you are mostly at this point. I know you're very prolific on Instagram, I think TikTok as well, and also now on YouTube. How did that get going? Like, what does that look like for you now? And how do you think about content?
- [13:36]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, it's absolutely wild. Like, I would have never thought that, A, I would have been doing this and B, it would have worked as well as it has. Like, I'm as surprised as everyone else at how well it's worked. So really what happened was I have a family member that works at TikTok, and they saw that I was going viral. I was getting over a million views on Twitter threads. Basically, once or twice a month, like, I would write a big Twitter thread about some cybersecurity news topic. I would write a long thread pictures, kind of diving into the. To the topic. I think one of my superpowers is, like, translating some of these, like, complicated topics, very technical topics, into like, hey, here's what it really means. Here's like, just storytelling about the actual thing, like the hack or the breach or the vulnerability or whatever it is. I've always tried to, like, lean into that as a superpower. And so I was doing these Twitter threads. They were doing really well. I had this family member work at TikTok that was like, what? Like, please, for the love, put this content on TikTok. Like, you're going to go viral on TikTok too, if it's working on Twitter. And I was like, hey, I'm basically a boomer when it comes to TikTok. I have no idea, like, how to do this. Like, I didn't even know how to record a TikTok. I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I, like, I have no idea how to do this. And so I kind of got bullied into it and I was like, some of my early TikToks were basically just screenshot carousels of my tweets. And then I learned how to do this green screen thing, right, where I would. I think some of my first ones were literally just screenshots of my tweets behind me that I green screen my face of and just kind of talked about the thread that I wrote on Twitter. And I think like the second one I did of those, like went viral and got, you know, a couple million views. So it was pretty. Like instantly it worked and I was like, oh, okay, I get it. And so, so yeah, TikTok's kind of magic like that where you don't need the audience first. Like Twitter, you need. You needed followers. You can't just like tweet something and get views, right? Like you need followers. TikTok kind of turned the whole thing on its head, right? And I had no followers. And all of a sudden it was working. And so then I started cross posting them to Instagram because I figured why not like a few into doing that. It blew up on Instagram too. And Instagram is. Is turned into my biggest platform. And so my. I did a whole presentation for your group about short form video. We can talk as much as you want about what I've found works and doesn't on this. I've seen a lot of people try and not do it quite right. So I have a bunch of tips if we want to get into it. But I will say it's been the most enjoyable content creation thing I do is. Is definitely that like the community that I've built on TikTok and Instagram is like my most engaged community. I think it helps because I still tell people to this day that I'm that Instagram. I have however many followers I have on Instagram and they're like cybersecurity content on Instagram. Like, what are you talking about? And I think that's to my advantage, right? That there's not a lot of competition in my niche. In short form video, people are either scared of it or don't do it, or they're good at it, but they're not actually a cybersecurity practitioner. They're just good at making content about cybersecurity. I'm kind of like one of the only people that does this for a living. Can really speak to it from a place of experience. I can get as deep technical as we want, but I can also kind of bubble it up and tell the story to the mainstream. So that's my guess on why it's working is that no one else is doing it.
- [17:03]
Chanel
So you have almost one hundred and some thousand followers on Instagram, right? 129, I think it is. How is that translating into newsletter subscribers? Or is that still a struggle?
- [17:16]
Matt Johansson
What I have found is that, and this is really unfortunate, and I'm sorry for everyone listening, but I have found, at least in my experience, that every platform is its own platform. And it's like very, very hard cross, like get anyone to leave the platform that they're reading or watching you on and like go to another platform and opt into that. Not to say that it doesn't happen. I got a lot of my newsletter subscribers from Twitter threads going viral. 100% short form video to newsletter subscribers is definitely more of a trickle than like an actual growth mechanism for me. I, I would say a very minuscule percentage of people that follow me on Instagram have like converted to newsletter subscribers. I mean, it's, it's there, like it's not, it's not nothing, right? It's probably hundreds, not thousands, right? Of 129,000 followers, I probably have, you know, maybe high hundreds of people that have subscribed. Not, not thousands. I'm not like strong call to actioning in the videos though either. You don't want to like, do too much of like cross promoting because then you're going to hurt the performance of the video. If I just start talking about in the middle of my video, if I'm just like, hey, go over my YouTube channel or like go over my newsletter, people are gonna swipe and then that's gonna send the signal and that's it. So like, it's like speed of information coming out of my mouth is like the best thing that I can do to make a video do well. It's hard to put CTAs in there.
- [18:46]
D
So how do you, if you're getting all these views and you've got almost 30,000 subscribers, which is, which is. No, like that's, that's impressive for the long length of time you've been doing this. What's like your best growth lever then like how are you getting these subscribers is just this kind of slow trickle from all of these different channels that you're doing short form or are you like have some dedicated strategies kind of behind the scenes that you're using.
- [19:06]
Matt Johansson
Yeah. At some point, like when I started selling sponsorships, I dedicate like some of my sponsorship revenue into paid growth for the newsletter. Right. So. And that's been by far the biggest growth mechanism for sure is like Beehive Boosts. I ran an ad with Refined, which I've recently turned off. I don't know if you guys have messed with Refined at all, but it was a good growth lever. But the engagement is very, very low. So my stats looked a little off because. Just because of that group of people. Like in my subscriber base, it's a few thousand from Refined ads. It's. But by far my biggest growth lever is boosts in Beehive. Either either free recommendations from friends is a few thousand for me for sure. And then boosts from other adjacent newsletters that I pay, you know, however much per subscriber, two bucks or something like that per subscriber from a Beehive boost. And the best part about the boosts is the engagement is off the charts because it's like, oh, this is a, this subscriber is a newsletter reader in my industry.
- [20:11]
C
Right.
- [20:11]
Matt Johansson
Like, they, they, they signaled that they signed up for another tech or cybersecurity newsletter. Because I don't accept boosts from every random AI newsletter or whatever the heck is on. I get a lot of applications that are just garbage.
- [20:24]
C
Right.
