← Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Success Story with Scott D. Clary
Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder | Building an AI Media Business from $1K to Multi-Million Exit
01:36:52
Loading summary
Transcript201 lines
- [00:00]
Scott Clary
Lingoda is a partner of Success story. Look, I'll be real with you. My French used to be solid. I learned it in school. I even had decent pronunciation. But when I booked a trip to France last year, it was a total blank. I could barely order a croissant without sounding like a tourist. So I jumped into the Lingoda Sprint challenge and man, it changed everything. I'd take live classes late at night after podcasting. Only five students max. Real teachers, real, real conversations. And in just two months, I went from bonjour to holding full conversations at a Paris cafe. Confidence unlocked. Now here's the play 30 or 60 classes in 60 days and if you finish them all, you get 50% cash back. That's basically €4 or $5 per class. That's insane value. Go to try.lingoda.com successsprint and then use my code Scott Sprint for an extra €20 off on top of their current deal. Registration closes May 5th. Classes start May 12th. Let's get fluent. This podcast is brought to you in part by Stash.
- [01:12]
Unknown
Are you still putting off saving and investing?
- [01:14]
Scott Clary
Because you'll get to it someday. Stash turns someday into today. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment advisory that combines.
- [01:23]
Unknown
Automated investing with dependable financial strategies to.
- [01:27]
Scott Clary
Help you reach your goals faster.
- [01:28]
Unknown
They'll provide you with personalized advice on.
- [01:30]
Scott Clary
What to invest in based on your goals. Or if you just want to sit back and watch your money go to work, you can opt into their award winning expert managed portfolio that picks stocks for you.
- [01:39]
Unknown
Stash has helped millions of Americans reach.
- [01:41]
Scott Clary
Their financial goals and starts at just $3 per month. Don't let your savings sit around. Make it work harder for you. Go to get.stash.comsuccess story and see how.
- [01:52]
Unknown
You can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase. And to view important disclosures, that's get.stash.comsuccess.
- [01:59]
Scott Clary
Story paid non client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee.
- [02:03]
Unknown
Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC and SEC Registered Investment Advisor.
- [02:08]
Scott Clary
Investing involves risks and investments may lose value.
- [02:11]
Adam Biddlecomb
Offers subject to T's and C's.
- [02:13]
Matt Village
When I was a musician playing in a band, I thought I was like a rock star. So I spent eight years in my professional career all the time begging people to come. When we first did a public webinar on LinkedIn and we had like 2,000 people registered to to come, that's when I realized that Mindstream was a big deal.
- [02:28]
Unknown
What if you could build and sell a company to a tech giant in just 17 months without funding a degree or a business plan. Adam Biddlecomb did exactly that. From launching Mindstream, an AI newsletter in a garden shed. He scaled it to over 150,000 subscribers and sold it to HubSpot in under a year and a half.
- [02:46]
Matt Village
Being a successful musician was my dream. My dream was ripped away from me from COVID 19. It almost gave me an opportunity to, to get out. And then I jumped into my first job. That next period of three years was very difficult for me. I went for a walk and I called my friend Matt Village and I told him, come around to my house, start a business. And I said, we're going to do this newsletter thing. You write it, I'll work out everything else and let's go. Two, three hours we'd started, everything was ready to go. That was our Runway. We achieved the goal of can we quit our jobs?
- [03:13]
Unknown
Today he leads brand strategy at Mindstream and shares his journey with an audience of over 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. In this episode, we explore how Adam turned a simple idea into a thriving business. He's helping others navigate the intersection of AI, media and entrepreneurship.
- [03:28]
Matt Village
I have been a failure for 10 years and a success for two. You have to choose your regrets. Every decision that you make, if you do one of the things, there's always a regret that you didn't do the other. When you make a decision in life, you have to choose the regret that you can live with.
- [03:46]
Unknown
Welcome to Success Story.
- [03:47]
Adam Biddlecomb
I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of.
- [03:51]
Unknown
The HubSpot Podcast network. Now, HubSpot doesn't just have great podcasts.
- [03:55]
Adam Biddlecomb
They also have great tools for entrepreneurs.
- [03:57]
Unknown
Let me tell you a story. I'm sure you've all heard of the.
- [04:00]
Adam Biddlecomb
Angel City Football Club.
- [04:02]
Unknown
Well, you don't just become the world's most valuable women's sports franchise by accident. Angel City Football Club did it.
- [04:08]
Adam Biddlecomb
The little help from HubSpot. When they started, data was housed across.
- [04:12]
Unknown
Multiple Systems and HubSpot unified their website, their email marketing and fan experience in one platform. This allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just three days. The results were nearly 350 new fan signups a week and a 300% database.
- [04:29]
Adam Biddlecomb
Growth in just two years. Sure, you can be a great team in the arena, but if you truly.
- [04:35]
Unknown
Want to build a legacy, a franchise.
- [04:37]
Adam Biddlecomb
And a dynasty, you have to build a community outside of the arena. And HubSpot helped Angel City Football Club do just that. If you want to Learn about how.
- [04:46]
Unknown
HubSpot can help your business, visit HubSpot.com.
- [04:49]
Adam Biddlecomb
There'S some other great case studies and you'll learn how HubSpot can help your business grow better. And one quick ask before before we dive into today's episode, I need your.
- [04:58]
Unknown
Help with something important. I've just launched a quick survey to better understand what you guys want from.
- [05:03]
Adam Biddlecomb
The show, and your feedback is going.
- [05:05]
Unknown
To directly shape our upcoming content.
- [05:08]
Adam Biddlecomb
It's only going to take a few minutes of your time and I made.
- [05:10]
Unknown
It super easy to find. Just head over to scottdclary.com survey and as a thank you for helping me.
- [05:17]
Adam Biddlecomb
Out, I'm giving away a free gift card to one lucky respondent chosen at random once we hit 1.
- [05:23]
Unknown
100 responses.
- [05:24]
Adam Biddlecomb
So not only will your feedback help.
- [05:26]
Unknown
Make this show even better, you might score something cool just for sharing your thought.
- [05:30]
Adam Biddlecomb
I really appreciate your help with this one, Adam. You scaled mindstream from 0 to 150,000 subs in 17 months before selling the HubSpot. That is a wild ride. That's fast. It's very fast. A lot of creators, they struggle to build audiences like this. You built it relatively quickly. So what was the moment when you were a creator and you were building this thing and was moving kind of at breakneck speed in terms of list building and creator economy building? What was the moment when you realized that you had something special?
- [06:13]
Matt Village
So I spent most of my career trying to be a musician. I think it's a good way to preface this. And at the time when I was a musician, playing in a band, creating content, I was a content creator. I didn't know I was a content creator. I thought, I thought I was like a rock star, you know. And even before that, I used to promote and put on shows. It was like my first business. I was an event promoter. So I spent probably the first seven, eight years of my professional career every day begging people either to come to my shows or come and watch my band. This was literally every day. Everything we did was like, come on, make sure you listen to our music. Check out our YouTube series, like all the time begging people to come. And it was such a hard sell all the time. And then when we first did a public webinar on LinkedIn for Mindstream and we had like 2,000 people registered to come. And then I sat down to go and do this, this webinar and saw the comments start flying in and hundreds of people like, excited to hear about what I had to say about AI. I kind of Had a moment where I compared that to how hard I got people to listen to my art. And, you know, that's when I realized that Mindstream was a big deal. I'd inadvertently, like, been successful with audience building in this kind of B2B media landscape in a way that I never had been able to do with music.
- [07:32]
Adam Biddlecomb
I mean, that's 2,000 people showing up for. For a live stream is a lot of people. So you built. It's not just building audience at that point and people show up and they want to hear. That's building community. And I think we can talk about that in a bit. I want to just go back and sort of unpack your origin story a little bit more. But that's. That is a huge signal. And I think that if I even look at some big podcasters, that built audiences is sort of my world that I live in right now. The, the switch from just sort of audience building into community buildings to start do like live events and to do live shows, and that's. That's like very. Anything live is very stressful because you're like, I need to not only be someone's, you know, dog walk or someone's drive into work, but I need them to take time out of their day to show up in real time and care about what I'm building. So that's a great signal. So musician and, and, and promoter to a degree, to AI newsletter writer, obviously, super simplified. But at the end of the day, that's sort of the career transition you went through. Where's the connection between your two worlds?
- [08:42]
Matt Village
Yeah, so I think, I think as I alluded to at the start, like, I didn't really know it when I was trying to be a musician, but I was, I was learning all the skills of building businesses. You know, like our band, we were called Chasing Deer and we released albums, we did shows, we did tours. But at the back end of it, we were. We were actually building quite a successful business. You know, we were looking at it with business fundamentals and we were able to support a living for the band. Like, we all lived together down in London. We managed to make enough money to pay the rent. And that was sort of the role that I took on when we were doing the band. I had like a co founder, you know, who was like my frontman, and he was the creative guy. He was doing most of the writing, most of like the art and all these things. And I was just trying to survive. So it was making sure we had enough shows, we were getting enough money, we were Marketing ourselves in the right way. I mean, even back in like 2017, like we started a newsletter for the. For the band. So I didn't really realize it at the time, but I was picking up all these skills to build businesses. I also think at the time, like, being a successful musician was the biggest. The biggest thing ever. To me. It was my dream. You know, I was like. When I started, I was like 14 years old and it's like I want to be on stage playing music. That's the life I want it to be. So doing that for so long and trying for so hard and having so much failure, I almost think has given me a free pass for the rest of life because in a way I have. I have failed the ultimate dream. So everything else is like, I can kind of be a little bit nonchalant about it, if you know what I mean.
- [10:17]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, it's an interesting take. I don't think that many people think like that when they fail at something. I think that it's. It's very positive. It's very, very positive. Is there a reason why after. I guess it's. It sounds like harsh, but like failing at the main dream, it almost gave you agency or inspired you to go do something versus kind of killed a creative spark that you had and made you almost move in the other direction from being a creative and just saying like, you know, like this, I'm not going to be creative. It's not working out for me. I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to go get a job or do something that's a little bit less creative. I'm just curious why after putting so much of your like, life and heart and soul and blood and sweat and tears into trying to be a musician, you had the energy or their willpower to go on another creative pursuit.
