Newsletter & Email Growth: Growth In Reverse

audio-fixed-Newsletter Growth Playbook - Chenell Basilio (with slides)
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Dylan Redekop: [00:00:00] One TikTok video drove 3,600 email subscribers in a week. Another strategy drove more than 27,000 subscribers. When you see numbers like that, the first instinct is to just assume it went viral. But after studying more than 80 of the fastest growing newsletter creators, Chenell Basilio made a shocking discovery.

The biggest newsletters all share the exact same two forces behind their growth. In this talk from the new media summit in Austin, Chenell breaks down exactly what those two forces are and the strategies creators are using right now to grow their email lists.

Dylan Redekop: Okay, our next speaker. She runs the Growth in Reverse Newsletter. I have the honor of co-hosting the Growth and re reverse podcast alongside her. Let's give it up for Chenell Basilio.[00:01:00]

Chenell Basilio: Yes. Woo. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks everybody for being here. Um, yeah, let's just jump right into it. So let's go here. All right. Have you ever seen a creator grow super fast and think, how did they blow up like that? Like, did they know the right people? Did they go viral? What happened? That's exactly what happened for me when I found Mario Gabrieli in 2022.

Now, Mario writes a newsletter called The Generalist, and I didn't know anything about newsletters at the time, and so when I found this article where he talked about his first year writing the newsletter, I was very surprised when I learned that he made over $300,000 in his first year writing this newsletter as a solo creator, just writing right.

So I had to know how he did it. I thought this was absolutely insane. [00:02:00] I went down the rabbit hole. I spent 50 to 60 hours researching everything he had done. Listen to every podcast he was on, went through his entire Twitter feed. Um, I probably know more about him than some of his best friends, which is kind of creepy.

But, um, and then I put together this long, deep dive 'cause I was like, somebody else might wanna hear or read what I had learned. And what I found was that it wasn't him going viral or, you know, any of that stuff. It was actually two forces coming together. Now, the first one is insanely valuable content, and if you've heard me talk at all, you've probably heard me talk about this, so I won't go too, too deep into it.

Um, that was the first piece, but the second piece was momentum. Mario had built up momentum, and I'll get into that too. Since I've written that first deep dive, I've studied over 80 other creators, spent thousands of hours researching newsletters. I'm very nerdy about this stuff, and I found that all of these [00:03:00] creators also had this formula happening.

I saw this with all of them. So let's talk about. Insanely valuable content. Last year, I spent a lot of time talking about this, so I won't bore you if you were here and you saw that, but this is what I call IV content or insanely valuable content. It's the kind of content that makes you feel like this.

Like when's the next newsletter gonna drop? When are they gonna publish that next video? It feels like Christmas when they hit publish. You'll share it, you'll save it. You'll probably even pay for it if they asked you to. It's a difference between content that makes people feel like this. And, oh my God, I have to share this.

It takes the, it makes a difference of you begging for attention to people looking at you, begging for you to make more content like this. So how do you know if something is insanely valuable? It's probably, it gets a lot of impressions, views, likes, right? Not quite. You see, it's actually the stuff that gets replies, [00:04:00] shares.

And saves. And if you look at any of the social media platforms today, Instagram, TikTok, they all work off of people DMing this to their friends, saving it, coming back to it later. Right now, insanely valuable content helps your reader do at least one of the following six things. Now, these are what I call the six buckets of IV content.

You wanna help them make money, save money, save time. Entertain them, make them feel something, whether that's anger, laughter, emotion, teach them or make them feel smart for their friends and speed to market. And if you combine two or more of these, that's where the real magic happens. Now, I put together a resource down here.

I'll keep that QR code up throughout the presentation, but I have a lot more about this. I have the entire video from last year if you wanna go deeper on this topic, but I wanna talk through some other things as well. So if we look back at Mario, I wanna give two examples of insanely valuable content and then we'll [00:05:00] move on.

Uh, Mario writes a newsletter. It's about investing startups, IPOs, all of that. And before a startup goes public, they actually have to submit what's called an S one report. Now these are super long documents, like 300 plus pages, very boring, very technical. And Mario was like, you know what? If someone wants to invest in a company like they have to read this thing and figure out if it's a good investment.