- [20:24]
Matt Johansson
You know, I've got a few that are just really, really top performers. And I know they grow because some of them are like, I have a relationship with at this point. I know some of them grow either via meta ads or one of them grows a lot via LinkedIn, LinkedIn content. So like two of my best performing booths, Boosts. I am downstream of them paying for meta ads or them being very good at LinkedIn. And I just get the recommended checkbox staying, staying lit, you know, that's so interesting.
- [20:53]
Chanel
So how much at this point do you think you're paying, like on average for a subscriber through boosts?
- [20:58]
Matt Johansson
I think it's. I think my offer is $2. Yeah.
- [21:01]
Chanel
And those are. Those people are like sticking around, opening, clicking.
- [21:04]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, I think I've got like a 50 to 60% open rate from Boost people. It's very, very good. Where whereas refined was like 1920 open rate from the refund, I eventually turned that off because I was like, this is really tanking my stats. I was also getting like, people replying to me, being like, I never signed up for this. Like, what is this? And then I would go check where they came from. And it was refined. So I'm like, I don't know what's going on over there. I don't know if you guys have any insight, but I just decided to turn it off. Even though it was like helping pad my subscriber number, it was like worsening everything else about everything.
- [21:35]
C
Right.
- [21:35]
Chanel
So, yeah, I tried it for a little bit and it definitely got subscribers, but I don't think that they were super engaged, kind of like you were mentioning. And I don't know if that's just a function of like me not putting in the time and effort to like figure it out. But yeah, I was just like, I don't have time to play around with this. I'm going to turn it off.
- [21:51]
Matt Johansson
Yeah. I've also done like a whole lot of auto pruning of my list based on those engagement numbers. But then I started to not trust the engagement numbers because I was, I was kicking people off the newsletter and then they would come back and be like, hey, why did, why did I get unsubscribed? I read this every, every week. I was like, oh man. Like my stats show that you've never done it, so I don't know, like, maybe that's my niche to cybersecurity. They tend to have like all the, like for sure and privacy things and VPNs and like, whatever it is. So it could have been my niche a little bit. So eventually I just turned that off. So I've auto pruned like 8,000 people off of my list. I think I would be at like over 40,000 if I didn't do some of that pruning. So. And I'm like, I'm kind of bummed because I don't know how many of those people were actually decent subscribers that, you know, just missed my, like, hey, like, I'm going to unsubscribe you if you don't click this link. Email. And then I just did.
- [22:45]
C
Right.
- [22:45]
Chanel
I feel the same way. Yeah, I just actually ended up turning off some of that stuff.
- [22:48]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, I'm like, yesterday, screw it. Yeah, I'm going to keep them all, whatever, you know, because I just can't trust it. Yeah, the open, the open rate stat is like weird, right?
- [22:58]
Chanel
So yeah, it's totally unreliable especially.
- [23:00]
D
Makes sense in your industry too with like, I worked for an IT company and our owner was big into like turning off all pixels and emails, like turning images off and all that stuff. So that makes a lot of sense.
- [23:11]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, totally.
- [23:11]
C
Right.
- [23:12]
Matt Johansson
And I know Apple Mail has its own thing that everyone's talked about that, like, is weird with stats too. So I was just like, all right, I'm just not going to make any action based off of these stats that I can't trust.
- [23:22]
D
That makes sense. That makes sense. So in terms of growth, we've kind of covered paid growth, some organic stuff and some trickle in from social media short form. I don't know if you have any follow up questions on that, Chanel, go ahead. But I was curious to talk a little bit more about revenue and sort of how you're generating revenue before.
- [23:38]
Matt Johansson
Before we move off of grit. So the. I don't want to discredit how good Twitter has been for me. So like the trickle from short form for sure. But Twitter, especially in my niche, like when I break down a news story and then I can very naturally have a call to action of like, hey, did you like my breakdown of this news story? Like, subscribe to my newsletter. If I have a tweet, like tweet thread like that go viral, I get a ton of subscribers from it. So if I go viral on Instagram, not. Not a whole lot of conversion there. If I go viral on Twitter, I absolutely get a lot of conversion. It's just the nature of the call to action just kind of fitting a little bit more naturally into a Twitter thread. So, yeah, I've definitely gotten a bunch from there for sure.
- [24:16]
Chanel
So what you're saying. Because I feel like most creators are saying like, oh, Twitter's dead. And Twitter's like, it's not there anymore. And I'm like, well, it probably does work for some people. And it sounds like it's working great for you.
- [24:25]
Matt Johansson
Yeah. I literally mourn the loss of Twitter was my home on the Internet for so long. And I literally grieve it because it's so different now and so many of my friends have left forever and are never looking back.
- [24:37]
C
Right.
- [24:37]
Matt Johansson
And I completely respect that and understand that my business's eyeballs and there's still a ton of eyeballs there for sure. Yeah, it. I will say for a while it got really bad. It got really bad there for a while. For whatever reason, I feel like it's kind of showing life again. I'd say the one thing that has gotten like irreparably, irreparably bad on that platform is like the spam and bot problem has just gotten out of control. Especially with like the verified thing being different and like you can't like verified check marks are almost like a bad signal now. It's like an anti signal.
- [25:15]
C
Right.
- [25:15]
Matt Johansson
Like, I think I have one because that's the only way you can, like, monetize. Like, I get paid for viral tweets, and the only way you can do that is if you, like, are a premium person. So I get more out of it than I pay. So, like, I'm like, all right, I'm winning on this exchange here. I don't care. But yeah, I mean, you could still get millions of views, like, from that kind of stuff. And that's. Yeah, it's kind of. As a content creator, it's like, how can you turn down millions of views on the, on, on a platform, especially if they convert? Like I said, it does convert better than some of my other stuff. So it's rough. And I, like I said, I will say the, the engagement feels to be getting better again. Like, it feels like the people that are there and are interacting are developers, they're engineers, they're practitioners, they're there. It's still a very good breaking news platform, like, more so than the other stuff. And so for that, it was always hard for me to leave because I, I'm in the news and so a lot of news breaks there and I'm like, what am I, what am I going to do?
- [26:10]
C
Right?