- [11:15]
Matt Village
Yeah, to be honest, I didn't at the time. So when I talk about my. My journey, I often like miss this period out. But it was quite a long period of time where I was like, truly lost. You know, I'd. I spent all my time trying to. Trying to do this thing and, you know, the kind of sexy way to tell the story is that like, my dream was ripped away from me from COVID 19. And that is essentially what put the nail in the coffin. You know, we went into lockdown. We couldn't go out and perform shows. Money stopped coming in, we couldn't pay the rent in our flat and we left. But even running up like the previous few months, running up to Covid hitting, I was starting to realize that the kind of, we weren't moving forward really. We were making a little bit more money. We were, we were kind of perfecting our craft a little bit. But something we were doing creatively wasn't connecting with people and we weren't building that audience. And I was starting to get a little bit disillusioned. And then like I say, when Covid came that that was the end. And it also gave, it almost gave me an opportunity to get out, but it didn't, it didn't happen quickly. I moved back in with my parents. I was 20 20, so I was 22 years old and I just like 22 years old and my dream had kind of essentially ended and I was, I was like not in a good place. I was back with my parents, I was drinking quite a lot. I didn't have a job, I'd never had a job. Like I didn't really know where to go. And it took me three or four months before I, I kind of got up off my ass and started, started working again, started getting fit, started reading, started learning. And then I jumped into my first job. I got a sales position. And the reason I went into sales is I thought like learning the skill of sales is going to set me up for the future. But I didn't really know what that future was and I had, I worked for three years in three different sales jobs before I started Mindstream. So that that period of coming back from, coming back from London, sitting down into COVID 19, like life where I was doing anything, that next period of three years was, was very difficult for me. It took me a long time to kind of really have the energy to, to go again and go and do something super creative.
- [13:29]
Scott Clary
I have to take a second and thank Northwest Registered Agent for supporting today's episode. Now listen. I know a lot of entrepreneurs listen to this show. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're building a business, you have to listen if you want to get more. When you're launching your next big idea, Northwest Registered Agent lets you establish your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. For nearly 30 years, they've been the secret weapon for entrepreneurs who want to move fast while getting expert guidance. For just $39 plus state fees, they'll handle your formation, create a custom website and establish your local presence wherever your business takes you. As an entrepreneur myself, what I value most is their one stop business solution. You get everything from formation paperwork to custom domains to trademark registration all in one easy to use account. No more juggling all these multiple services or wasting time figuring out the legal stuff. So don't wait. Protect your privacy, build your brand and set up your business in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com success and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent@northwestregisteredagent.com success. I just want to take a second and thank Cornbread Hemp for supporting today's episode.
- [14:40]
Unknown
Now Cornbread Hemp CBD gummies have been.
- [14:43]
Scott Clary
This really nice addition to my wellness toolkit. I don't use them every day, just.
- [14:48]
Adam Biddlecomb
When I want to unwind after those.
- [14:50]
Scott Clary
Extra busy weeks, but they're perfect for.
- [14:52]
Adam Biddlecomb
Those moments when you want to take.
- [14:54]
Scott Clary
The edge off and just find your balance. Really just shut off from work.
- [14:58]
Unknown
And what makes them special is how Cornbread handcrafts them. They only use the flour of US.
- [15:02]
Scott Clary
SDA Organic Hemp plants.
- [15:04]
Unknown
That's the best part for the purest, most potent experience. No fillers, no artificial fluff, just clean full spectrum goodness in delicious watermelon, berry and peach flavor.
- [15:15]
Scott Clary
I keep them in my nightstand for.
- [15:17]
Unknown
Those moments when I just need a little extra help relaxing. And I love how transparent they are too. Every batch is third party lab tested.
- [15:23]
Scott Clary
So you know exactly what you're getting. And they put together a special offer for all success story podcast listeners.
- [15:28]
Unknown
All all listeners can save 30% off their first order. Just head to cornbreadhemp.com success and use code success at checkout. That's cornbreadhemp.com success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing gummies.
- [15:45]
Scott Clary
Prolon is a success story partner. Now long weeks and busy weekends they can leave everybody feeling depleted and tired. We work nonstop and that's why I love Prolons five day Fasting Mimicking diet. I love this company. Let me explain how it works. Basically they have a fasting mimicking diet that rejuvenates you from the inside and out. They deliver plant based soups, snacks and drinks that keep your body in a fasting state while giving you nutrition. And when your body's in a fasting state, this triggers cellular renewal and it actually works. This is why I loved intermittent fasting for so many years. This is the magic of Prolon. And the exciting news is that they just launched a new next gen five day program. So it has all the benefits that they had before, but now they have 100% organic ingredients in their food. Better taste and ready to eat meals that make the whole process easier. I've tried the original Prolon program. I felt fantastic whenever I do it. I personally cannot wait to try this new and improved version. And if you've never tried them before, you're in for a treat because the old one was great. I can't even imagine how good this new Prolon five day program is going to be. And for a limited time, Prolon is offering success story listeners, all you guys, 15% off site wide plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five day program. Just go to prolonlife.com Clary that's P R O L O N l I f e.com Clary to get your 15% discount and your bonus gift. ProlonLife.com/Clary.
- [17:24]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, it's interesting because Covid, Covid was, it's, it's always. You have to be careful how you say this, but Covid for you technically was a blessing because that's what eventually put the nail in the coffin that allowed you to sort of go through this really difficult, kind of shitty transition period, but ultimately come in on the other side and build something successful. But it's interesting because for creatives, for people that are kind of in the, the world that, that we're in, you, you're writing, I'm podcasting. Before that, you were creating art, creating music. I never know when to tell a creative that they should keep iterating and pivoting and trying to refine the product versus, to quote Kevin o' Leary, take it behind the barn and shoot it. And Covid forced you to do that, Like Covid forced you to shut it down. So what's your feedback for any kind of creative? Because I don't, I don't consider music or writing or podcasting or even influencer on social. I all consider them creative to. They are, they're just, they're just creators trying to figure out how to build audience, how to have their message resonate. When is it, when is it something you should iterate through and test new ideas versus when is it something that you should shut down if global pandemic doesn't force you?
- [18:44]
Matt Village
Yeah, I think, I think it's very difficult when you're in the moment and especially, you know, when we talk about creative. Normally when someone's doing a creative venture is a very, very passionate, emotional thing for them. I think you need to kind of get out of the day to day a little bit. And, and there's ways to do that. You know, you can look at like meditation, you can look at journaling, you can look at all these strategies, but you need to break yourself out of execution, because you can kind of optimize anything to infinity. And I think sometimes when you're stuck in the weeds, that is the solution. Like take podcasting, for example. If you have someone who's not got a successful podcast, they could be saying, oh, it's because of I'm using the wrong camera or the wrong microphone, or I'm not iterating in the right way, or I need to have different guests and all of these things. And you can do that forever. But if you were able to kind of take yourself out of the weeds and really, really step back and look at data over a long period time and really kind of, I think you have to decide on like, what the key metrics are for you. And I think that's different for every person. You know, for, for me in the band, it was like, how many people are becoming super fans? That, that was always the metric. For the person who would book the show ticket as soon as you announced, they would buy the new CD as soon as it was launched, they would buy all of your merchandise. They would tag you on their socials like these, These were the, the super fans. And when I realized that, that for us, like, we weren't getting more and more of them over time, that was the, the one metric that made me realize that we weren't actually progressing.
- [20:17]
Adam Biddlecomb
Does that, does that mean, like, that I was going to ask from a, from a creative content perspective, does that mean that like, the music's not good or you're not good marketers? Like, what's the thing that would create more music? Super. I've never been a. I've never been in a band yet. I play music, but I've never tried to build an audience around it. Yeah, so what, what's the metric?
- [20:36]
Matt Village
So I think, I think our problem with, with Chasing Deer is that we, we tried to please everybody and we. Part of the reason we did this is we were. We were originals band writing music, going on tour, like, trying to sell our music. But the way we made most of our money was doing corporate events, weddings, parties, and playing and playing covers. So we had always had this strange, like, mix between do we. How we promote ourselves and like, oh, we probably shouldn't say like this thing in our song lyric on the original side just in case someone wanted to book us for their corporate event or whatever. You know, that's where the money was coming in. So there was always this balance that could be one of the root causes. Another root cause is like in our mission, in our Mission statement. We, we always used to said like, say we were. We are kind of fun. This is what we are. We're just like a fun party band and everyone who comes to our gig is just going to have a great time. But I almost think that's too broad. You know, like most, most musicians have a, have a statement. Like they have really quirky character types or they are anti establishment or they're pro this or they're. Or they're anti that. Like they have something that they can really like live and die on and that is going to attract that type of person. You know, we were almost trying to do like Coldplay. Yeah, Coldplay down the line. Not Coldplay from day one. And, and you know, if you look at that in a business sense, it's like we didn't niche down.
- [22:05]
Adam Biddlecomb
You know, that's really. I think that that's probably one of the, the hardest lessons that I've had to learn. And I see a lot of creators screw this up because what they do, myself included, is they'll look at like the big influencer that's kind of doing the same thing that they are. And they're like, oh, I just want to, I want to be the, you know, the Tim Ferriss Joe Rogan Diary of a CEO podcast or I want to be the whatever Gary Vee of social media or pick a, pick a influencer that somebody looks up to. And those people are, are at this point so famous they can afford to be a little bit of a generalist in their content and they can afford to interview, you know, all these different people or post all these different ideas on their social. But a lot of them started so niche down and people forget that. People forget that Gary Vee started with wine. If you're, I mean, if you're a Grant Cardone fan and you see all his stuff now, now he's gone into politics. He started with sales training. Yeah, it was very, very niche. It was very niche. And now he has a big audience. Right? Everybody. I think even I'm not sure how like the, the, the, the. I think Joe Rogan started with like comedians and it was just comedians. And now he interviews everyone and anyone about politics, cultures, society, whatever. So it's so cliche, right? It's so. But you know, don't compare your, your day one to someone else's like year 10, which is really what everyone's doing when they start creating content.
- [23:27]
Matt Village
100 in my world, like obviously newsletters, but in LinkedIn content creation, one of your previous guests, like Sahil Bloom, I think what he is doing now is he's taking like quite generalist advice, but like wrapping it so beautifully. And someone will say to me, like, how does Sahil blow Bloom, like post this quote and get like thousands of likes on LinkedIn, but when I post the same quote, I don't get any likes. And it's like he's built up the credibility over years of hard work that people trust, trust his message. You know, you haven't, you haven't done the work. So you don't almost get the luxury of being generalist.