And so him and his friends would get together and they would put together these S one Club reports. They would spend weeks going through the stuff, give you like the TLDR, is it a good investment, is it not? And these ended up being 29 pages long, which is kind of the hefty document. But then I looked at the S one report and I was like, how long is this thing?

317 pages. So Mario and his friends would take this long, kind of boring, arduous document, condense it down, add their own, take context. Uh, maybe they've seen something else in the market that's gonna disrupt this, and then they would [00:06:00] just give it away for free. Like, that's insanely valuable to somebody in that space.

So, Mario's buckets, oh, they're a little off. Uh, make money. Save money and save time. Arguably teach them something, but we'll go with these three. All right, one more example of this and then we'll move on. I wanna give you this example from Justin Moore because he does not write deep dives. When I say insanely valuable content, it does not have to be a long form article.

So Justin writes a newsletter called Creator Wizard, and he helps creators get sponsorships and brand deals. And so every week he sends you these. Sponsors and brand deals, like literally you can go make money from his newsletter. It's kind of insane, right? Like here's, here's a brand. They're looking to work with.

A creator, go sign up. So every time you see his name in your inbox, you're probably gonna open that email, but he doesn't stop there. He keeps going. If you refer just one person to his newsletter. He will send [00:07:00] you not only those brands, but the contact information, the person you should be reaching out to, what some recent campaigns they've done are, and even a recent TikTok video of a brand working with this other creator.

So you can get some ideas of like how to pitch this brand. This is free, but it's insanely valuable. And so if you can find a way to add some of this kind of thing into your content, you're going to stand out. So his buckets are, make money, save time, and speed to market. So I'm ho I hope you can see like how this plays out over different people's content.

But let's move on to the momentum side of things. Because this one I haven't really talked about too much, but it's important. So momentum is when you start seeing the efforts of your work compounding, everything starts moving faster. You're like, oh, I've been doing this for three years now it's paying off.

Right? And you might have seen this before. This is from a guy named Jack Butcher. He put this [00:08:00] together. And I think of this just like perfectly encapsulates what I mean when I say momentum. Like you're doing all of this work. You think it's pointless So many times along the way, you're like, should I quit?

Is this not the thing for me? Right? And then eventually it takes off. So how do we build momentum right now? You might think. Hey, it's all these tactics, right? All these ways to grow. If you've ever Googled how to grow a newsletter, you've probably seen some version of this, and I was like, yes, but like how do you know where to start?

Like what's, what's right? And I don't think there's one answer at all, but I kind of reorganized this list a little bit into these three categories. Attention, trust, and conversion. So if we split them up this way, the attention kinda gets you seen. Trust is another way to get seen, but it's more secondary after you've done some attention work.

And then the rest is conversion. So if we [00:09:00] start here, we start looking at short form, video threads, carousels, all of that stuff. Most people think attention is about sharing your work, and I agree with that. I think that's true, but I also think that when people look at it just this way, this is where you get burnt out because you're like, oh, I just gotta post, post, post, post, post, got engaged for 30 minutes before I post on LinkedIn.

Like all of that, right? But I actually don't think this is right. I think it's actually more like this, sharing your work and building those relationships.

Now if I look back at my own own growth timeline, I started the newsletter in December of 2022, and within 10 months I had hit 21,000 email subscribers, which was bonkers. Like that was insane for me. I was not expecting that at all. People ask me why. And for a long time I would just say, oh, the content is so unique.

It's so deep, like it's a deep dive. Nobody ever did anything like this. So they just share it. It's naturally getting shared. [00:10:00] And I think that's true, but I think I was also missing a piece of this and that is this. And when Dylan and I were recording, we were getting ready to record a podcast on how I had grown the newsletter in the early days.

I was like, okay, I should probably do some research. Like what did I actually do? And I went back through my Twitter feed and this is just like, I think it's like a day and a half or two days of me posting. And yes, I was sharing my content, but through those you can also see like me commenting on other people, sharing their work, congratulating people, doing all this.

I was building community and I didn't realize it at the time, but that's what I was doing. And so I was making friends and all of that. And I would say some of these people I still talk to today, which is crazy. This is like over three years ago. 95% of people are no longer around. They're no longer doing this.