- [26:11]
Matt Johansson
Like, be slow on, on the news. So, like, so, yeah, I feel, I don't know, a few of us have been talking behind the scenes. It feels like it's getting, getting better. Coming back a little bit.
- [26:20]
Chanel
Okay, so how do you think about, like, the content mix between video and, and X or Twitter, if you're saying that, like, you get more subscribers if you go viral on Twitter, like, but Instagram is more, like, consistent with that, right?
- [26:34]
Matt Johansson
Yeah. So going back to my point about, like, how each platform, like, I feel the need to create specifically for that platform in order to do well on that platform. I have a very hard time, like, except like, short form video. I can cross post to tik tok, Instagram, YouTube, it's the same video. Like, that's fine, but it's made for short form. If I ever, like, have a long, like I have long YouTube videos that I'm making. If I try to grab a clip from that and put it on my short form, it won't do well. Like, if you, if you watch my short, if you watch my short from videos, you have to start basically in the middle of the most important point of your video needs to be in the first three seconds right along with a visual hook, along with, you know, whatever it is. And it's got to Be fast. So like, I see a lot of my friends that have podcasts try to clip, you know, stuff from the podcast for short form video. I don't know if you guys do or not. I think I've seen some.
- [27:26]
Chanel
Well, no, I think we've dabbled.
- [27:27]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, but I think you, you edit them in a way. I think some of yours have been pretty good, but some I've seen some people and they'll do like these auto clip generator tools or whatever it is from like a long form conversation. And I'll sit with them and I'll show them like, hey, let's watch the first five seconds of your video real quick and you tell me what it's about. And that like it's really hard to clip with the energy that you need in the first couple seconds of a short form video. It's really hard to get that energy in the middle of a long conversation. If you see some of the professional podcasters out there, I'm like a big fan of Scott Galloway. The Prof. G, like ecosystem is, is really good for me. Ed Elson is like his host of the Prof. G show. Ed. Ed is like, you know, Gen Z, born of this. Born and bred of this version of the Internet. And he talks a lot about this, about how he's constantly thinking about the clip in the long form conversation. Right. He's like tuning the way he's asking a question or responding so that there is a moment that he can edit that the energy is high and that this clip is going to play well. And I'm like, yeah, that's the only way to do that. Well, Right, right.
- [28:31]
Chanel
That's so interesting. Sorry.
- [28:32]
Matt Johansson
I think your initial question was like how I think about my breakdown is. And so like really my. My answer is each algorithm is still. Is still so different is why I kind of went on that little tangent. And so I very much like short form video. It's feel. It feels like my new home. Like Twitter was my home for so long. It feels like my new home on the Internet. How long have you been doing it?
- [28:51]
D
Sorry to interrupt, but how long have you been doing the short form? Like consistently?
- [28:54]
Matt Johansson
Maybe 18 months. Maybe 18 months. A little after newsletter start. So yeah, maybe like late 2023, early 2024, something like that. That's a guess. I'd have to go back and look. But, but yeah, like the algorithms on short form reward consistency and volume.
- [29:11]
C
Right.
- [29:12]
Matt Johansson
You know, like you'll see a lot of people that say like how to make it on TikTok is to post like multiple times per day on TikTok.
- [29:18]
C
Right.
- [29:19]
Matt Johansson
Twitter is very much like you can oversaturate your algorithm on Twitter. Especially with the kind of news threads that I do. If I did one of those every day, I don't know, some people get away with it. It doesn't, it doesn't seem to work for me. It seems like exhaustion, I think. Justin Welsh, I know you guys are friends, friends with Justin or at least familiar with Justin. He talks about this a lot. Is like the long threads like don't do more than one or two of the like really deep things a week but then just show up kind of consistently every day. And so yeah, like that's kind of. I try to do my breakdown where I try to do a short form video every day I want. I probably wind up averaging about five a week just because I miss whatever.
- [29:55]
C
Right.
- [29:56]
Matt Johansson
I try to do one or two like long news threads on Twitter every week and then just schedule out some like exist on Twitter and LinkedIn, you know, a meme or a picture or just like a headline without a long thread. You know, I try to do that or you know, just some random thought that I had instead of just tweeting it at 11 o' clock at night, scheduling it for the next day is like a good little tweak that I made. Made. So it's just okay. It's not, you know, 1130 random thoughts. It's like prime time good, like people are going to engage with it kind of thing. I do stuff like that for sure.
- [30:30]
Chanel
So are you scheduling out a bunch of posts ahead of time like, or just. It just kind of happens?
- [30:34]
Matt Johansson
I try to. I, I do. So we're going to talk about revenue. I do have an agency that I, that I run and I've also, I have hired some social media help for me to run the vulnerable you social media accounts. So I still run all my personal stuff but like I've started vulnerable you accounts on everything like LinkedIn, Twitter threads, like whatever. So I, I have some help managing those channels. I just literally couldn't squeeze the time out of my day to like also create content for a vulnerable you branded LinkedIn or anything like that. So I have hired some help there. So she definitely schedules out a ton of for the vulnerable you stuff and then we sit every Monday and we try to come up with a plan for like me slash the brand for the week. She's only been working for me about two months and I'd say maybe twice we've like actually successfully Monday been like, okay, like, let's post some stuff on Matt's account for the week. It's hard, especially when it comes to news. You gotta be, you gotta be kind of fresh, right? Yeah. It's also, it's just a grind to be like, okay, let's sit and churn out a bunch of random like tweets and LinkedIn stuff for this, for this next hour. It's hard.
- [31:48]
D
I've got a follow up to Chanel's question about the short form video versus like the Twitter written stuff in terms of growth. And so are you driving some revenue with actual impressions on like TikTok and on Instagram and stuff? Like, is that making you money? Because I, I can't help but wonder, like, that's a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of effort that you're putting into that content. And you were saying how it's kind of like a trickle. Like it's not, it's in the hundreds for your. For Instagram versus Twitter. So what's the rationale there?
- [32:15]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, so Instagram does not pay me for views. I missed that boat. I think some people are grandfathered into like some sort of creator fund that they had at one point. They do not have it anymore and I missed it. So I do not, I do not make money. If I get a million views on Instagram, I don't make a dime from it.