- [24:05]
Adam Biddlecomb
No, you can't yet. And that's where that's. I think that's why a lot of creators burn out, because they try and be generalist day one and they don't see the traction. But if they niche down for a period of time, I mean, this is like Mind Stream was AI. Like you did niche and I assume that was a lesson that you learned. I don't know, consciously or subconsciously when you decided to move from creative venture to Life sucks. I hate sales. I want to go build something. I just don't want to make sure that I don't want to make the mistakes with the newsletter that I'm building. And I'm curious why you even decided to start a newsletter amongst all other things in the world that you could ever start. But I'm assuming one of the lessons was don't generalize and don't be the Coldplay 20 years into their career. When we first started, is that sort of how you were thinking through Mindstream when you. When you first kicked it off?
- [24:57]
Matt Village
I'm. That might have been a small, a small part of it, but maybe I'm.
- [25:02]
Adam Biddlecomb
Giving you too much credit. I have no idea.
- [25:05]
Matt Village
Yeah, I think, I think you might be. You know, it's. It's very tempting to look back in hindsight and like draw all the dots that tell the nicest story, but Mindstream really came out of like pure frustration. When I started Mindstream, so at the time I was working a sales job and I had this like small e commerce business that I was running. I was selling snooker and pool accessories. So like tips and chalk and all this stuff like dropshipping through Amazon FBA. And I'd scaled it to doing about £80,000 in revenue with like, I think I had like a 12% profit margin. But what I was selling wasn't my own product. I was competing against other FBA sellers. So the price was controlled by like five or six sellers. So I got to £80,000 in revenue. And when you hit £85,000 in revenue in the UK, you have to register for VAT and you have to start charging 20% VAT on top of your product. And that just killed my margin completely. I think it took it down to like, 4%. And when I kind of modeled it out at the, at the rate I needed to scale to make it worth it, I'd have to start looking at hiring staff and like a warehouse with 4% profit margin. It just didn't make any sense to me. And that, like, was like a real kick in the teeth, you know. I thought that this was my way out. I'd, like, tried and tested loads of things. I'd landed on this one thing. I'd spent loads of money on a coach and, and my coach at the time, like, I, I said to her, like, yo, this VAT thing, like, how do I get around this? And she didn't have an answer. When your coach doesn't have an answer, it's like, oh, dear.
- [26:48]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, you're. That's not good.
- [26:50]
Matt Village
Yeah. So I had a. I don't know if it was that, that day where, where it kind of clicked to me or like a, A couple of days later, but I, I went for a walk. I went to walk like a couple of hours and I called my friend Matt Village. He'd been my, like, best friend since I was like 4 years old. And we, We' together. And I just like shouted at him for like an hour on the phone. Like, what has become of our lives? Like, we, you know, we're 23, 24 now. We haven't done this thing that we always said we were going to do. Like, we're both just in, like, jobs. You know, I have to be careful because I, I do actually. I did actually love the last sales job I had. I worked with some great people, but we, we weren't where we wanted to be. And I told him, like, come around, come around to my house and we're going to, like, lock ourselves in my office and start a business. And the reason we landed on a newsletter is because he was a copywriter. He was working as a copywriter for a copywriting agency. And I had spent the last two, three years with my first million as the, like, number one podcast in my ears. That was like my main entrepreneurial motivation. And two hosts of that podcast had started and exited successful newsletter businesses. So it was like the freshest thing in my mind at this. So that's, that's one piece of the puzzle, another piece of the puzzle was in my previous sales job. I did most of my outbound through LinkedIn. So I would just spend so much time on LinkedIn. And I started following these AI creators who were getting like a load of buzz. It was like Zayn Khan and Adit Seth in back in those days, like mid 2023. And they had AI newsletters that were starting to grow. There was like a load of buzz behind them. So couple like me having listened a bunch to the newsletter business from Sam and Shan on my first million, my co founder, who I wanted to start this business with being a copywriter, me seeing all these AI LinkedIn content creators that all just came together. And I said, look, we're going to do this newsletter thing. It's not going to cost us any money to really get it started and we're just going to try it. You write it, I'll work out everything else and let's go. And within like two, three hours of being locked in this office, we'd started. We had the name, we bought the domain, we'd created a logo. Like everything was ready to go.
- [29:09]
Scott Clary
Lingoda is a partner of success story. Look, I'll be real with you. My French used to be solid. I learned it in school. I even had decent pronunciation. But when I booked a trip to France last year, it was a total blank. I could barely order a croissant without sounding like a tourist. So I jumped into the Lingoda Sprint challenge and, man, it changed everything. I take live classes late at night after podcasting. Only five students, max. Real teachers, real conversations. And in just two months, I went from bonjour to holding full conversations at a Paris cafe. Confidence unlocked. Now, here's the play. 30 or 60 classes in 60 days. And if you finish them all, you get 50% cash back. That's basically €4 or $5 per class. That's insane value. Go to try.com lingoda.com success underscore sprint and then use my code Scott Sprint for an extra €20 off on top of their current deal. Let's get fluent.
- [30:15]
Unknown
FreshBooks is supporting today's episode. And if you've ever wondered how successful entrepreneurs stay on top of their finances while growing their business, the answer is FreshBooks. The numbers don't lie. Over 30 million people have chosen FreshBooks, processing more than 60 billion in invoices and saving an incredible 192 hours every year on accounting tasks. Think about it. That's nearly eight full days you could get back to focus on what really matters, growing your business. FreshBooks is more than just accounting software, it's your all in one financial command center. Create professional estimates, track time, automatically bill clients, and capture expenses on the go. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with over 100 business tools you already use, all backed by award winning customer service. If you're ready to stop drowning in receipts and you're ready to stop chasing down payments, here's what I want you to do. Head over to freshbooks.com to start your 30 day free trial. No credit card required. And for all you success story listeners out there, I've got something special. Get an exclusive exclusive 60% off for six months when you visit freshbooks.com pricing offer transform your business with freshbooks today. That's freshbooks.com pricing offer for 60% off. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Now listen up. This matters for your business. In today's digital landscape, security isn't optional, it's essential. Without it, deal stall, sales cycles stretch on and scaling becomes very difficult now. Why? Because investors, customers and partners all expect.
- [31:35]
Adam Biddlecomb
Businesses to demonstrate strong security practices before they commit.
- [31:39]
Unknown
If you can't prove trust, you lose opportunities. So whether you're a startup founder trying to land that first big client, or an established company scaling your security program, Vanta helps businesses of all sizes prove that they're trustworthy by Automating compliance across 35 frameworks like SoC2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA, the exact certifications your prospects are demanding. Here's why you need to pay attention. Vanta gives you back precious time that you're currently wasting on compliance. Their platform automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance work. It helps you respond to those endless security questionnaires up to five times faster. And it connects you with experts to get your security program running immediately. The results speak for themselves. A recent IDC report found that Vanta customers achieve over $535,000 per year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just three months. So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Quora and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. And don't miss this for a limited time, only my listeners can get a thousand dollars off Vanta. That's real money back in your pocket. Visit vanta.comScott right now before this offer expires. That is V A N T A.
- [32:59]
Adam Biddlecomb
Dot com Scott, what were the outside of lessons that you learned from like my first million and and obviously, you know, Sam built the hustle. Sean built Milk Road. So two great examples there and I think they speak about them a lot. Some strategies, how to grow scale. And I actually think it's a really interesting business model we can talk about if it's something that can be done almost like predictably as a business model to, to sort of copy the playbook that, that they had, that you had. And if you can, you know, someone listening can start one today and build it and exit. I think that's an interesting conversation because they seem to be so confident about it. And I guess you're a living example of listening to some advice and then running with it. But outside of the newsletter advice that you got, what were some of the. Because you've gone through sales jobs, Amazon, fba, building a, building a band and, and being a creator before, what were some of the most important ideas that you've learned up to this point in your career? I know you're still young, but what were some of the most important business ideas that helped you make Mindstream successful?
- [34:07]
Matt Village
I think at the core of it, it's just having a bias for action. I think the majority of people today are consumers load of people who think they're being productive, listening to loads of business podcasts and the year, the year before I started mindstream, like 2020, 23, sort of January when I was looking at my goals for the year, my main goal for that year was I want to become someone who does something rather than say something, because I've always been able to, to sell myself. It's one of, one of the best assets I have. The problem is when you're selling yourself but you're not actually doing anything, it's, it's just, it's just a lie at the core of it, you know what I mean? So I set myself the challenge that year of becoming the person who continues to sell itself but has something that's really exciting to sell. So having that bias for action is something I'm very, very grateful to have to have it kind of like in my core. And it's been there all my life. I started my first business at 14 doing events, went out and did the band. I've always had the energy to kind of go out and do things. And then also the thing I'm really like, my, my word of the year of 2025 is intention. Like I'm working quite hard to analyze all aspects of my life and optimize and really work on life building. And whenever I like discuss it, it all always comes down to like being intentional. That's How I get happiness and success out of something. And to be intentional, you have to have like a big. You have to have a big picture. I don't think you can be intentional if you're really in the weeds, you just end up being reactive. So being able to kind of step out, analyze a situation, know the end goal you're going towards, and then make intentional decisions that will help you get there. I think those. Having those two things really is kind of the core of what you need to go out and be successful in something.
- [36:13]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, I think that's very wise. I think that even without intention, her Mosey speaks about this a lot. How entrepreneurs sometimes last in this cycle their entire life about starting something, get, you know, getting excited about it, then the hard happens and then, you know, you get kind of disenchanted with it. Then you start the next thing and then you get the motivation to start it, and then hardship happens and then you move on to the next thing. And I think it's because you don't have that big picture or that North Star and you, and you aren't intentional at what you're doing. Like, intention in my mind, is what gets you through all those inevitably hard moments that are going to occur whenever you're building anything meaningful. You need to have intention and you need to have North Star. You need to have a vision bigger than, you know, the, the shitty, the shitty thing that's bound to happen on the way to building the impressive, incredible, amazing thing. It's so, so, so important. I know that when you started Mindstream, it didn't like blow up right away. It took a, it took a second. So early days of sending that newsletter, actually before we even talked about early as you're sending the newsletter, what made you want to focus on AI content? What was like, what was the signal in the market that that was a good idea.
- [37:27]
Matt Village
So this is May, May 24 May 2023, that we sat down and when we sat down to decide on what we're going to start, we didn't know it was going to be a newsletter and we didn't know it was going to be AI. We made that decision in the space of two or three hours. So I have to think about what I was influenced by at that time. And most of my, like I said earlier, most of my time at work was spent outbounding on LinkedIn. That's a little bit of a lie. Most of my time at work was spent scrolling through LinkedIn. Right. You know, and maybe, of course, maybe.
- [38:02]
Adam Biddlecomb
A little Bit of outbound.