And so remember that for a second. 'cause it'll be important. So I did that for months and it didn't seem like work. I was enjoying it. I was having [00:11:00] fun. It wasn't like, oh, I have to hit 30 posts on Twitter today. It was like, no, I wanna go see what my friends are doing. And about four months later, that trust, that consistency, all of that turned into a message like this from my friend Jay Klaus.

Um, at the time we were not close. I have now been on his podcast over three times. We were closer, but I did not really, we didn't have a great relationship at this time. So when I got this message, I was like, oh my god, Jay Klaus wants me on this podcast. Like, that's so cool. Um. Jay had been building trust with his audience for years.

Like he's not just gonna go to some random person and be like, Hey, you wanna come on? Like, let's, let's talk. So I think by being consistent, by doing this, it really led to this, which is awesome. So real quick consistency and before you all like zone out, I promise this isn't gonna be boring. So I think that there are three reasons.

Consistency is important. The first two are the ones that get talked about the most, but I actually think the third one is more [00:12:00] important first for yourself. Obviously it's a forcing function. You are able to keep yourself accountable. You're like, Hey, I'm posting every Sunday. It doesn't matter. I'm gonna do it.

That's important. For potential readers as well. Like people need to see your work 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 times before they actually sign up. Right? Those are important. But this last one is the one I don't think gets talked about enough. Consistency is important for building relationships. Um, it's not just for you, it's a networking signal.

It lets people know. Like, Hey, I'm gonna be around in six months. You can trust that I'm still gonna be here if you're posting here and there willy-nilly, like it's not, not gonna do what you want it to do. And some of the bigger creators I'm friends with now, they did not care who I was at year one or year two, or I just hit year three recently and now they're coming out of the woodwork.

And I'm like, where have you been? Like, this is so weird. But they, they recognize, they game sees game, right? Like, you know, this [00:13:00] person's putting in the work day after day consistently, they're gonna be around. So remember that Twitter example, like 90%, 90 plus percent of those people are not gonna be around in 6, 12, 18 months.

So when someone's building up their relationships, their their trust with their audience, like you have to remember that they're not just gonna put on everyone. Honestly, before I started this, I would be jealous of people. I'd be like, why did they get to go on that podcast? Why did they get a shout out?

Like, what is going on here? I had so much head trash about this, like just thinking through it. Now I realize it's not because they were the smartest or they were, you know, any better than you are. It's just that they kept showing up. They kept sending emails. They kept posting. They're building relationships, they're doing cool stuff, and they stopped jumping from thing to thing to thing.

I see so many people in this space who are [00:14:00] like, they do this one thing for six months and then they do this other thing for another six months and they're like, ah, it's not taking off what's happening? It's like, well, these people do this stuff for like 10 years. Like this isn't a six month game. And if you know Seth Godin marketing extraordinary, he is been around forever.

He loves to support new up and coming podcasters, right? And he will go on your podcast. Only once you've hit a hundred episodes, not before he knows that, you know, 95% of people are gonna quit before that time. And so he has this, he's like, if once you hit episode a hundred, come back to me. I think that just like perfectly is a good example of, of this exact thing.

So keep that in mind. All right, moving on. If we go back to this, um, attention trust conversion, I think they actually go in order almost like you have to start somewhere. If you go out to a random person and try and do a guest post, they're gonna be like maybe. [00:15:00] But if you're posting and they can go and like check your work and make sure you're actually doing something, I think it works well that way.

Okay, so insanely valuable content, momentum, all of these things. Real quick, one other way to look at this. Um, yeah, okay. So four quadrants of this whole thing, right on the x axis is momentum. The Y is content, it's the bottom, it's just the meh content, insanely valuables at the top. And I think there are two parts of this that people fall into two most common camps.

The first one is hard mode. This is you are posting everywhere, talking about yourself all the time. You're seeing so much momentum, but the content is not that good. And so you're almost burning trust with people because they're like, they sign up, they're like, oh, this sounds kind of interesting. They sign up and they're like, eh, it's all right.

But then when they see you again, they're probably not gonna sign up again. They're not gonna go through your workflow again. [00:16:00] So if you're in this space, I would say. Talk to readers, figure out what they actually need, try and add more insanely valuable parts to it, and optimize for replies. And then this other one is the one that breaks my heart a little bit.

These are the hidden geniuses. These are the people who spend 100% of their time on content trying to make it the best possible thing they can. Which is super valuable and it needs to happen, but no one's gonna share your work for you. Like you have to do some momentum. And so when I hear people ask me like, how do I grow without social media or without guest posting or without any of this, I'm like, why?