- [32:32]
C
Right.
- [32:34]
Matt Johansson
So that's disheartening for sure. TikTok. I do. I am in the creator fund on Tik Tok. TikTok algorithm is a bit more feast and famine for me. I'd say Instagram. I'm very consistently high performing. My audience is highly engaged. I get a lot of DMS and comments from the same couple hundred people. I like, recognize people, you know, like, they're definitely part of my community on Instagram. Yeah, I love it. It feels great. They defend me when trolls come and like start tearing me apart. They'll. They'll go after. I don't even have to defend myself. It's fantastic. That's pretty Good. On, on TikTok, it's not like that. Like I, I'd say my floor nowadays on a reel on Instagram and I try to post one. Every day is like 20,000 views. That's like my floor. So, like, I do, I do very well. Right on, like every reel. My floor on TikTok is like 200 views. Like I can post something and get Nothing.
- [33:25]
C
Right.
- [33:26]
Matt Johansson
On TikTok. And it's the same video.
- [33:28]
C
Right.
- [33:29]
Matt Johansson
So the algorithm over there is Just very strange. And it's feast or famine, so I either get like a couple hundred, couple thousand or I get 2 million, like randomly. So if I can somehow materialize a couple million view video like once a month on TikTok, I make, I make some decent money from views. I think my best performing month on TikTok in terms of them paying me was like $2,000, which was like, hey, that's a real, that's a real check from just posting a video. I'd say on average it's in the dozens to hundreds of dollars. You know, maybe a quiet month is like 60 bucks. And then I think this month I made 600 bucks. I had like a few get a few hundred thousand views and I made 600. It's not nothing for, for, for just posting. I did recently turn on like this subscription feature for everything. So now like I am accepting like you can choose to subscribe to my Instagram and my TikTok now for like a few bucks a month. Those platforms like, culturally aren't very like subscribed to your favorite creator. Like, I know, like Twitch, that's like a big thing, right? You're live streaming on Twitch. People are in chat gifting people subs. They're subscribing $5 a month. They're doing gifts. Like that's the whole Twitch culture. That's not the culture on Instagram or TikTok.
- [34:41]
C
Right?
- [34:41]
Matt Johansson
So that's, I'm not seeing like a ton of people actually convert to that. I'm putting a lot more effort into it where I'm like trying to put subscriber only stories up. I'm like trying to do subscribe. I have a subscriber group chat on Instagram that if I talk about the story, I can't share the links to a lot of stories that I'm talking about. Twitter doesn't let me put links and things. So I'm like, hey, if you want the links to what I'm talking about, subscribe and I'll put them in this DM for you, right? And then I, and then I, I put other stories in that DM that I don't make a video about. And I try to like promote that on my stories. We're talking handfuls of people that have actually subscribed. It's just, like I said, it's just culturally not part of the platform to be like, yeah, let's give this guy $5 a month on Instagram. It's just like, yeah, what about Twitter? Twitter is not like an actual Monetization, it maybe like 150 bucks or something. Like that was like the bet, like some of my best months. Like I said, I consistently make more than it costs me for Twitter premium. So that's like why I leave it on. But it's like, it's, it's not though. I see some people reporting recently that they've like changed their payouts and people are getting more. I haven't had like a super high performing viral tweet since that change. I've just been putting less, less effort into the platform as a whole. I'm interested to see if, like anytime soon if I, if I go viral, if, if that changes. I've seen some people get thousands of dollars where they were getting dozens of dollars previously for like the same performance. So I think that they've upped payouts, but it's definitely not my main form of revenue. So you, you asked how I justify the time that I spend on Instagram. I do sell sponsored slots, so I sell newsletter sponsorships. I also sell sponsored short form videos. I try to limit the amount. I don't want my whole feed to turn into sponsored stuff. I'm in a fortunate position that I have a lot of demand for sponsorship so I can turn down sponsors. So my sponsors are high quality. Like, oh, I do actually believe in these companies. Like it's not just like whoever is throwing money at me. And so that's, that's my rationale is because currently my highest dollar sponsor is sponsor slot is an Instagram video because I have proof of conversion and it's, you know, it's my biggest audience and I've got customers. I have sponsors that have closed deals, like B2B SaaS, security deals because of Instagram videos. I have. And so the fact that I can say that I can, I can command a little bit of a higher premium.
- [37:04]
Chanel
In that space without getting too far into it. Like what? I don't want you to necessarily give specific numbers, but I'm just curious, like, what, how do you even charge for an Instagram spot? Like, is it based on views? Is it based on like how many followers you have or so the best.
- [37:20]
Matt Johansson
Hire I've ever made in my life is my sponsorship salesperson from back when I just had my newsletter and I was just starting to start sponsorships. I hit up this guy, he sells sponsorships for those other security newsletters that I talked to you about earlier. That, that guy that gave me that call that was like, hey, I quit my job. This is a sponsorship salesman for him. And he works off of commission only, so it was like a very low risk thing for me. He just takes a cut of whatever he brings me. And so he was just selling newsletter spots. Maybe I started selling them around 12,000 subscribers right around there, if that's a good metric for you guys. Okay. And maybe I was selling. And it's. It's hard to give you guys answers on this because I know that us, the cybersecurity niche of content creators, there's only a handful of us that like, do this and, like, make money off of doing this. We definitely don't fit, like the traditional influencer cpm, you know, conversion thing, because we are so niche and that comes with, like, a bit of premium. So it's like the sponsors that are selling stuff in my newsletter are selling things for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, right? It's like Palo Alto Networks is one of my biggest sponsors. Like, if you're a customer of Palo Alto Networks, you could be giving them millions of dollars a year. So this isn't, you know, sneakers, like, or makeup.
- [38:40]
C
Right.
- [38:41]
Matt Johansson
It's definitely like a different relationship. And so we don't really fit into, like, the more traditional CPM model. So we command a bit of a premium. It's not outrageous, but like, I, you know, we. We have done the numbers and it's like, oh, that's, you know, if I was slinging makeup, this would be definitely harder. How do I sell it?