- [38:04]
Matt Village
Yeah. And obviously there's a algorithmic effect to, like, someone's LinkedIn feed. But mine became all about AI and I was following these. These creators who were. Who was building these followings, talking about AI. If anyone thinks back to that time, it was just everything. Like, someone could put a lead magnet of 100 ChatGPT prompts and get, like thousands of emails overnight. So it was the obvious thing to go for at the time. That's not the. That's not enough. I don't think so. When me and Matt sat down and talking about it, I said, I think AI is the thing. Do you, as the copywriter, care enough about this technology to write about it every day? And luckily Matt did. Otherwise we might have picked something totally different and not be where we are today.
- [38:51]
Adam Biddlecomb
I think that, listen, there's something to be said for, like, riding a trend. I think that's. I think that's a. It's smart. But the trends are also busy, so that means that there was probably a whole bunch of other people writing AI newsletters. So I think that just jumping on like a bandwagon trend. It sounds compelling and it sounds like a great idea, but then you realize that everybody's doing it, so you still have to differentiate somehow. It's not like it's. It's not like it's easy. Do you think. Do you think that if you had chosen to write about anything else, you would have been as successful as fast?
- [39:26]
Matt Village
Definitely not. Definitely not. You mentioned about the competition. Even when we sat down to. To start Mindstream, though, I remember looking at it, and there were more than a thousand AI newsletters on Beehive. Like on our day one, there was more than a thousand.
- [39:41]
Adam Biddlecomb
Ridiculous.
- [39:43]
Unknown
I think.
- [39:43]
Matt Village
I think a reason for that is Sean Pury had said six months before, someone needs to go and do the hustle for AI. So I was. I was late. Like, we were late. Superhuman. The rundown already had, I think, half a million subscribers, so we were so late. There was big players in the game and there were hundreds and hundreds of smaller players in the game. So in those very early days when we kind of analyzed the market, what we realized is that most of the newsletters were quite smartly using AI technology to. To just consolidate what's going on. They were doing, like, a pretty good job of cur. All of the buzz, and there was so much buzz and then using AI to write these newsletters, and they were just basically saying, like, here's what happened. That was it. And they were all formatted in the same way because they were all being built on Beehive, which had this, like, you know, amazing way of building these newsletters so they all kind of look the same. What we had was with Matt was like a real copywriter, like a real experienced copywriter who knew how to connect with people, who knew how to have a journalistic ang. And from day one, what we tried to do is not just report on the biggest AI news, but the AI news that we thought was really interesting and then to give an opinion on that news. So it's not just here happened, it's here's what happened. And this is what it might mean for you. This is what it means for X, this is what it means for Y. And that's how we differentiate it from day one.
- [41:13]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, smart. You make it so you include a human component into it. Not just aggregating.
- [41:19]
Matt Village
And also, we signed off every newsletter with written by humans. That was like our little tag at the end in this time when everyone was like using AI to write copy in the early days and it was all rubbish. We were written by humans.
- [41:31]
Adam Biddlecomb
When you. So this brings me back to the sort of the point I was alluding to before. When you first started, you did not get the traction that you were looking for. I think that from what I understood, you were getting like you were sending this newsletter to 30, 40 people a day. Your dad was reading it like, like really, really early startup, right? Like, not, like, not like immediately you get a thousand subs. So how. How long did you go through this period of just trying to figure it out, what kept you motivated, what made you think, you know what, even though it's not picking up, we're definitely on the right track because just to, you know, frame it, whatever, a couple hundred or thousand AI newsletters, there's some with 500,000 subs, you start. You've never built a newsletter business before. You realize that it's a sort of kind of like a crowded, competitive space. You're not getting traction. Some people throw in the towel very quickly. I think that if you look at like even stats for podcasters, if you've done more than 10 podcasts, I'm pretty sure it's something ridiculous like you're in the top 1% of podcasters just by releasing 10 plus episodes.
- [42:42]
Matt Village
Roads.
- [42:42]
Adam Biddlecomb
So what made you continue?
- [42:44]
Matt Village
So we had, we had pretty humble goals at the start. We both invested £500 to get it started. And that, that Runway, like gave us, I think, a few months just in terms of like the small sas cost we had at the start and our goal was can we both quit our jobs before the end of the year? And this was May, so in six months time can we replace our sales and copywriting jobs? And we weren't earning a lot of money here in the UK at the time. So it was just about these tiny building blocks. And my day used to be wake up at 6am, go to the gym, come home, write a piece of content for LinkedIn. Matt was writing the newsletter. I was trying to build a following on LinkedIn to generate subscribers. I then schedule that piece of content, go to work and do my sales job. I would then run home for my lunch break, like 5, 10 minute walk from my house. So I would literally run home, get on my laptop and engage on LinkedIn around the time of the post. As you'll know, creating content on LinkedIn, like engagement is pretty key. So I'd literally be sat on LinkedIn writing comments to all these people, trying to comment on my post. Then I'd run back to the office, finish my job, come home at the end of the day and spend another couple of hours on LinkedIn. And when you're like that focused on essentially things that don't scale, you know, it was like dming people, asking them to join the newsletter. It was posting this content, commenting on all these people's posts. You can get like obsessed with the small wins, you know, oh, I got a thousand impressions on the post for the first time. I've just hit 1,000 followers on LinkedIn. And that was probably the first six or seven weeks and, and we probably got like a thousand subscribers from LinkedIn. Then at that point Beehive did this like promotion where they were offering like they, they'd match your in, they'd match, match your investment into their boosts program which is like a cross paid, cross collaboration across newsletters. So we then dropped in two and a half thousand, which was the maximum. So we got $5,000 of boost credits and started paying, paying for subscribers that way. So suddenly we were having like 2,000, 3,000 subscribers. And at that point we made some money. Someone wanted to advertise in the newsletter and they also paid me to post about their content on LinkedIn. I think it was like 2, $300 for our first sponsor and amazing.
- [45:26]
Adam Biddlecomb
That's, that's like now you validated, even in a small way the idea.
- [45:30]
Matt Village
Yeah, yeah, that, that was it. You, you hit the nail on the head. It was, it was validation and then you could start to build a model, right? You could Go. Okay, we have this many subscribers. We charged at this CPM. I charged at this CPM for my LinkedIn and you can just model it out from there. And with this model, we were able to secure some investment. So we had two and a half thousand subscribers. We'd made like maybe five, six hundred pounds at this point. And I secured a 40,000 pound investment for 10% of the company. So it was like 400,000 pound valuation. And that was it. That was our Runway. We'd achieved the goal of can we quit our jobs? You know, three, so.
- [46:13]
Adam Biddlecomb
Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
- [46:14]
Matt Village
Three months in, this was. So it was launched in May and then, yes, September, October, we got this deal over the line.
- [46:21]
Adam Biddlecomb
Do you feel that more creators, when they start, because most creators, they start creating because they're passionate about a topic. They're not going into it thinking, I'm sure they want to scale it and monetize it and maybe eventually exit. You can make the argument that for some creators, it's very hard to exit because they're the face of the business versus a newsletter where it's faceless. But do you think that it's healthy for creators to go into a with in the same way that you did? Do you think that that would lead to a more successful outcome for the majority of creators, writers, YouTubers, podcasters, to go in thinking, okay, I love the creative pursuit, but how do I apply a business mind to this and monetize it and quit my job or secure investment as quick as possible? Because candidly, I don't. I know a lot of creators and they all go into it thinking, I want to make money, but I've never seen somebody be so purposeful. Not many creators take an investment, a $40,000 investment, 10%, $400,000 valuation in the first couple months. Like, I don't think that's a normal thing for most creators.
- [47:28]
Matt Village
Yeah, I think the pro. The problem is often the, the, the gene or the mindset of creativity, like whatever it is, doesn't normally come in parallel with like a business mindset. And this, this is what I saw in, in music. Like I. You'd sit in a room with all these musicians and they'd be like, talking about, you know, like the latest strings they'd got for their guitar or like, you know, the new time signature they were writing their new songs in. I very, very, very rarely met another musician who was like, I just charged this much money for a show. Like, it was, it was. So it just didn't matter to those creatives. And I Think maybe when you look at like someone who wants to be a YouTuber or a podcaster, they're probably kind of a little bit more business focused, but still the creative endeavor is still the most important bit. If you have somebody who has kind of a business first principles, but they also have that little bit of creativity that's like a magic combination and they can go out and win. When you're competing with people who aren't thinking that way now, that's the key thing.
- [48:38]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, I think that's very, I think it's very smart. So let's talk about, let's talk about scaling the newsletter. So, I mean, you just mentioned sort of one strategy that worked well, obviously, I think I have to, I think that you'll agree with me. Like, before we talk about any scaling strategies, you have to make sure that the product, like the newsletter itself is good. I mean, you can talk about all the scaling strategies in the world and, and running paid and doing, you know, swaps. If the quality of the content's garb, first of all, it's gonna be a huge waste of money. But you're just attracting people to garbage. So like, the quality of the product has to be incredible. Thoughts on that? How do you, how do you know what's your metric to figure out whether or not your newsletter is, is, is what people want to read? Like, how do you benchmark it? Is it open rates? Is it click through? Is it people responding back saying, oh my God, I love your newsletter? Like, what is the thing that you actually look for? For.
- [49:32]
Matt Village
Yeah, so the two top line ones are obviously open rate and click through rate. That's, that's kind of the, the main metric you're looking at every, every day. Unsubscribe rate is pretty important. You know, you have like a industry benchmark of like 5%. So if you can be below that, you know, people are unsubscribing your newsletter at a better rate than others. Reply rate. This is so key, you know, if you put a call to action out. So like, what did you think of our newsletter today? And you get ghosted by your audience of thousands of people, then that's, that's pretty scary. And another key one, like when people started to tweet about us or post about us on LinkedIn with no prompting, you know, that's, that's a really key signal. So you start to get a connection with your audience. It becomes a little bit more of a community. I still don't think that newsletter businesses are communities, but it has that, that bit more of that feel and vibe to it. Those maybe kind of less intangible metrics are so much more important than open rate and click through rate.
- [50:34]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, yeah. I mean, if somebody's, if somebody's constantly replying or, or, or reposting you or like, you know, like saying like, hey, I just read about this in, in, in this newsletter and post a little tweet about it. Like, that's incredible. It's not community, but it's like, pretty damn close. Right? You know? You know what I mean? It's. Yeah, I, Yeah, that's. That's a good signal. It's like something that I don't think enough people look for. But all the best newsletter writers, I see it all the time with, with, with your content, with the hills content. They're getting clipped out and the ideas are getting shared everywhere with no prompting.