Like you have to put, nobody's gonna just go out there and share your stuff for you. You have to put a little bit of legwork in. It doesn't have to be a ton, and overtime you can do less, but in the beginning you really have to show your work and like share this with people. So, uh, don't be here. Please, please start talking about yourself.

I know it's uncomfortable, [00:17:00] but you gotta do a little bit. And if you really don't want to, I would just say, try and think of social media as like a relationship building platform versus, Hey, I'm just posting about myself. 'cause that feels icky and I understand that. But think about it as building relationships and, and sharing your work.

And if you really don't wanna do that, just maybe substack for you because there's community built in. People can find you. There's discoverability there. I will go quick through this. Uh, don't be here, don't be the person who's not promoting yourself and doesn't have good content. Um, but this is like the sweet spot, and I don't think there's a perfect ratio for this.

It's like probably 80% of your time on content, 20% promotion is probably good in the early days. But um, yeah, you gotta do something. Okay. Let's talk about what's working now. I only have 13 minutes left, so I'm gonna go quickly through this. So if you wanna get all of this stuff, you can use this code. Okay.

We're gonna old school here. Uh, lead magnets [00:18:00] have been around forever, and I'm probably gonna date myself here, but I looked at this Google Trends graph and I first, I think I put out my first lead magnet in 2013. I had a personal finance blog. It was so bad, but now they're like exploding. Like they're just everywhere, right?

They've been working. They're making a strong comeback. Essentially, if you don't know lead magnet, enter your email. Get free thing. Makes sense. Some of the most common ones you see are these checklists, sheet sheets, quizzes. Uh, but what's even more exciting is you can put these on social media. So you probably see people on LinkedIn, Twitter, they have a really good hook on the post, and then they're like, Hey, comment and get this free database or resource or whatever it happens to be.

Uh, Daniel Busante is very good at this. If you wanna go check out his work, um, to see some more. I wanna talk about something a little different. So this is Millie. Um, Millie writes a newsletter called Generalist World, and I swear that every [00:19:00] creator I've researched doesn't have the word generalist in the title.

It just happened that way. Uh, but I wanna talk to you about what happened right here. So in short, Millie launched a quiz, but it's not just any quiz. She actually worked with an organizational psychologist who was in her community to put this together. So it was science backed, all of that good stuff. Um, and she did the super smart thing of getting the domain generalist quiz.com, and now she puts that everywhere.

But Millie also was posting on TikTok. For a while, and she wasn't seeing a ton of subscribers. She was getting some results, but after she launched this quiz, she's now able to talk about it, but also show it on the screen with the domain right there. Generalist quiz. It's in the caption, it was on the top in the URL bar.

And so she doesn't necessarily have to tell people exactly where to go. They can see it, they can click on it. So many different [00:20:00] ways. Now this workflow for her that she posted this in September of 20 25, 3600 subscribers in a week from one TikTok video with this quiz. I'll take that all day, right? So we had to have her on the podcast.

'cause I was like, tell me more. I need to know more. And I said, how does it feel to have a newsletter growing this fast? And she said, it feels amazingly exciting and totally frustrating because I keep telling everyone, this is the elite flywheel. It's so good. And she's like, nobody listens to me. There's so much value for it.

People share it because it's so good. It's so what? Insanely valuable. So she keeps going and she said, the game is you just keep publishing. And occasionally, and sometimes regularly, one will pop off and I'll open my beehive and be like, whoa, a thousand subscribers. What [00:21:00] happened? Oh, it's a TikTok video that went crazy.

So she took her quiz and she added some momentum to it with this TikTok videos. And so I look at this and I'm like. I wonder if this could have happened if she like, didn't have the first two years of experience. And I don't think it, it would've happened because she had all this experience talking to her readers, figuring out what they wanted, what, what was gonna help them.

And then she put this into place and that's why it took off. I don't think this would've worked in the beginning, but once you have your niche down, you understand your reader. I think this one do super, super well. Okay, this is Charlie Dice. Charlie, uh, is in the growth and Reverse Pro community. She. Was writing a newsletter called The Rural Writer about farming and regenerative stuff, and she was writing this for over a year and a half, and she had 700 subscribers.

