Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth

Tim Huelskamp cofounder of 1440 on the Growth In Reverse Podcast with Chenell Basilio & Dylan Redekop

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[00:00:00] Dylan Redekop: This episode of the Growth In Reverse podcast is a special one. It's a live recording right from the stage of the Newsletter Conference in New York City back in May. Chenell actually had the privilege of interviewing the co-founder of 1440, Tim Huelskamp, right there in person, and I'm super jealous I wasn't there.

[00:00:16] Dylan Redekop: Tim's story is really impressive, though. He co-founded 1440 in 2017 with an email to 78 friends and family. But today, they have over 4.7 million subscribers. They have over [00:00:30] 25 employees, and they're doing roughly one million in revenue per employee. That's over 25 million in revenue, if you weren't counting.

[00:00:39] Dylan Redekop: In this conversation, Tim shares how they grew, including a scrappy early days tactic he calls the washing machine that most newsletter operators would never think to try. They also talk about how 1440 tripled ad revenue just by obsessing over the format of a single sponsor placement and where Tim is taking 1440 next, which, if it works, could make the newsletter itself [00:01:00] just the beginning.

[00:01:01] Dylan Redekop: This one is jam-packed. I think you are going to love it

[00:01:04] Chenell Basilio: All right. Yeah, welcome to Growth in Reverse Live. Um I'm excited about this one because I have not done a story on Tim and 1440 yet, so it's super honoring to have you here. Appreciate it.

[00:01:16] Tim Huelskamp: Right back at you. You and I favorite, uh, authors, and I'm really looking forward to spending the time with you today.

[00:01:21] Chenell Basilio: Thank you. I appreciate that. Um, okay, so now 1440 has 4.6- 7 ... 4.7 million [00:01:30] subscribers. You have 25 plus employees, and you're pulling in about 1 million per re- per employee. 1 million revenue per

[00:01:37] Tim Huelskamp: employee. 1 million in revenue per employee.

[00:01:38] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Correct. That's crazy. So starting there, you have this huge branch now, but going back to the early days, May of 2017 is when you started 1440.

[00:01:50] Chenell Basilio: Correct. That's crazy.

[00:01:51] Tim Huelskamp: Yep.

[00:01:51] Chenell Basilio: Um- Now you tell

[00:01:52] Tim Huelskamp: them.

[00:01:53] Chenell Basilio: Oh yeah, I guess, uh, for those of you who don't know, I do a lot of deep dives. These are some of the brands I've written deep dives on. Super [00:02:00] excited to now add 1440 to this list. Um, but yeah, we have Tim here today. I pulled up an old edition of 1440 back from 2017.

[00:02:10] Chenell Basilio: Um, looks very different, but also very similar. Yeah,

[00:02:15] Tim Huelskamp: it turns out every- Yeah, I think so, you know, back then we, we started, we had sent the email to 78 friends and family. We had this thesis that basically with media, like by design, uh, publications are very niche-y. So you have sports and politics and culture and technology, and our whole [00:02:30] thesis was like there's these curious people that love learning, and who's kind of an inch deep, mile wide provider to roll the opposite.

[00:02:35] Tim Huelskamp: Mm-hmm. And then on top of that, they wanna be, uh, delighted with like serendipitous knowledge. So like fall foliage schedules and Michelin stars and the white papers, and these things that they wouldn't come across in their algorithms.

[00:02:45] Chenell Basilio: Yeah.

[00:02:45] Tim Huelskamp: So that was our original product there today, uh, back then. And yeah, we spent the first two or three quarters doing literally nothing else but taking feedback on that product.

[00:02:54] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. So we sent it out to 78 friends and family the first week, and then, um, once a [00:03:00] week, right? It just begged for feedback. So it was our aunts and uncles and groomsmen and everything. And I think one of the big things we learned there was, uh, we actually ... This is a ... So that's from what? Uh, September. The original ones actually had images in them.

[00:03:12] Chenell Basilio: Okay.

[00:03:12] Tim Huelskamp: So I think like one of the, the, um, one of the things you hear a lot is like, "Oh, you have to have images in newsletters." And like, we basically said like our, our readers told us, "I don't want the images," 'cause they actually get in the way of the knowledge. Right. If you look at our product, there's 40 to 50 links across all these different places, and basically they said like, "Those images are really big, [00:03:30] and I don't wanna see an image.

[00:03:31] Tim Huelskamp: I instead want what you guys do so well, which is succinctly teach me things in one line. And then if I wanna dive deeper, provide me to the best link on the internet." So originally we had more images, and then we actually cut them. So some people ask us like, "Hey, everyone does images. Why don't you do that?"

[00:03:46] Tim Huelskamp: It's 'cause we like deeply listen to our customer, and that's why our, our product today still doesn't have images.