- [51:09]
Matt Village
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [51:12]
Adam Biddlecomb
Go ahead, sir.
- [51:13]
Matt Village
Yeah, I think, you know, you talk about quality of a newsletter, you also have to compare a lot. Like, comparison is the thief of joy. But maybe analysis is the opposite of that or something. But we would very regularly sit down and analyze our competition. We did it at least every month like a proper, like, let's stop what we're doing. Let's look at what the competition are doing. Let's. Let's try and see what people are reacting to. We had an inbox that we had, like, thousands of newsletters subscribed to, and we analyzed AI newsletters, business newsletters, marketing newsletters. So you have to, you have to constantly regenerate and constantly improve your. Your content to ensure that the readers keep coming back. You know, I think a lot of people who make newsletters just build a format and find a way to execute on that format with the least input as possible, and then get confused six months down the line when it gets a bit stale.
- [52:08]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, because. Because it works. And again, people get lazy. They don't reinvent themselves. Out of all the different ways that, I mean, in terms of like growing a newsletter, you obviously are promoting it everywhere. You mentioned that you run paid against it. One strategy that you said didn't work was a cold email strategy. So let's talk about the strategies that work the best. Let's talk about strategies that you tried that didn't work at all or didn't work as well. And also, if you think those, those lessons are still relevant, I guess, I mean, it hasn't been that long, but in 2025, the strategies that you thought worked or did work well with you, would they still Work well for somebody else who's building a list right now.
- [52:49]
Matt Village
Yeah. So our main success actually came from acquisition. Our first big acquisition was right after we got the investment. I started connecting with a guy called Mattis. He was a Slovenian guy who had built up a huge email database. Sort of, sort of accidentally, he'd bought a domain called autogpt.net I think this was late 2022 and was doing an SEO play, collecting emails and then selling digital products through email sequences like AI Digital Products. And a couple of months after he'd launched this, there was this open source project called AutoGPT that started getting loads and loads of buzz. The idea at the time was it was like AI agents which are of coming now, but this was like 2023. People believed this open source project was going to create fully autonomous agents and they had so much buzz and so much hype, but because they were open source, they weren't very strategic with their marketing. And Matic website, autogpt.net remained in the number one place on Google. So people were searching autogpt to try and find this open source product, landing on his website, clicking Join now and joining his newsletter list inadvertently.
- [54:12]
Adam Biddlecomb
Amazing. Good for him.
- [54:15]
Matt Village
And once he realized what was happening, he, he doubled down on it and was like a proper SEO whiz to like keep that place and like optimize. And he made quite a lot of money early on selling these digital products. Six or so months down the line, he had this list of like 200,000 subscribers and decided to transition his business model from selling digital products into a newsletter, like a traditional newsletter, business model of sponsorships, premium newsletter, et cetera. But he was struggling to operate, he was struggling to hire, he was struggling to sell ads. He was a developer by trade, so had like an amazing set of skills, but was struggling to turn this thing around. And we just started networking, sharing strategies on newsletter growth, growth. And in the end I pitched to him that we would partner up, we would actually merge the newsletters. So at the time we had 15,000 subscribers, he had close to 200,000. And I managed to broker a deal that he would get 30% equity in Mindstream and then he would bring all of his newsletter subscribers, his blog revenue, from product sales over to Mindstream. So that took us from 15,000 subscribers, we went to 110,000. We didn't import the whole list, we imported the most active people, went to 110,000 basically overnight.
- [55:38]
Unknown
A big thank you to indeed for supporting success story because hiring people is one of the hardest things you're ever going to have to do. As an entrepreneur, as a founder, as somebody who's trying to build a business, it's important to hire well and find the right person. But it takes so much time and it's so labor intensive because like most entrepreneurs, you have a thousand things going on and there's good chance chance that you just realized your business needed to hire somebody yesterday. So how can you find that great, amazing right fit candidate fast? It's easy. Just use Indeed because you don't have to waste time struggling to get your job posts seen on all these other job sites. If you're using Indeed, you can just use their Sponsored Jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. Your post jumps right to the top of the page for relevant candidates so you can reach out to exactly who you're looking for faster and the results really speak for themselves. According to Indeed data, Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. And you know what I love most about Indeed? It really just makes hiring so fast because everything is streamlined in one place. No more juggling multiple platforms or waiting.
- [56:39]
Scott Clary
Weeks for the right candidate.
- [56:40]
Unknown
And how fast is Indeed in the minute I've been Talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed according to Indeed Data Worldwide. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of Success Story will get a $75 spons sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@inn Indeed.com clarity terms and conditions do apply. Just go to Indeed.com clarity a huge thank you to Netsuite for supporting today's episode. Now, what does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going.
- [57:11]
Adam Biddlecomb
To get 10 answers.
- [57:12]
Unknown
Bull market Bear Market Inflation up Inflation down Honestly, at this point you just need a crystal ball. But until we get one, over 41,000 businesses have found the next best thing. They future proofed their businesses their operations with NetSuite by Oracle, which is the number one cloud ERP. Imagine having your accounting, your financial management, your inventory, your HR all flowing together in one fluid platform. And here's what makes NetSuite different. It gives you one source of truth for your business. You get the visibility and control to make quick, confident decisions while others are guessing. You're working with real time data, insights, forecasting. You're basically looking into the future of your business with actionable data. Whether your company earns a couple million or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and helps you grab your biggest opportunities. And speaking of opportunities, they put together the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com ScottClary. This is the playbook for understanding how to use AI for your business. The guide is free. That is NetSuite.
- [58:16]
Adam Biddlecomb
I just want to take a quick second to thank HubSpot for supporting today's episode now.
- [58:20]
Unknown
Success Story is one of the many podcasts in the HubSpot podcast network, which is the audio destination for business professionals. If you like Success Story, you're also.
- [58:29]
Adam Biddlecomb
Going to like Billion Dollar Moves, another.
- [58:30]
Unknown
Incredible podcast hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is an incredible interviewer. She asks the hard questions on her show.
- [58:38]
Adam Biddlecomb
You're going to learn about the triumph.
- [58:40]
Unknown
The failures of all her guests, the.
- [58:41]
Adam Biddlecomb
Hard lessons of the best and brightest.
- [58:44]
Unknown
In business so that you too can.
- [58:45]
Adam Biddlecomb
Make billion dollar moves in venture, in investing, in business, and in life.
- [58:49]
Unknown
I want you to go listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcast. It is one of my favorites.
- [58:54]
Scott Clary
Sarah is one of my favorite hosts.
- [58:56]
Adam Biddlecomb
If you like Success Story, you're going.
- [58:58]
Unknown
To love this show. And a quick pause if you haven't.
- [59:00]
Adam Biddlecomb
Had a chance yet, I'd love your.
- [59:01]
Unknown
Input on our listener survey@scottdclary.com survey. It takes just a few minutes and one lucky respondent won a gift card once we hit 100 responses. Your feedback directly impacts what we cover on this show.
- [59:15]
Adam Biddlecomb
I really appreciate it. I mean that's amazing. And what happens when people realize that they're now part of a new email list? Are they as responsive? Do people drop off? Are they as valuable to the advertiser?
- [59:29]
Matt Village
Yeah. So we churned quite a lot of those subscribers over time time. And the subscribers that came through this process of thinking they were thinking they were joining this open source product project and then getting this newsletter. They were never like the highest quality of subscriber. We'd get like 25 open rate from them and like you know, 1 to 2% click rate. They weren't amazing subscribers, but the quantity of them was so high and we were still bringing in like 3 to 5,000 subscribers every month from this blog. Over the course of the next year we managed to take the amount of traffic to AutoGPT from like 90% homepage traffic. So these were the ones we thought were going to the project to like 30 and brought and won on loads of other keyword topics and got better and better subscribers. But at the time when we had these new 100,000 subscribers, the engagement of the lift did drop quite a bit. But even so this gave us an opportunity to really start making some money to go and sell some ad slots. You know, when we had 10, 15,000 subscribers, we were struggling to negotiate deals with bigger advertisers because they didn't. Even though they'd got good results from Mindstream, it was too little of a fish for them to bother even making a PO, you know. So suddenly, when we had 100, 110, 115,000 subscribers, I was able to secure deals with companies like Guide Taplio, who had a bunch of, of advertising money to spend. HubSpot started advertising with us not long after. We were able to get enough money coming in the door to go and execute paid strategies that would start to replace these subscribers. We had quite a lot of churn, but we were recycling and improving the quality of the list. And now our open rate now is like 46, 47%. Whereas at this time a year ago, just after the acquisition, we were sitting like 27, 28%.
- [61:30]
Adam Biddlecomb
Oh, amazing. So, so, so it's tough because it's always like a chicken and egg thing, right. Because you need, you need the subscribers and, and even a hundred thousand subscribers opening at a 20 open rate, it's not perfect, but it's enough to interest an advertiser to write a po because then they can actually cut a check and they'll get results and they won't be as good as, but they'll still be decent results and then the advertiser will still be happy. Then you take that money, you put it into paid strategies, and then now you get even better results. You can charge a higher cpm and it's like this great, beautiful flywheel of newsletter growth and revenue. But you have to get critical mass at the beginning and that's where a lot of people struggle.
- [62:12]
Matt Village
Yeah.
- [62:12]
Adam Biddlecomb
Or they just take longer. It just takes a long time.
- [62:14]
Matt Village
Yeah. And for us, if we were to go out and get 100,000 subscribers at that sort of quality through like paid strategy, we'd probably be paying, best case, $50 per subscriber. So we'd be looking at, you know, 150, 000 to replicate what we got from, from that deal, which was really.
- [62:36]
Adam Biddlecomb
Just a well negotiated deal.
- [62:37]
Matt Village
Yeah, yeah. And we, by the way, Mattis came on as cto, he was a great, great help in building Mindstream. And you know, all of the founders have been very happy with how it's worked out. So, you know, it was, it was a great journey.
- [62:50]
Adam Biddlecomb
Amazing.
- [62:52]
Matt Village
So, yeah, getting, getting to that, that like critical mass, as you, as you mentioned, where you can start making money and start recycling and start spending on. On paid is is important and it's very, very, very difficult to do without a lot of money. This is one of the reason that you know these thousand AI newsletters, most of them are gone now.