She's like, it's okay. It's not great. It's not the growth she wanted. [00:22:00] And when we jumped on the the welcome call, I was like, you should be on, on like Instagram or something. 'cause you should, you have these cute little p piglets running around. Like people would eat this up, go on Instagram, go on TikTok.

She's like, I'm never doing video. I was like, okay. But then the US government shut down, happened in October, and Charlie was a government employee and so she was furloughed. Look who's on TikTok now. So she, she started a new TikTok about how she hit a million dollars in net worth before the age of 40.

She's like, I wanna help people with finances. This doesn't get talked about enough. So she started these videos and these are like three minute long videos. Like, I didn't know this worked on TikTok, but apparently it does. This was October of 2025. She didn't tell anyone she was doing this. I talked to her like maybe 60 days or less, like after she started.

She's like, yeah, I have like 50,000 followers. I'm like, [00:23:00] what? It was crazy. She's like, yeah, but I don't know what to do. Like I have this other newsletter about the farming stuff. I have a full-time job. I can't do both. And I was like, well, do you enjoy this finance stuff? And she's like, yeah, I do. I said, well, I know this girl named Millie who did this thing with a quiz, like, you should try this.

And so she did, and now she's doing TikTok videos about her quiz. She's at 85,000 followers on TikTok now. We're 135 days in as of today, and she crossed like 6,200 subscribers this week. That's pretty crazy. This stuff is still working. Yeah. Okay, so these lead magnets are all great, right? Quizzes, checklists, et cetera.

What I think is even more exciting are repurpose lead magnets. So we all think about lead magnets, like something I have to create this new thing, right? But what if you just took all of your podcast episodes or links to your recent articles or groups of [00:24:00] podcast episodes, blog posts, all this stuff, right?

And combined it and put it into something to give people. For free. This is Sam Vander wheen Sam is an attorney, turned to entrepreneur, and she is an Instagram person. She has a podcast and she does things like this, like comment class to get the webinar link or whatever. Right? And we've all, we've all seen this and it works, works well.

We had, we actually had her on the podcast too, and I was asking her like, you know, we were talking about this strategy and she said, yeah, I do this thing. You know, comment X word to get the link to your podcast episode. Um, but the really cool thing she does is she actually started grouping podcasts together.

So she'll have like, you know, five episodes about money for CEOs, and then she puts them into a CEO's guide to Money playlist. Post it on Instagram and says, Hey, if you wanna get the playlist, comment X word. And she does that, and [00:25:00] she, she'll send people a link to the playlist after they enter their email.

She said, thousands of people have signed up for this. Like, this isn't anything really net new, it's just taking what you've already created, packaging it up, giving it to people as you need it. I thought that was cool. Uh, Gannon Meyer came into our community to talk about ManyChat. He is brilliant with this stuff and it can get very technical.

Um, but he walked us through this full video. Uh, I'm actually, I've given this to you guys for free. If you want the video, if you grab that resource, it's in there. Um. So yeah, if you wanna use that, you can. All right. Moving on. YouTube, lead Magnets. This is obviously Mr. Matt McGarry. Matt came on our podcast and said, I got hundreds of subscribers from one video.

And I was like, what? What do you mean? So I found the video and it had 32,000 views on it, and all he was giving away were the slides to his video, like exactly what he was walking through. Full slide deck. That's it. It wasn't anything new. [00:26:00] And I was like, okay, wait, this has 32,000 views. You got hundreds of subscribers or more.

So I texted him. I was like, Hey, Matt, how many subscribers did you get? And he said, he got a thousand from this. So I was like, okay, let's check the conversion rate. All right, 3.1%. Got it. Well, that's pretty good. So I was like, I'm gonna try this. So in our actual podcast video, about six minutes in, I put in like a 32nd ad read and I was like, did you hear Matt just say he got hundreds of subscribers?

Like I went and I created this whole notion document with a video. You can grab it, the link in the description. I thought this was pretty cool. It was fun. I talked about his landing page and everything. That one got a 4.6% conversion rate, but then I was like, wait, how do I get 10,000 email subscribers with this?

I feel like it's gonna be a lot. Right? 217,000 views. Our videos, me and Dylan work very hard, but our videos get about a thousand views per, so this would take [00:27:00] forever. And at 52 videos for a full year, we'd have to average like 4,000. And I was like, ah, that's a lot. Then I found this guy named Caleb. Caleb Ralston.