- [38:58]
C
He.
- [38:58]
Matt Johansson
He basically has kind of figured out the market because he. He represents a bunch of the biggest creators in cybersecurity. So he. He's kind of like a good person to be running my stuff. And so, yeah, we've. We started low, right? I was kind of down list for his. He represented two newsletters of over 100,000 subscribers. Were the other two guys, right? And then I was over there with 12. And. And so it was basically like, oh, can you not afford these other two? Or are they sold out? Like, are you interested in Matt?
- [39:26]
C
Right?
- [39:27]
Matt Johansson
Was like how it started.
- [39:28]
Chanel
You were the downsell, literally.
- [39:29]
Matt Johansson
And I was fine with that. You know what I mean? Like, I still had my day job. I was fine with that. We were proving it out. And then, yeah, it started like, we started to have success stories and testimonials and, like, we were able to kind of like, place me in a specific niche within the niche, right? Of like, hey, Matt's got a lot of practitioners. He doesn't do, like, a lot of. Some of the content creators out there do a lot of early Career content, how to get into cybersecurity. It's like a really big if you, if you look up cybersecurity content creators, there's a ton of content about, like, how to get into cybersecurity. I've resisted the siren call that is that because, oh man, will my subscribers go up if I do that? Those subscribers are not in the industry yet by nature of them subscribing to that kind of content. And so that's not who I'm generally talking to and it's not who my sponsors want to reach. Not that I make a lot of my decisions based on who my sponsors want to reach, but that, that's kind of a line that I've drawn is like, I don't do a whole lot of like, how to get into cyber content. When I live stream. That's like all of my questions. If I go live on TikTok, all of the questions are like, do I go get this certification? Do I have to go to college? Do I do, you know, whatever.
- [40:33]
D
Matt no longer live streams.
- [40:36]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, no, I like it. It's, it's engaging, it's fun. I, I, I joke that I need to, like, put a sticker behind my head that says, like, I will not tell you what certificate to go get to get a job. Like, that's not, that's not my jam. But a lot of people, if you scroll TikTok lives and you find like, people in tech, a lot of it is like, oh, join my boot camp and like, get this certification and whatever. And it's just, I'm not, I'm not slinging a course over here, so.
- [40:59]
Chanel
Yeah, that makes sense. So I know you left your day job back in November. December. Ish.
- [41:04]
Matt Johansson
November.
- [41:05]
Chanel
Yeah. Congrats. How's it been going since then?
- [41:08]
Matt Johansson
Oh, I've got a few more gray hairs, but yeah, it's stressful as all is all get out. It was really bad timing that I, I left and then like, the deadline for buying my own health insurance was like two weeks later. So I was like, just faced with the reality of like, how much that's gonna cost right away.
- [41:23]
C
Right.
- [41:24]
Matt Johansson
Living, Living in the US That's a fun little, a fun little thing. But no, it's been going well. Revenue is good on sponsorships. I also run an agency under the vulnerable you brand that we haven't really talked a lot about. But, like, again, leaning into my superpower of storytelling on complex topics, I found that a lot of marketing agencies out there that cyber security companies were using don't know anything about cyber security. They're really good marketing agencies, but they're not from the industry.
- [41:49]
C
Yeah.
- [41:49]
Matt Johansson
And all of a sudden I was like, wait a second, I write a lot of cyber security content.
- [41:54]
C
Right.
- [41:55]
Matt Johansson
So I'm doing content marketing without calling it content marketing. So let me start calling it content marketing and selling content market marketing services. And so that team's up to like 25ish now. On the agency that work for me that are journalists from cybersecurity practitioners that would like a side hustle to write a few blogs for me. We do like social media management of cybersecurity companies. Like social media stuff. We're like helping guide them into tiptoeing, into short form video. None of. They're all terrified to do that. They don't want to do it. But yeah, we've kind of become a like, like good technical understand this industry like arm of. Of marketing teams. And that's also helped kind of revenue and like day job type stuff. So I'd say my revenue is about half and half sponsorship stuff and the agency stuff right now. I think, I think both have a higher ceiling. I've got room to grow in both. I'm not sold out on sponsorships. I definitely have room to grow on the agency. But so it's exciting but stressful. It's hard. You can imagine running companies while putting out as much content as I put out every single week is definitely difficult. But yeah.
- [43:02]
D
And you've also recently launched, we alluded to this earlier, a paid subscription for vulnerable you.
- [43:07]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, I mean, three figures. ARR. It's.
- [43:13]
Chanel
Going well. Going well.
- [43:14]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, yeah.
- [43:14]
D
Like maybe talk us through that decision. And also just so I don't forget to talk about this, we had Akash Gupta on the show about six months ago and what he basically said is he figured out like how to optimize what he called optimizing for the internal share. So basically getting people from big companies subscribing to his newsletter and then having a paid tier for these corporations that can get their whole team sort of on it. And I just see an opportunity here for you because you're mostly a B2B type of content and newsletter.
- [43:44]
C
Right.
- [43:45]
D
And so I'm curious your. Yeah, a little bit. A little calm, a little call.
- [43:49]
C
B.
- [43:49]
D
But I'm curious what your plan is for I guess the paid newsletter. We just had tomorbeck on the podcast recently who just launched a paid newsletter. Different space of course, but it seems like more and more people are going this route. So like maybe talk us through that decision and, and what your plans are for it.
- [44:03]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, kind of just. It was always in my head once I got big enough to be to like even try to offer it. Like, like, okay, like, let me throw something out there. I, I've hemmed and hawed about it for a very long time because a, I didn't want to add a whole lot more work to my plate. As you can see, I'm putting out a lot of content already. So I was like, like, literally, like, my, my daughter knows about newsletter night. It's like, oh, it's newsletter. You know what I mean? Like, it takes me hours to write the newsletter and you know, I generally work all day and then I got to write the newsletter and so like, you know what I mean? So it's like a thing, right? So I didn't want to start a premium that then had a. I, I would have to like manage a community and put out more content that demanded a. A paid tier.