- [63:10]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean not a lot of people have 150, 200 grand to, to. To list. Right. Not, not the app. I mean even if you do have money, you don't put 150, 200 grand into building a list because you don't even know what the results are going to be like. That's, that's a for everybody. It doesn't matter if you have a business. I've never seen somebody who's running has had an exit is running a successful cash flowing business business from day one. Put like 200 grand into building an email list. That's a significant investment for anybody with, with when they don't know the result. Right. That's scary. That's really smart. Very, very smart. Out of all the now for paid, that was the other strategy. You said about A$50 per subscriber. Just talk to me about how, assuming that somebody has some money to spend on their newsletter, how should they do this properly? Like where should they spend the money so that they get that, that result and not three, four dollars per subscriber.
- [64:13]
Matt Village
Yeah. So you can get, you can get $52 per subscriber with paid co reg pretty easily. So Spark Loop and Beehive Boosts, I think there's something inside substack that does it as well. But those are the areas that we played in. Now these subscribers are good for a couple of reasons. One is that they are, are generally, they're generally upscribed. So somebody is subscribing to your newsletter and you say I recommend you also subscribe to Mindstream and then that subscriber has the option to go and do that. So they are in, they are a newsletter consumer first and foremost. So they're used to the format. The other thing that's good about Sparkloop and Beehive is they have, they have software that analyzes the metrics of these subscribers. So you can only pay for engaged subscribers. So you can, you can kind of promise to get, you can be sure that you're going to get engaged subscribers. The one problem with Sparkloop and Boost though is as you know, like, like in your email inbox, you've probably got three or four newsletters that you read religiously. You've probably got Hundreds that you kind of archive every day. I don't think it's possible for anybody to have 1020 newsletters that they read regularly or 1020 podcasts. So when you are getting subscribers through this strategy, they're probably subscribing to four newsletters at the same time. And your newsletter isn't even the one that they wanted to subscribe to in the first place. So you've got to do a really, really, really good job of turning that subscriber from someone who thought your newsletter sounded interesting and joined to somebody who is really, truly engaged and is going to go and spend money with the advertisers that you recommend or is going to convert into a paid subscriber. If you go out and run ads on like, Meta or X, for example, and subscribers are coming to your landing page because they've seen something about your newsletter they like and then they've gone to make the intentional decision to subscribe to your newsletter. Even if their engagement metrics are similar to Sparkloop or Beehive, they're going to be more emotionally connected with you as a brand because they actually made that decision to subscribe to your newsletter. And I think over a long period of time, they're going to give you more, more, they're going to give more returns for your advertisers. They're more likely to convert to your paid products if that's what you do or buy your, buy your products or come to your talk or whatever. I think they're always going to be more invested in you because it's not.
- [66:54]
Adam Biddlecomb
A, it's like a, there's like an extra level of action required to, to go through this process versus like a one click. Subscribe to four emails at the same. Subscribe to four newsletters at the same time. Yeah, I guess the answer is then you have to figure out how to run ads, how to set up landing pages, how to optimize that funnel, which is, that's just business. At the end of the day, all creative ventures are business. So I mean, people ask me, like, how do you grow a podcast? I'm like, how do you market it? I'm like, well, well, how do you market any business? You do. You do all of it. All of it and all. Anything you can possibly think of. Run paid, do collaborations, figure out how to, you know, turn a podcast into a newsletter, put it up on your website. How do you get that article to rank and, and everything that you can possibly think of for a business? You do it for the newsletter for the the creative product you're. You've made. One strategy that you said didn't work, which is interesting, is a cold email strategy to grow newsletter subscribers. So I'm assuming that just means that you're reaching out to people saying, hey, I have a newsletter. Do you want to sign up? If this is something that you're interested in, why did that not work?
- [68:04]
Matt Village
This was one of the things that I was like, most excited about. You know, when you're kind of running the early numbers in a spreadsheet and you, you see like dollar signs at the end. It was one of those moments and, and the logic was like, could we buy leads cheap enough through like, Apollo or in the, you know, hundreds of thousands and then across like, you know, 50 email domains with three, three emails each. Send emails at such a scale that, that you get enough people to, to kind of click, take that CTA and join the newsletter. And I remember this one moment where we were putting what's called a magic link in these emails. Whereas, like, one click on this link, you would subscribe to the newsletter. And when we turned on this magic link campaign, we sent out to like 10,000 emails and like 3,000 of them subscribed. So we were like, oh, this is. This is it.
- [69:00]
Adam Biddlecomb
That's awesome. Yeah.
- [69:02]
Matt Village
What we didn't realize is they're kind of, they're like a bot. Bot analysis of like Gmail was, was checking all of the links and automatically subscribing them without, without them even realizing. So we were like totally breaking gdpr. We were subscribing people to our list who didn't realize. And yeah, you can imagine what like open rate and click through rates were horrible.
- [69:23]
Adam Biddlecomb
And I'm assuming a lot of angry emails back.
- [69:26]
Matt Village
Yeah, just a few. Yeah. So we realized we couldn't use this magic link strategy. Over time, we realized we couldn't use links at all because it would affect. It would affect sending of these emails. So we weren't reaching enough open rate. And then we were trying things like reply yes, if you want to be subscribed and all of these things, but we never cracked it. In the end, it was something we probably spent about $10,000 on over time, like testing and iterating and working with different partners who thought they could help us. And we just never found a system that worked. I still think there's potential. I think a great email marketer can make this work. And I think if you crack it, you can be getting engaged subscribers at maybe 30, 40 seconds, which is super exciting.
- [70:07]
Adam Biddlecomb
Well, I think The, The. The thesis is if enough people learn about your newsletter, a percentage of them will want to read it. That's really the thesis. So like, how do you, how do you get your newsletter in front of a million people, 2 million people, that. I mean, if you can do that, then a small percentage of them actually subscribe. Now you just have to figure out how. How much is it going to cost and how. How do we actually. With GDPR and CCPA and all the other other anti spam laws, how do we do this properly? I have no idea. But it does sound like an interesting idea. But if it doesn't, like, listen, there's so many ways to build a business, and there's so many ways to build a list. I mean, I've listened to Sam Parr's story and I think a lot of. A lot of his newsletter early days was like event based. It was like event signups for hustlecon that he turned into his first, you know, his first whatever. A hundred thousand or even like 50,000 hustle subscribers universe. So there's a million different ways to do this. And I think acquisition is smart. I think paid is smart. I think you. I think the way you did it was incredibly smart because it saved you about $200,000. So like, yeah, like, yeah, for any creator save $200,000. Nothing wrong with that. In terms of monetization, I guess we're kind of just doing like a newsletter master class, but that's fine. People will. People will learn a lot in terms of monetization, I guess. Two questions. You don't have to go into too much detail, however much you want, but you chose to do sort of advertiser and sponsor as the main way to. To monetize the newsletter versus a premium. So just very curious as to why. And then the second question, just on the paid front is, what's a good. What's a good cpm cost per milliliter, cost per thousand newsletter subscribers that somebody who's starting a newsletter is thinking, okay, I want to go and get advertisers. How do I price this out?
- [71:58]
Matt Village
Yeah. So we chose sponsorship because at the core of it, we were trying to emulate the Hustle and Milk Road. Like, that was the business model we started with that we decided we wanted to do. And the reasons for this is, is me and Matt, we were interested in AI, but we were in no way experts who could offer something that somebody else couldn't. So what we were doing is doing a very good job of curating the news. And then Matt was able to add kind of that editorial insight that our competitors weren't. So we were offering something different there. But we weren't an AI engineer at Google who is like at the, the breakneck who's able to give out some valuable information. So if you are going to do a great job of curating the news and putting it into a nice format, I don't really think that's something you can pay wall. If it's this like generalist news. And you look at the hustle was business and tech news. The milk road was crypto news. We were AI news. Even though these are niches, they're still pretty broad topics in general. The whole thing about having a daily newsletter as well rather than a weekly newsletter is that you have seven pieces of digital real estate a week rather than, rather than one piece of digital real estate a week. So that was why we were working at that critical mass. And the opposite business model is this paid version. I think if you are someone who is like a real expert in something or you have access to data that other people don't, don't, you're so much better off going for paid. And like, I know one of my good friends, he's a newsletter operator. He has like 7,000 subscribers and he's been building his newsletter for five years. But he has such a valuable niche and is potentially making more money than we work with Mindstream with you know, 1% of the subscribers. So you have to, when you kind of look at a newsletter business, understand that newsletter is just a medium and the content that you, you send through that medium is going to dictate how you should monetize it.
- [74:08]
Adam Biddlecomb
I love it. So just thinking about pricing stuff out for advertisers. How did you think through what to charge people?
- [74:16]
Matt Village
So a lot of it was comparing to our competitors. So we would look at what the rundown and Superhuman and AI tool report. These like bigger newsletter than us were charging. We could look at, we could find out how much they were charging for a main app had, how many subscribers, they had what we thought their open weight was and then calculate the CPM that they were charging and we would just undercut. Slightly.
- [74:39]
Adam Biddlecomb
Smart.
- [74:40]
Matt Village
Yeah, yeah. We never had a sales team. I did all of our, I did all of our ad sales and all of our ad sales came inbound. They came From firstly, my LinkedIn, mine and Matt's LinkedIn accounts. Secondly, now this is like the biggest hack for newsletter operators. We, we paid to get like first space on articles of like 10 best AI newsletters so we had the first, second and third spot of Google. One was AutoGPT, our own blog. We like created this article, put ourselves in the top space. I can't remember the name of the others for the life of me, but Forbes was one of them. We didn't pay for Forbes, we managed to get on Forbes but we, we were kind of top spot on Google if you were searching for, for advertise on AI newsletters. So we had all this inbound and I was managing the sales and the way we kept long term customers is pricing at a position that just made so much sense for them. And when I was like scaling it and when I was looking at operationalizing, my rationale was let's get kind of a little bit less revenue than we could but then not have to hire a sales person and a customer success people and churn through advertisers at like a quick run.
- [75:54]
Adam Biddlecomb
Right, that's, that's very smart because just the energy and it. So like what you did is you actually kept your, you, you slightly reduced margins, your top line and your profit margins but then you didn't add overhead. So that actually, that actually ended up working out. It balanced itself out. I'm assuming. That's very smart. Yeah.
- [76:14]
Matt Village
And we were also able to project a lot better because you know we would, we would bring on a, and we had more than 50% retention with our advertisers. Some advertisers would go, you know, it wouldn't be a right product market fit. But those ones that worked, I would lock them into very, very long term deals. So you know, we were almost having like be able to project mrr. Whereas most newsletters, you hear Sam talking about this, it's like you have a good month, next month you have to go again. You like have to start from scratch. We didn't, we didn't really have that because we had these long term advertisers.