[00:03:51] Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I love that. So for the first seven, eight months or so, you just focused on the product. All of it. I think, I think so many newsletter operators just skip over that [00:04:00] piece. They're like, "Well, we have an email.

[00:04:01] Chenell Basilio: We have a format. Let's just run." Yeah. And you're like, "No, no. Like, let's slow down." Yep. "Let's figure this out so that we can-" Grow faster later Correct And I love that. I love that. That is like, that, I think that just is a testament to how you've grown since then.

[00:04:13] Tim Huelskamp: Yep. Um- To build on that too, I think one of the things we, we learned through that process was like, it was very news heavy at the beginning, 'cause that was our original thesis, and a lot of the feedback was, "Give me more knowledge serendipity.

[00:04:23] Tim Huelskamp: Give me these crazy ideas I'm not gonna come across on social media or other newsletters." So we just tried to really lean into that, and our product evolved, [00:04:30] uh, even more so where like we have an et cetera section- Mm ... which is where a lot of this fun stuff you'd see flying around the internet is, and people love that.

[00:04:36] Tim Huelskamp: So it was in there, but it got much bigger through that process. So the, I think the two big things were less images for our audience. It doesn't mean it's right for everyone's audience. I think you should test it. Yeah. And then second, like our curious people love th- we, we hear a lot of things where they'll come in and say something like, "I had no idea that this, when I woke up this morning, I was gonna be spending 45 minutes learning about bioluminescent fish in the Pacific Ocean."

[00:04:59] Tim Huelskamp: But like-

[00:04:59] Chenell Basilio: I [00:05:00] think I clicked on that one.

[00:05:00] Tim Huelskamp: Nice. Yeah, yeah. But put it like 1440, like you fi- you have such good taste and I trust your taste. Mm. And you find these really fascinating articles and resources, and you put 'em in front of me, and then I go down these rabbit holes with you. So I think like that was the two big things we learned was like our audience doesn't want images, and then second, how you load it up with unique knowledge serendipity.

[00:05:21] Chenell Basilio: So- After this seven, eight months, or three to four quar- like two to three quarters of figuring out the product, how did you decide, like, "Okay, now it's growth time. Let's [00:05:30] go"? Yeah. How did you know when it was right to do that?

[00:05:32] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. So I think we were kinda figuring it out on the fly. I, I was in the private equity world for a decade before this, so I tried to take a lot of the principles I learned there.

[00:05:39] Tim Huelskamp: And we always just break it down into three things. If you look at our core business newsletter products, we're real- we're incredible at writing the newsletter. We have like a six- we've always had a 60%-plus open rate. Uh, our team puts their, pours their heart and soul, and puts so much love into the product every morning.

[00:05:53] Tim Huelskamp: The second thing was, how do we grow the list? And then the third thing was, how do we monetize it to create the flywheel that everyone always talks about at these [00:06:00] conferences, right? So, like, those were our next two things. So, like, we felt at that point we had de-risked the product, 'cause we'd taken so much feedback from the first three quarters.

[00:06:07] Tim Huelskamp: Our open rate was holding, and our retention was really awesome.

[00:06:10] Chenell Basilio: Okay.

[00:06:10] Tim Huelskamp: So then we basically said, "Okay, can we prove that we can grow the list and then monetize it?" So those were our next two challenges, kind of in quarter four and five.

[00:06:18] Chenell Basilio: Okay. Very cool. Yeah. So I mean, let's talk about growth. I put together this growth timeline of 1440, and you can see it's, like, kind of slow in the beginning, 'cause your focus on the product so much.

[00:06:29] Chenell Basilio: [00:06:30] But talk through, like, the first thousand subscribers. That had to have come during the first, you know, two to three quarters, right?

[00:06:35] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. So- Yeah, I think by the time we got to the end of the two or three quarters, we had, like, 2,000 subscribers. Okay. So it wasn't growing very fast. Mm-hmm. And at the time, we were doing it one day a week, and then we started doing two days a week, and three days a week, and we eventually got to five.

[00:06:46] Tim Huelskamp: Um, my favorite thing back then, back then was, so when we sent it out to 78 friends and family, we... A week later, when we sent the second one, there were 91 people on the list.

[00:06:55] Chenell Basilio: Oh,

[00:06:55] Tim Huelskamp: that's awesome. So even back then, there was some signal that people really like this, and they're forwarding it to each other.

[00:06:59] Tim Huelskamp: And [00:07:00] even back then, Drew, my co- our co-founder, I was like, "Ooh, there's some signal in there. Like, we gotta keep going," right? So we basically just sent it out, and then you... It was, like, 78, 91, I think 104 was the third one. And you could see it organically growing, that people liked the product, even though we were taking feedback.