He does personal branding for, he used to work for Gary V the Hors. He knows what he is talking about, but he never had a personal brand before and he actually put together a six hour video talking through how to build a personal brand. And he did this exact thing. He put the workbook in the description.

I was like, oh, interesting. And he told someone that he got, when this video hit 600,000 views, he had gotten 27,000 email subscribers from one video. That's crazy. That's awesome. I would love that. But it was still that four and a half ish percent conversion rate, and I thought that was. Seems like it's, it holds, which is cool.

Not only that, this video has made him over $10,000 in AdSense revenue alone. Not to mention, I'm sure he is gotten consulting gigs and that kind of thing from it. Okay. [00:28:00] Uh, other people's audiences, aside from lead magnets, here's something you can do. Um, guest posts, guest podcasts, all those middle things I was talking about.

Um, this is Maya Voer. This is probably my favorite example of this 'cause she went so hard with it. Um, Maya writes. About go to market strategy for a product. And I found her when I was doing a deep dive on Akash Gupta and Akash had a newsletter at about 114,000 subscribers at the time. So I was like, oh, Maya probably has like 20, 30,000 subscribers.

Right? No, she had three K. And I was like, how is that possible? Like, why would he partner with her? Like she can't offer him much in terms of, you know, reciprocal engagement. So I wondered this. We had him on the podcast and he said, I started by seeing her on my LinkedIn feed and eventually I commented on one of her posts 'cause she had a bunch of good co posts.

She sent me a connection request. We had a dialogue. At some point we felt like we should create a newsletter together. [00:29:00] Consistency. Right. He saw her on LinkedIn posting a bunch of times. Yeah. I think the subscriber difference was a little high, but I was more than thrilled to do it because I've been reading our content and her content is super high quality, right?

Insanely valuable content. And she did this over and over again with different newsletters, all with bigger audiences. And then she posted about it in her 2024 year in review and she said, I did dozens of podcasts and substack placements with other mega creators. And that's how she was growing. Now she has over 26,000 subscribers.

And I just think that's such a cool strategy. Like she's just writing collaborative posts with these bigger creators. You don't have to be on video. That's what I'm trying to get at. Okay. This one is my favorite. Uh, while back inside of our community, we were trying to do more cross promotions and I was like, I kept hearing people say, oh, they just don't work well.

Like, I'm getting less than 10 subscribers. How do we do these better? And I was like, oh, [00:30:00] maybe I need more data. How do I get more data about this? So I was like, maybe I should do 30 cross promotions with 30 different creators in 30 days and we'll call it 30 days of growth. And every day I'll share one other creator's optimization or growth tip for your newsletter.

My A DHD went crazy with this. Um, I did not give myself enough time for this one. But that's what I did. So every day there's a daily newsletter for 30 days, which I never wanted to do a daily newsletter, but it was fun. I went way overboard. I had a private podcast, posted on Substack, did a LinkedIn newsletter, had a referral program, partnered with other, uh, software companies to share some prizes.

A few shared it and got 3,700 subscribers in 40 days. The open rate started at 77%, which I have not seen that open rate in a long time. As you grow, your open rate goes down a lot, um, and it only ever went down to 62%, which I thought was great. Other benefits, [00:31:00] stronger relationships. The quality of subscribers was crazy.

Speakers on the stage today joined that and I was like, whoa, that's really cool. And now I have tons of content I can reshare. And then on the back of it, I launched a product, uh, thirties growth course where I was just walking through these things as a video that is now the growth fault, which I add to regularly.

And I think it's great for brand new newsletters. If you hit a growth plateau. If you wanna spice up your content, you're kind of feeling a little bored. I think this is a great way to do that. So just to recap, before you hit publish, check out the six buckets of Ivy content. See if you can make it more valuable for your readers.

Those emojis look crazy on screen. Okay? Um, make sure you're not a hidden genius or playing life on hard mode, either make your content better or promote yourself. Please, please, we need you and make sure you have insanely valuable content and momentum, [00:32:00] and I'll be in the back. We don't have any more time for q and a, but I'll be in the back if you have questions.

I love talking about this stuff, so please come up to me. All right. Thank you.