- [76:48]
Adam Biddlecomb
Because you were pricing them right. And they were happy, they were happy. You weren't like pushing them so that they were like oh, oh, we're almost you know, positive roas or positive ROI on this, but not quite so let's try and find something else. Yeah, Very, very smart. So when did HubSpot turn from advertiser into somebody that was actually looking to acquire you?
- [77:08]
Matt Village
It was pretty quick. They started advertising with us in February 2024 and then in April we had the first conversation about acquisition. It then we then closed in October. So it took a long time to get it done. Or, although, although, you know in terms of acquisitions, it's not, not that long, but for me it felt long. So yeah, a couple of months from.
- [77:30]
Adam Biddlecomb
Advertiser to that conversation and, and whatever you're comfortable sharing. I'm, I'm curious about like what revenues that you were hitting or what level you were at before. They thought like this is a good acquisition for us because this is the second newsletter acquisition they've ever made, the hustle being the first.
- [77:47]
Matt Village
Yeah, so we were doing like 40 to $50,000 a month, month at the time. So like, you know, pretty, pretty small revenues. The reason that we were appealing to HubSpot is they were looking at, they were advertising in like so many AI newsletters and they were kind of able to like look at the performance across AI newsletters. And I imagine we were just somewhere near the top of the spreadsheet and then they went a bit deeper and they liked our editorial style. You know, when we were having those initial conversations, that was one of those, the main topics of the conversation that they really felt that our editorial aligned with what they were doing wider in the HubSpot media network. So it was, it was a good fit.
- [78:29]
Scott Clary
Hey everyone, Scott here. I just want to take a second and say thanks for listening to the podcast over the past couple years. Obviously this wouldn't be possible without each and every one of you. I have a favor to ask so I would love to get some more information about you and why you listen to the podcast and why you listen to the show and why you tune in every week. And I have put together a short, short survey and we are using this to help us sort of inform what type of content we want to create and the direction of the podcast going forward. This information is not shared with anyone else, so this is just for us internally and I put together a link so scottdclary.com survey where you can go and you can fill in some information so we can know what kind of content you love. Also for the first 100 people that respond to the survey, you will be entered into a draw for a hundred dollar Amazon gift card. So we'll be giving out one of those to the first people that respond. It should not take more than two minutes of your time to fill out the whole survey. It's really not that long and it will help you shape the future of the podcast. So I really appreciate each and every one of you and thank you for listening.
- [79:38]
Adam Biddlecomb
Do you. Are you. Were you always building to sell? Was this something that would you mentioned even before? Like it was kind of like a Surprise. Like, it wasn't like you were going around. Let me, let me preface. You weren't going around like shopping a deal. You didn't have like an investment banker going to a whole bunch of like private equity firms saying, hey, you know, this newsletter's on the market. What can you give me for it? This was sort of, it was, it was good business relationship that turned into acquisition opportunity. Was this something that you, that you were expecting or wanted or were looking for?
- [80:11]
Matt Village
No, we weren't expecting, we weren't expecting this. We certainly weren't expecting anything so early. You know, this was, was, this was April 2024 and I'd left my job in October 2023. So I was like seven, eight months into working on this full time. You know, we'd only talk about this moment where we got the 100,000 subscribers. That was December 2024. So it was like four months between hitting critical mass of actually really having a business that made sense to having these conversations about acquisition. So, you know, when we, when we sort of spoke internally with our co founders and looked at the long term future, the possibility of a sale was always there. And I always said to our team, like, let's make sure we don't have any skeletons in the closet. You know, my, my CTO Matic, I love him to bits, but he would come to me quite often with like, let's try this black hat, like growth strategy. And I go, ah, maybe not. Like, let's just keep it everything, let's keep everything clean. Let's try and operate in the right way because you never know who's going to come knock in and then you want to, you want to have the.
- [81:15]
Adam Biddlecomb
Foundations right and then you can take advantage of the opportunity. Exactly. You built it right from the ground up.
- [81:20]
Matt Village
Exactly. But yeah. HubSpot Coming in that early was like such a surprise. It was, it was such a surprise. And it's quite funny really. You know, I have this idea, I think I got it from Chris Williamson and modern wisdom that in life you have to choose your regrets. Like every decision that you make, if you choose to go and play football or go to a nightclub and go dancing, it's like if you do one of the things, there's always a regret that you didn't do the other. So when you make a decision in life, you have to choose the regret that you can live with. And of course, I, in an alternative universe, I'd love to know what I could have done with Mindstreet Team by myself. You know, I had, I Had many ideas of how I could evolve the brand, different products, we could align next to it. And I have of course, a little bit of regret that I don't, I'm not able to find that out. But I couldn't live with the regret of not working with HubSpot. You know, they've, they.
- [82:21]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, they gave us. I know. I get.
- [82:23]
Matt Village
God.
- [82:24]
Adam Biddlecomb
No, I was gonna say. I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm sorry. I was just thinking about, about, I was thinking about how you came to this decision because I was actually just listening to Mr. Beast on Diary of a CEO last night and he was talking about how he's had offers obviously for his channel and in the billion dollar range. And his thought process was, well, if I sell it, I'm just going to want to do the same thing anyway, so why would I sell it? Because I'm just going to start it again. And I think Mark Zuckerberg had the same idea as well when he got the famous Facebook offers. He said, well, I'm just going to start another social network. That's all I know how to do. So why would I sell it? So I'm always curious about like what, what calculation you do in your head or what thought process you go through when you choose to sell versus let's see how big I can build this thing. And I think you were alluding to it, but a lot of it is, is it the right partner that yes, there's a sale involved but I know you're not done.
- [83:30]
Matt Village
Yeah, I was, I was at a co working space this morning and I, I bumped into a, a friend of mine called James. He runs a company called Rert and we were talking about exactly this. I gave him the analogy that if, if there was a.2 offers on the table table, one of them was HubSpot and the other one is random media conglomerate that no one's ever heard of and the other company were to offer me 10 times the money that HubSpot offered me. And you play out those two deals over the next 10 years. I think I will be wealthier from taking the HubSpot deal rather than taking the deal with 10x the money from unheard of company. Because now I am someone who sold my company to HubSpot and that's going to open and already is opening hundreds of doors to me and the, the way I can build out my personal brand working with alongside HubSpot and always being the co founder of Mindstream and I know at HubSpot we're going to make Mindstream something incredible. That story is worth almost more than the money.
- [84:42]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, I believe that. I mean, I've seen what they've done with, with, I mean, with Sam and, and, and Sean and my first million and I mean, it's one of the largest business podcasts in the world. And, and that was on the back of an acquisition. Like when, when Sam sold, he had no idea that my first million was ever going to exist.
- [85:00]
Matt Village
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, you know, a lot of people say to me, like, oh, okay, you've sold your, your company. You're kind of done now, right? Like, well done, mate. Pat on the back. And I, I worked very hard with mindstream. I think I was lucky that HubSpot came knocking on our door. But you make your own luck. And now is the opportunity for me to make the most out of this acquisition. The next few years working with HubSpot, looking at opportunities that come up, coming on your podcast is a prime example. If I was someone who'd sold a company to someone you'd never heard of, of, you know, it's not too exciting.
- [85:40]
Adam Biddlecomb
It'S just a different, I mean, like, you're right, 100%. I think that, I think that there's, I think that having the long term vision in an exit is very important. And being to your point that you mentioned earlier, intentional about everything, including who you sell to. You're right. There's. If you had sold this newsletter to no name private equity firm, you would not have the connections, you'd not have the relationships. It would be, it would be the end of this chat chapter and outside of, like, forget, forget the jumping on podcasts and building a personal brand stuff. How many acquisitions, how many times does like no name private equity company come in and buy something and they completely destroy what you've built?
- [86:21]
Matt Village
So true, so true. I mean, when, when HubSpot, when we were having the initial conversations, they said, we want to make Mindstream the biggest media brand in the world. And I said, oh, sorry, the biggest AI media brand in world. The world. I said, cool, so do I. Let's, let's go.
- [86:34]
Adam Biddlecomb
You know, and they do it well, that's the thing. They have the resources. So they're not just, I mean, you, you can look at, you can look at proof that they've, that they sort of live up to their word. That's the point. Right?
- [86:45]
Matt Village
Yeah. And obviously, you know, I haven't mentioned this specifically, but the day that we started Mindstream, when we were locked in this office, I said, look at, look at what Happened to the Hustle, like, let's try and do that for AI and then you have this full circle moment where we have the same exit to the same company as Dennis, all like, it's that. That just like the kind of irony of that, like, pushed me towards making that deal.
- [87:10]
Adam Biddlecomb
It is. I know, right? It's. It's like this nice full circle moment. It is a nice full circle moment. Do you think that. Do you think that anybody listening, if they are trying to figure out what to do and, and they, you know, they. They don't know. They want to be entrepreneurial, they don't know what to start. Do you think a newsletter is almost like a. Not like a safe bet, but like a pretty predictable business model that people can emulate?
- [87:37]
Matt Village
It is. It is so predictable. That's what I love about it. You know, when, when we were like, when I said we had our first ad sale for like a few hundred bucks and we had 2,000 subscribers, that was sort of almost enough data for me to build a spreadsheet for the next two years to look at.
- [87:53]
Adam Biddlecomb
At.
- [87:53]
Matt Village
You know, if we grow at this rate, we can charge this and we can do this. It's a, It's a very solid business model. The other advantage you have today, building a newsletter business is you have products out there that are specifically tailored to help you do that. Specifically. Beehive, they're, I think, the best player in this space and they have an amazing editor, amazing website builder, they have internal growth tools, they have internal monetization through their ad network work. You know, when, when Sam was building the Hustle, he had to, he had to build his own technology. He actually had, like, developers on staff to send a newsletter. You know, whereas today you can just pay beehive 50 bucks a month or whatever and get going. So the, the monetization is not easy, but simple. The execution is not easy, but simple, but the software is now easy, whereas that was very difficult before.
- [88:47]
Adam Biddlecomb
What, what is one thing that people believe to be true about your success story that maybe is not true?
- [88:54]
Matt Village
One thing people believe to be true that isn't true?
- [88:57]
Adam Biddlecomb
One thing that they look at you outside looking in and they just think, wow, that came easy, or anybody could do that, or, I don't know, something that you think that people outside looking into a very successful entrepreneur who built something very quickly would believe to be true. But isn't maybe a story behind something that you struggled harder on more than. Than people know?