[00:07:15] Tim Huelskamp: So we basically said, "Okay, we have organic growth. What other, uh, methods can we use?" So at that point, we leaned into four in the first couple quarters. So you have organic word-of-mouth. That's what grew obviously. Um, we did swaps, so we worked with other similar-sized [00:07:30] newsletters to trade, uh, trade our inventories for theirs.

[00:07:33] Tim Huelskamp: Uh, we did Facebook ads starting then too, and then we also did this, uh, Dojo Mojo thing, uh, which was interesting. Does anyone, anyone remember that or hear of that? Yeah, it was this interesting- ... interesting product. So that, that basically got us from, you know, couple thousand subscribers into, like, the 30,000 subscribers.

[00:07:50] Chenell Basilio: Yeah.

[00:07:51] Tim Huelskamp: And then at that point, we're like, "Okay, we have enough of a market to go out and, and sell to advertisers. Let's see if, if we can de-risk the third part, which is the monetization."

[00:07:59] Chenell Basilio: Very cool. [00:08:00] Yeah. I pulled up some, uh, past Dojo Mojo giveaways that I could find. Some of these are interesting. And then I saw this other one, and I was like, "1440's in a-" Webcam glam one.

[00:08:14] Chenell Basilio: So I thought that was pretty funny. Um, so you, you actually call this, like, the washing machine?

[00:08:19] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah, I mean, so you, when you have no money and you're trying to grow these companies, sometimes you do things that are a little bit more like Hacky, I guess. And with this one, so it was this company down in New York, and what they did was you'd get like [00:08:30] five brands together.

[00:08:30] Tim Huelskamp: It probably says them right there.

[00:08:31] Chenell Basilio: Yeah.

[00:08:32] Tim Huelskamp: Um, and basically everyone chips in 500 bucks, and then like United Airlines might give you a $500 gift certificate or $1,000 to go to Paris, and it was all positioned around like a trip to Paris. And then what happens is, uh, all five brands contribute emails, and if you sign up, you sign up for all five of these brands', uh, email lists.

[00:08:49] Chenell Basilio: Right.

[00:08:50] Tim Huelskamp: So I think the problem there is it's kind of like the courage market, where people are signing up for things and they didn't actually provide the intent to you. They didn't say like, "I want this product." So you kind of show up in their ... [00:09:00] They show up in the, you show up in their inbox. Uh, so the way we thought about that back then was we said, we don't talk about this on my podcast often, but we basically said, you know, like deliverability, as everyone knows, is like one of the most important things.

[00:09:11] Tim Huelskamp: Like, you have to make sure you have like a super clean email list. You have to make sure that everyone that receives your email wants it, and if they're not, you should like ... It's, it's really hard when you're small to like cut, cull the list, but you really have to do it because all the spam filters in Gmail, like they see if you're, if people don't like your product, and they penalize you.

[00:09:28] Tim Huelskamp: So yeah, we basically, [00:09:30] we took all those emails that were acquired from this growth strategy, and we used another IP address, and we would copy our email every morning and send them out over there. I love this. And then if they spammed and unsubscribed, it would happen not on our, our list. And then we would, after about a month or 45 days I think it was, if they were a, a really high subscriber, like they were clicking and, and engaging with the product, we would pull them off and put them on our main list.

[00:09:53] Chenell Basilio: I love this, 'cause usually when I see stuff like this, I, I always think it's like the brands who don't have a great product and they're just like trying to hack their way [00:10:00] through. But ... And sometimes we get too precious about the channels where we grow our lists from. And so I kind of love that you're talking about this and saying like, "Hey, when you're small, you kind of have to do stuff."

[00:10:09] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. That like maybe you-

[00:10:10] Tim Huelskamp: Exactly. Like you described, like you know what? Now we have, we have like we're very profitable. We can invest like a million dollars a month in customer acquisition, but we didn't have that back then, so we had to figure out how to do it as cheaply as possible. I think I was just looking back then, like we would get these engaged subscribers for something like 40 cents.

[00:10:23] Tim Huelskamp: Uh, 47, 50 cents. Wow. So like you'd run them through that system, and then we'd pull them over and get someone for, you know, [00:10:30] under a dollar, which back then is, is massive for us.

[00:10:32] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. And I think you had said that like 30% of them unsubscribed or spa- Yeah, yeah ... like sent to

[00:10:37] Tim Huelskamp: the spam. Actually, we looked at the data.

[00:10:38] Tim Huelskamp: It was, it was something about 15 to 20% of the emails that went in came out.

[00:10:42] Chenell Basilio: Oh, okay.

[00:10:43] Tim Huelskamp: So like all that junk stayed over on the other side. But then also like once we got up into where we were monetizing and growing like more, um, less hacky, we, we, we like moved on from it. And then also I think a lot of brands came into it.