- [44:45]
C
Right.
- [44:45]
Matt Johansson
It had to be really high quality content if I was accepting money for it, in my opinion.
- [44:48]
C
Right.
- [44:49]
Matt Johansson
And so I handed hot about it for a long time to like, try to figure out what I could offer to people ages. Like, I also just had people that were like, hey, do you have a Patreon? I would love to just support Some people were just like, I would love to throw you 10 bucks. I like, I read your newsletter every month, like, whatever it is, right? Like, I have a lot of like working professionals that read my newsletter that would be very happy to throw me $10, right? Like, and like, so I was like, okay, maybe I just throw something up even if it's. There's not a lot on the other side of the paywall, you know. And eventually I stumbled on this idea to bring that mental health, like, part of the newsletter back in. And I talked about it a little bit earlier, but I was like, oh, if I. I've got a bunch of friends in this industry that are really, really like high level cybersecurity people, founders of companies, you know, executives at big companies. I'm still in touch with a lot of the people like that I've worked with over the past, you know, 18 years. I've got a really strong network of successful cyber security people. I know that if I ask them to like, hey, come tell me your like, shittiest life story. Sorry, I don't know if we can explicit tag here, but like, yeah, give me the low lights, right? Like, and my whole shtick is like, come get vulnerable with me. It's vulnerable you come get vulnerable with me, tell me some stories you don't tell on other podcasts.
- [46:01]
C
Right.
- [46:01]
Matt Johansson
The idea, selfishly, is not a whole lot more work on my part.
- [46:05]
C
Right.
- [46:05]
Matt Johansson
I can just, like, kind of send out, like, some questions to some friends, maybe reformat it a bit, maybe record a little short video to just say, like, hey, this is my buddy, so and so. He's the head of security at this thing. You know, I. I've known him for this long, like, you know, a little short video kind of thing. But that. That would be, like, valuable for people to see. I've also put up there that once I hit kind of critical mass of paid subscribers, I would start a community. A lot of people ask for that. I see that as my audience. I polled my audience for a few newsletters before I launched. I polled and said, hey, would you support if I had a paid tier? And I had a bunch of people say yes, A whole lot more people say no. Which is, of course, right? Like, that's the percentages. You're never going to get, like, a significant percentage of people to, like, pay for your free content. But I had a good. A good number of people say yes. I was like, okay, screw it, let's do it. And I had them say, hey, if you were going to pay me, what would you want to see for it? I asked them that in the poll, and a bunch of people said community. And so my plan is to launch a community, even though, like I said, I didn't want to, like, manage that. I figure once I get to some sort of critical mass where it's not like six of us staring at each other in a Slack channel or something like that, that I would launch something on the back end and start to kind of run that. So, yeah, that's kind of it. I turned on all the subscriptions across the board in the same week. So I was like, you want to subscribe to me on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok has a subscription button. Premium newsletter, wherever you want to give me, like, a few bucks. I appreciate it. My accountants appreciate the less bumpy revenue from sponsorship stuff. Yeah, right.
- [47:36]
Chanel
It would be so cool if there was, like, a feature where you could, like, have people sign up to subscribe to you and they get access to all of your premium accounts, whether it's Twitter, substack, you know, Instagram, everywhere. It'll never happen, but that would be awesome.
- [47:49]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, I think you can do, like, coupon codes. So I was thinking about this, right? I was like, if I set everything at 10 bucks, right. And it's basically just like, hey, yeah, could I. If you subscribe one place, could I give you like a free sub across the other places or whatever? I've thought about it. Yeah, for sure. Right now, there's not an overlap. Like I said, like, the communities are very much their own community. I have very little overlap. I kind of turned it all on. You do the math. And it's like, I've got, you know, a good amount of subscribers. If I can get 1 or 2% of them to subscribe, really good baseline salary for me to, like, just have in the back of my head as like a safety net if who knows what World War III button gets pushed and advertising revenue dries up or whatever it is.
- [48:31]
C
Yeah.
- [48:32]
D
I have a couple shortish questions. What is Matt Johansson's newsletter philosophy or mantra?
- [48:39]
Matt Johansson
Consistency is like the number one thing I tell everybody, right. I have a lot of people in my bubble, in my niche that have started newsletters and then, like, who knows when the next newsletter edition is going to show up, right? And. And so it's really hard to, like, subscribers or, like, build a community when they have no idea when they're gonna, like, see the next thing from you. For newsletters, it's like, hey, every week I write it. The other thing, like, I see a lot of, like, AI generated newsletters. Like, hey, that's not gonna, like, people can sniff that stuff out. Like, you know, so if you want to, like, do it, you have to show up every week and connect meaningfully with your audience and, like, give them something. They're trading their email for something you're.
- [49:17]
C
You.
- [49:17]
Matt Johansson
What's Gary Vee's new book called? It's like Day Trading Attention or something like that. And, like, I think that we're all in that business. We're all in the day trading attention business. And this was like, what a lot. Some of the responses going back to the premium newsletter poll that I ran, a lot of people said no. They were like, I literally do not want any additional content in my inbox. Like, please, no more content.
- [49:36]
C
Right, right.
- [49:37]
Matt Johansson
Like, that's how a lot of people feel. And I get that.
- [49:39]
C
Right.
- [49:39]
Matt Johansson
It's like, you know, I happen to be a newsletter consumer and producer, so I do, like, consume a lot of this stuff, but I. I try to stay on top of it because it's kind of my job at this point. And it's. It's a lot of, you know, it's a lot to consume. So I get it. So, yeah, my philosophy is make it worth it and show up constantly. Constantly. If you're gonna have a break, announce it. Like, I'm all for people taking their time, but be like, hey, I'm going on vacation for two weeks. Be back. Or better yet, get like a guest writer for those two weeks. Do not miss, do not miss the time. Like if you need to take a break, hire help or something.
- [50:11]
Chanel
So it's such a good break in the consistency of like, oh, they have like this friend that's gonna write it this week. I always love those.
- [50:17]
C
Fun, right?