- [89:26]
Matt Village
Yeah, I think it's. I think it's probably that I Have it all figured out. And I think that's probably applied for most entrepreneurs, especially when you create a personal brand and you really tell a story of yourself and, and you hear that story a lot of time. Times, you know, I am working harder than I ever have right now post exit, post exit on life building and I am very, very happy. I am more at peace than I ever have been. But that has come from so much intentional hard work. And I think when, when I was starting out and I'd look at successful entrepreneurs, you just think like, they've just got it, man. They've just got a thing like, you know, it was always going to happen for them. And I have been a failure for like 10 years and a success for two, you know.
- [90:19]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah. What would be a lesson that you've learned? That was a very important lesson. But you wouldn't wish that lesson on anyone else because it was so hard for you to learn.
- [90:30]
Matt Village
When I was, when I was young, I had quite, I had a few relationships with mentor type figures that were very, very toxic. You know, people like dangling carrots and then giving you the stick. So I had to learn to be independent and to be almost distrusting because of getting burned so many times. And the, when I kind of look back on them now, the relationships were all very similar. You know, it was someone more successful than me, aspirational, who, who was very kind of quick to speak and very exciting to work with and gave me loads of energy and made me feel good about myself. And I've sort of, I can see that flag in people now because there's always, there's always a bigger, there's always a bigger fish, you know, so sometimes I have a conversation with someone now and they get me very excited about an idea. And then I, I realize that I could potentially be repeating mistakes going into business with somebody. So that I, I think that's the main, main one. When you're. For a lot of my career, I've been like the young, exciting prospect. You know, when I started my first business at 14, one of the things like I loved was telling people how old I was. It gave me such a rush of dopamine. When people go like, you're only 14, like, that's amazing. And then when I was doing gigs when I was 18 and 19, people could be like, you're only 18. And now people say to me, like, you're only 27. You know, like, it's been a thing throughout my life. But that, I think that also, you also attract bad players when you're something that's. That's young and exciting and up and coming. So learning how to see them and avoid them is something that was very difficult, but is very. I'm very glad I have it now. I don't think I'll get burned again.
- [92:30]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, I think that. That. I think that being young and excited and just wanting to, like, sort of, you know, conquer the world if you're not careful. Yeah, for sure. People could take advantage of that. There are a lot of good mentors and business partners out there. But I think that everybody. Everybody who is ambitious will fall victim to that at some point. Everybody will make a wrong business partner decision. I definitely. I have for sure, many times. But I think that that's something that just has to be learned through failures, which is also why I'm a big fan of, like, taking risks. When you. When you have the ability to take risks early on, when you don't have the, you know, the financial commitments of family and wife and. Or husband and kids, like, I think that it's important to take those risks and to fail fast. Like, these are all very cliche entrepreneurial ideas, but I think they're all very valid. Like, they. It's so you don't take these risks and end up with the wrong people when you're 45, 50, and you have, you know, a lot of responsibility. I mean, childhood friends don't always work out as business partners either. I've never. I've never had a childhood friend turned business partner, but I know people that have. It doesn't always work out. I have a friend right now who is getting. Who's getting sued by a childhood best friend. And it's like their parents and their grandparents and obviously they know each other. And it was one of those situations where, yeah, they've been close for, like, 35 years, and now they do business together. And now shit's hitting the fan. I don't know, dude. I haven't had good experiences with partners. You did. I have not in my past.
- [94:06]
Matt Village
It's tough, I think. I think doing business with friends or family is like, the heart that, like, high risk, high reward potential. But also, you know, you could. You can also burn yourself really, really badly. My partner, Hannah, has just left her job and she's coming to work in me with my. My business. And it's something we thought long and hard about. Um, and, God, I am so excited. I am so excited to start working with her, to have her more involved in, like, my vision and our vision for the future and. And it really become our thing rather than my thing. You know, it's a, it's, it's a step that I need in my business, but it's also a very exciting step to take in our relationship.
- [94:50]
Adam Biddlecomb
It, it is amazing because what you, what you solve for when you can do it properly, especially with like a spouse or, or you know, f immediate family or close, close family and friends, because you solve for trust. Like you don't have to worry about trust anymore. Right. You can just be super candid. You're not. There's no politics, there's no, there's no. What is this person going to think? Like just absolute trust and transparency which is like a hack in business. If, if it's done right, it's like a complete hack. Like it helps immensely, but you also have to find a way to not tie business outcomes and let them influence like how you feel about this person. Like if they don't perform in business, you can still love this person outside of the business and care about this person side of the business. And that's what people get up and they, then the business go into their family and then that's just, I don't know. It's tough. It's very tough.
- [95:43]
Matt Village
Yeah.
- [95:43]
Adam Biddlecomb
If you can do it right.
- [95:44]
Matt Village
With Matt, my co founder, it's been, it's been very interesting. And one of the things that I think has made us successful is we spend dedicated time together where we don't talk about business normally. It's like video game. We'll just hang out like we used to when we were 15, go for a walk, we go for a run together, work out together, play video games and just make sure we have that time to kind of still work on that friendship. And then the business relationship is a different thing.
- [96:11]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah, I think that's very, very smart. I think it's smart especially if you're gonna bring like your, your better half, like not just a friend from childhood, but like your, your, your partner. If you bring that person into the business, you, you do have to find time to shut up off and just do like regular human, not always talk about business. What would be some of the most toxic entrepreneur advice that you hear a lot that you think people shouldn't listen to?
- [96:40]
Matt Village
The main one is that to be successful you have to sacrifice everything. This I think is some of the most common business advice. Like people talk about like hustle, sprints and monk mode and like all this kind of stuff. And the thing I realized, like as I started building mindstream, I got more energy for life than I ever have before from building my company. And I was able to apply that energy into building my company, but also into all other aspects of my life. So I am now fitter than I have ever been. I have a better relationship with my partner than I ever have. I have better relationships with my family. My mental health is better. Like I have. I have been able to kind of progress horizontally across all the verticals of my life. And I genuinely think this is true of most entrepreneurs. Like, generally when you see someone be successful, they start to also get in shape and they start to also prioritize other things. Some don't. But I think they use this, this trope as an excuse. The one place I think it applies in terms of sacrificing everything is if you're trying to become the best in the world at something, if you're trying to become the best in the world at a sport, you're trying to compete in the Olympics, or you're trying to be the best in the world at entrepreneurship, then you have to sacrifice. But if you're trying to just be a damn good entrepreneur, you can build in other parts of your life too. And you should.
- [98:08]
Adam Biddlecomb
I agree with that completely. I think that a couple ideas. I think that first of all, seasonally, seasons. Seasons do exist. So there can be seasons of, of non balance. I think that's okay for a period of time, but I think that the issue is when you don't migrate from one season to another and you keep that non balance and then you let all the other parts of your life deteriorate. That's not, in my mind, success. Also, people don't actually need to make as much money as they think they do. And you do not have to be like an exit. That that makes you a few million dollars. I mean that, that is a lot of money for a lot of people. You don't need a hundred million, $500 Million exit to be happy. So I think that also when you look at your, you know, entrepreneur heroes that you look up to, I think you're benchmarking against the wrong goals for most people. Most people do not. You know, you always. I would, I've been ripped on for saying this before and I'm like, most people don't want to be Elon Musk on. Most people don't want to be a billionaire. I, I know billionaires. I, I'm sure you do too. Like, they are not, they're not all happy people. Like some of them are, are old and working very hard still.
- [99:17]
Matt Village
Yeah.
- [99:17]
Adam Biddlecomb
And the life they have is not a life that most people would want. Forget about the work, the stress, the lawsuits, the, the press. Like it's not fun. Like I think that's why. Well, first of all, I think most entrepreneurs, I think are to a degree neurodivergent just by taking the risk and doing and doing the. But I think that billionaires is a whole other level of neurodivergence drive. Something that is not applicable or wanted by most people.
- [99:47]
Matt Village
I agree 100%. When I was, when I was, you know, when I didn't have any money and I was trying to build businesses, like 100% of the content I consumed was how to make money. Now I have a little bit of money. I probably say like 60% of the content I consume is how to build a life life, you know, and I think like, it genuinely excites me more than anything else. And me and my partner are like so aligned. You know, we have X amount of money coming in every month and we have X amount of money invested and we sit down and we're so intentional with how we inflate our lifestyle and we have inflated our lifestyle a lot, but all in ways that are really important to us. You know, travel, health, food. Not like, like too many material objects, you know, some, but we're very, very intentional with, with our spending, with our life building and you know, in a couple of months, couple of weeks time, we're moving to a part of the country we want to live in. We're spending more and more time traveling, we're spending more time on, on date nights, more money on date nights. And you can build like a pretty amazing life with a bit of money. And that is thing that really excites me.
- [101:02]
Adam Biddlecomb
Yeah. And that's what I think most people should optimize for. I think that that would like, listen, maybe, maybe they won't build it in 17 months, but if they start now, I mean, if you put five, five to seven years of concerted effort towards building an audience that is lifechanging. And again, at the end of the day, only one thing really needs to work. And then you're set up financially so that you can make smart decisions that actually fulfill you as opposed to, to reactive, stressed out financial decisions about where you work, where you spend your time, what you, you know, I think that that's, that's one of the most important ideas I, I know you speak about like compounding success across all areas of your life. I think that's very smart too. It's not just about financial success because the second you have a little bit of money, you realize like what's actually important. I wish more people would learn that before they make the money. So I mean, you made your money money relatively quickly considering most people would spend 10, 20, 30 years trying to build a company to be acquired and they sacrifice their, their, their wealth, their mental, physical health, their relationships all along the way. So I hope people can learn from, from what you, how you're living now and just apply it so that they can live fulfilled across all areas of their life while they're building, not just after the exit. I think that's very, very important board. I know you push back against hustle culture. I, I know you weekend hard. These are all very important ideas. I know there's a lot of things I think you have a very healthy entrepreneur mindset. That's like the one thing that I take away from, from who you are as a person. I think that's something that everybody should take away. If you wanted to leave the audience with sort of one last, last bit of wisdom, actually I'll ask where can people connect with you first? That's important. So give me like the socials, the website, all of that. But then I would like you to think about some last piece of wisdom. And usually the way that I frame it is if you could only pass on one lesson to your kids because it is so important, what would that lesson be and why? But first tell people like where they can connect with you.
- [103:16]
Matt Village
So to connect with me, you can head over to LinkedIn. That's where I post content every day. To read the Mindstream newsletter. You can head over to Mindstream newsletter. My one piece of advice is plan your life like it's the priority. Be intentional with your days. If you learn in your work how to optimize, how to plan, how to prioritize, take those skills and apply them to your life. Don't allow yourself to be distracted by social media, by Netflix. Make sure if you're spending time doing something that it's something you have been intentional about.