- [50:18]
Chanel
Yeah, yeah. And you get to find new creators and that kind of thing.
- [50:21]
Matt Johansson
You see it on like late night tv, right? Like they, you know, oh, Jimmy Kimmel's off this week. Who's, who's sitting behind the desk?
- [50:27]
C
Right?
- [50:27]
Matt Johansson
It's fun. It's like, wait, some comedian, new comedian is hosting.
- [50:31]
C
Great.
- [50:31]
Matt Johansson
Yeah. I mean, I think just consistency is like the number one thing that I see most people fail at. You know, it's just like I, I gave the short form presentation to the growth and reverse community and I challenged everyone. I said, hey, make a video every day for the next seven days. I don't think a single person did. You know what I mean?
- [50:48]
Chanel
I think some people started it and.
- [50:50]
Matt Johansson
Then they were like, some people started making short form videos after that. I've seen them.
- [50:54]
C
Right.
- [50:55]
Matt Johansson
But no one did seven days in a row. No. Like from the time that I was like, hey, this is the most important thing you could do. No one did it. It's hard. Consistency is so hard.
- [51:03]
C
Right?
- [51:03]
Matt Johansson
Life gets in the way. It's really rough. But that's my philosophy is my, my success on social media is the fact that I have not. Shut up. Yeah.
- [51:13]
Chanel
I was going to ask you next, like, what do you think the biggest opportunity is? Do you think it's literally just showing up on short form? Is that like the biggest opportunity right now or do you think there's something else that people should be paying attention to?
- [51:23]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, I think short form, especially in niches, short form is so under tapped right now. Like generic short form is. There's a ton, right? There's a ton of people making TikTok videos every day about like them trying their new food truck in their city or whatever. Like I get a ton of like food influencers and stuff like this, right? There's a ton of that. And like you. But still do it. Like, like I see, I see new ones pop up and be successful all the time. It doesn't matter. But oh my God, in niches, no one's doing It. Everyone's terrified of it for some reason, right? Not for. I understand it's hard. It's very vulnerable. Like everyone hates the sound of their own voice. Like no one wants to do it. Everyone thinks that they've got to edit. They've got to like, you know, whatever it is. I don't know if you've seen like I've showed you my short from video. I don't edit them. Like, I actually dislike over edited videos. That's like my whole philosophy on YouTube right now too. I started YouTube or we barely talked about YouTube on this conversation. It's what I'm putting most of my effort into right now because I think it's got the highest ceiling for me.
- [52:18]
C
Right?
- [52:18]
Matt Johansson
You can make, you can make good money on YouTube from ad revenue. And YouTube pays out better than all these other platforms too, right? The over edited YouTube. I start. What I was saying, I started over a year ago. What I would do is I would write my newsletter Thursday night to go out Friday morning. Friday morning I would record a YouTube video about the newsletter that I just wrote. So I was basically just trying to like make an audio and video version of my newsletter. Turns out that's a dumb idea. That's a really bad idea because. Because then I, by the time I edited it and put B roll in it, I couldn't really get the YouTube video out till Monday. I hired an editor to help and all this kind of stuff. I really couldn't get it out till Monday. So I'm writing news on Thursday to go out Friday morning is already borderline, maybe a few days old. I'm not breaking news in my newsletter. I'm aggregating news. My newsletter now you wait till next week. It's like, like what? Everyone already heard about this stuff, right? First of all. Second of all, YouTube rewards evergreen content. It's like if, if you stumbled on this six months from now, it is a completely useless video. Like this is not interesting at all because I'm like giving you a minute of 10 news stories that were, that were valid then. And I was like putting so much effort into like editing and B roll and popping up and trying to do this whole news story. It was dumb. So my new philosophy on YouTube is take a current event that's like, you know, prevalent. Maybe it is a news story, maybe whatever. But zoom out, go deep. Like what, like what is, what is this saying about the whole like this whole thing going on? What can people learn from this 6 months from now that would still be valid? And that's working way better. And I got rid of all of my editing tricks. I'm breaking all the YouTube rules. I'm like screw this. You're looking at it. This is my YouTube studio.
- [53:56]
C
Right.
- [53:56]
Matt Johansson
And I don't do, I don't do any animations. I don't do anything. I use this tool called Description to like cut out the, you know, me speaking misspeaking or the dead air while I think about what I'm saying next or when I switch my, my screen or whatever it is. I use descript to just cut all that out. So it soup to nuts. Maybe takes me two to three hours to put out a YouTube video now where it used to take me days, right. Until I turn it all around. And that's been working wonders.
- [54:20]
C
Right.
- [54:20]
Matt Johansson
I think people are a little burnt out with like the over editing. You know, like when, like the tiktoks of two years ago that had like all the like emojis popping up and you know like all the like crazy animations. Like those don't do well. What does well is like it looks like you're facetiming your friend while they're walking to work. Like that does better than anything right now.
- [54:39]
C
Right.
- [54:40]
Matt Johansson
It's like everyone wants to just connect with people.
- [54:42]
D
So I see your most recent longer form video on YouTube has been one of your most successful at least of recently.
- [54:49]
Matt Johansson
Yeah.
- [54:49]
D
Do you have any idea why? It's totally off topic, but I'm just curious.
- [54:52]
Matt Johansson
It's so hard to figure out what's going to do well and not on. On YouTube. It's definitely over indexed thumbnail and title and I'm very bad at thumbnail and title games. But it, it definitely is like the simpler I can make the thumbnail and title, the better. The more information I try to squeeze in there, the worse it does. So I think that there was a. Probably a pretty good hook on that one that drove some engagement.
- [55:14]
D
What the hell is going on with extensions during or turning into malware? Is the, is the title and all lowercase too, which is interesting.
- [55:22]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, yeah. See like I'm. I'm trying to break every rule on purpose. Yeah. I'm trying to be aggressively casual context.
- [55:31]
Chanel
Like right now it's five days ago and it has 51,000 views, which is pretty wild.
- [55:36]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, it's. It. I'm definitely. It's slow growth on YouTube but it's spiky. So like every, every couple of. I consider 10,000 views a video that, that did well right on, on YouTube at my current size. That's Like a. Okay, I did. I, I made a good video. Yeah.
- [55:51]
D
And three of your last four have hit that.
- [55:53]
C
Yeah.
- [55:54]
Matt Johansson
Yeah. So like it's, it's, it's snowballing, right? Yeah. So this whole new format is going way better. And like I said, I, like, I look at. There's some other channels if you look at, like you can take courses about doing well on YouTube and like, they'll talk at length about lighting and cameras and editing and, and hooks and thumbnails and all this kind of stuff. And then you go, look, go pull up this channel. There's a guy called some Ordinary Gamers. I don't know if you've ever heard of this guy.
- [56:21]
Chanel
I think you told me about this guy.
- [56:23]
Matt Johansson
This was an unlock for me. This was an unlock for. I looked at some ordinary Gamers, right. He's tangentially in my niche. He talks about cybersecurity every once in a while, right. He's more like generic tech, live streamer, talks about video games, talk about technology, talks about like security every once in a while when it's like, you know, overlaps with more general public interest. He gets like a hundred thousand to millions of views on every single video he posts every day. Which is like what they tell you not to do on YouTube, right? That's like a TikTok thing, right? Don't post 20 minute videos every day. No way are people gonna watch that.
- [56:55]
C
Right?
- [56:56]
Matt Johansson
He posts every day. His thumbnail is just his face sitting in his studio most of the time, right?
- [57:02]
C
Yeah.
- [57:03]
Matt Johansson
His lighting is atrocious. His audio sometimes, sometimes he's way back here and he's like walking into the screen and then he's like on, like he breaks every single rule that they would teach you in like a YouTube academy, me. And he's killing it. I think the rules are made up and the points don't matter for you whose line fans. But it's like, it's just, can you show up authentically? And I'm almost trying to break the mold from like the Mr. Beast in your face. Oh my gosh, look at this bright colored thumbnail. Look at all this edits I'm gonna throw at you in the first 30 seconds of this video. I'm gonna treat you like a little cat with a laser pointer and like change the screen every two or three seconds. That's literally like, I've taken some YouTube courses. They say do not like leave the screen stale for more than three seconds. They like, you have to change something. You got to put something up. You got to zoom out, you got to zoom in. You got to, like, switch to B roll. You got to do whatever every three seconds. You know how long it takes to edit something where you have to change it every three seconds? It's insane.
- [57:57]
C
Right?
- [57:57]
Matt Johansson
And I also think it's like you're treating your audience like little ADD children, right? Which maybe a lot of them are if, you know, they're consuming some of the more popular YouTube content. But it's not the audience that I'm going after, right? So I'm just trying to, like, connect authentically with my audience everywhere. Now at this point, I threw out, I threw out my editor. I was like, screw it. We're going to sit, we're going to hit record, and we're just going to jam on a topic that's a little bit more evergreen than, than the news story. And it's paying off. It's doing really well.
- [58:22]
D
And so these. Are you just editing yourself with Descript?
- [58:25]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, Descript. Yeah, I just cut out the, Cut out the dead space, and that's pretty much it.
- [58:30]
Chanel
Well, so I see the, I see in your description, the first line is just like, subscribe to the newsletter. Are you getting subscriptions from YouTube? Yeah, it working better than Instagram?
- [58:40]
Matt Johansson
I'd have to check. I'd have to check on the comparison. My, my gut says similar, maybe slightly better. Maybe slightly better. Interesting, because the call to action, like you said, is right there. And I can't do that on Instagram videos. I can't put a link somewhere. What I should do more of, and this does work on Instagram, I should do more stories where I say, hey, write. I've done this a few times where I'm like, I'm up late, I'm at the studio. You know, I'm here, I'm reading this news story. I'm writing it for my newsletter. Here's a link. Because you could put a link in story. I say, hey, subscribe. You know, it'll be in your inbox tomorrow morning. I should do that every week. And I don't. Because, yeah, I do get a few. When I do that, I'll get, you know, I'll get a handful of subscribers if I, if I strongly pump it like that.
- [59:24]
Chanel
Yeah, I think there's only so much time in the day, though.
- [59:26]
Matt Johansson
So, so much done a day. And also, like, I'm very sensitive to, like, exhausting my audience on, like, calls to action. Like, I, I, I, I am, like, endlessly just trying to pour free value onto the Internet.
- [59:38]
C
Right?
- [59:38]
Matt Johansson
It's Just like, like newsletter's free, Instagram's free, TikTok, like just I'm just trying to show up every day and just like give, give, give. And then it's like, all right, let's you know, figure out the subtle ways in the funnel to like make this worth my time.
- [59:52]
Chanel
Yeah, well, maybe you can come back in a few months and tell us how you've improved your newsletter game from social. Cuz you clearly have the short form video, the long form video figured out. At this point it's, it's a matter of like time of just continuing to do it. So. So this is awesome though. I'm excited to get this out into people's hands.
- [60:09]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, I'm excited. Hopefully I've got like, you know, a good story in six months to share how the premium newsletter is going. Maybe the community has started, you know, stuff like that. I'm hoping that that kind of turns, turns real.
- [60:21]
Chanel
Yeah. Well, if people want to find you, where should they go? Like what's the best place?
- [60:27]
Matt Johansson
Literally anything we talked about. I'm everywhere. So I'm Matt J On a lot of platforms. M A T T J A Y.
- [60:34]
C
Why?
- [60:34]
Matt Johansson
Because there's always another Matt. Yeah, if you're, if you're a Male in the US from the 90s, there's, there's always another Matt. So I was Matt J my whole life. So yeah, Matt J on Twitter and Instagram. I think I'm my full government name on YouTube. But you can find my, I think you can find my link tree on most of my bios that have kind of everything. And then volnu.com v u l n u.com is my, is my newsletter.
- [61:02]
Chanel
Well, thanks for joining us on the show. I appreciate it, Matt.
- [61:04]
Matt Johansson
Yeah, it's always fun to talk. I'm usually talking about security stuff, so this is always fun to talk about why I spend all this time on social.