[00:10:55] Tim Huelskamp: At the time, like Airbnb and all these really reputable brands were doing it. I was actually kind of surprised by that. But [00:11:00] then it kind of like most growth trends, it works really, really well for two or three years, and then people like it gets crowded and it didn't work for us anymore, and we decided just from a, uh, a risk perspective it didn't make sense, so we turned it off.

[00:11:11] Chenell Basilio: Yeah, that makes sense. I love that. So then you obviously started doing Facebook ads at some point too. Yeah. You do thousands and thousands of Facebook ads at this point. Correct. Uh, Erica's incredible at running that program. Yeah. Um, how did you decide like, "Hey, let's just turn on the faucet for Facebook ads instead of going after [00:11:30] like these hacky things or organic growth"?

[00:11:32] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah, I think we always knew that the hacky things wouldn't scale. Yeah. If you're trying to build like a really big business with, you know, tens of millions of revenue and tens of, tens of millions of subscribers, you need scalable channels. And I think Facebook today even is probably the best place to do that.

[00:11:44] Tim Huelskamp: So yeah, the next thing we did was start to go to, uh, to, to Facebook, and I think some of the things we... I think we were spending, I don't know, a couple thousand dollars a month at the beginning, just really understanding how can we, uh, take our value proposition and put it on the market and make sure we're getting, getting subscribers back.

[00:11:59] Tim Huelskamp: [00:12:00] So at that time, we started studying, uh, David Ogilvy and Claude Hopkins. There's some really incredible, uh, timeless marketing traditions that we tried to instill in our ads back then. We still use them today. And actually, is that the next one that, that-

[00:12:14] Chenell Basilio: That's the next one, yeah.

[00:12:15] Tim Huelskamp: Okay, cool. Uh, I mean, if you look

[00:12:16] Chenell Basilio: at- I can pull that.

[00:12:17] Chenell Basilio: It's okay ...

[00:12:18] Tim Huelskamp: if you look at most of them, like what they, what they do, so like we tested a thousand different pictures of, of, of readers, and then also, like if you look at that act- uh, I stopped What David Ogilvy taught us was [00:12:30] if you put your pain out into the world, people that have that pain see it, and then they, they, they wanna-- They're, "That's me."

[00:12:38] Tim Huelskamp: And then they say, "Okay, how can they uniquely solve my pain?" So it's what's the pain point? How can that company uniquely solve my pain? And then social proof, right? So these are different iterations of it, but, like, if you look at, "I stopped watching the news a year ago. Was so sick of the bias everywhere, but in doing so I was out of the loop."

[00:12:56] Tim Huelskamp: Right? So, like, that's this pain people have. They watch TV, everyone's yelling at each other. Yeah. They don't [00:13:00] even learn that much. With 1440, you can learn 50 new things in five minutes and no one's yelling at you. And, like, we kept on hearing that in our, in our, um, in our inbox. Actually, still today, if you reply to an email, they all come to the...

[00:13:11] Tim Huelskamp: I read every one of them. So we would see all these testimonials and see the pain points of people, and we would just take those with their permission and then turn them into ads and put them back out in the world. Actually, Sara Blakely from Spanx taught me that. I don't know her, I read it, but, uh, she taught me that, that principle.

[00:13:25] Tim Huelskamp: So it's basically like what are those pains and why people love you, and then reposition them [00:13:30] as w- pain, unique value proposition, social proof. So these were-- I mean, these ads ran for-- They're still running today, some of 'em, but they ran for like four or five years, and, uh, we just got that audience that our, our audience is a third Dem, a third Republican, a third independent.

[00:13:46] Tim Huelskamp: They're 50/50 male/female. They're spread perfectly across the country. There's a lot of these people out there that are like, "I am just s- I just wanna learn, and everyone makes it so hard on me, and I go to YouTube to look at a video. I don't know what's real anymore. I'm on social media. [00:14:00] There's bunnies jumping on trampolines that say 'hi.'"

[00:14:03] Tim Huelskamp: Like, like, "I'm trying to learn about the gut microbiome. I have no idea what anything is anymore."

[00:14:08] Chenell Basilio: Right. "

[00:14:08] Tim Huelskamp: And I'm a curious doctor with three kids at home, and I'm trying to learn really efficiently, and everything gets in my way, and I just wish someone would help me learn things." That's our, that's our demo.

[00:14:18] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. So yeah, we just figured out how to speak to them, and usually when you do that, here's the pain, and then unique- uniquely solve the pain, social proof, that one, two, three punch can work pretty well.

[00:14:27] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. And going back to that you answer every [00:14:30] reply that you, you get.

[00:14:31] Tim Huelskamp: I don't answer-

[00:14:31] Chenell Basilio: Answer or

[00:14:32] Tim Huelskamp: you read them

[00:14:32] Tim Huelskamp: I, I read them all. Yeah. I, I answer most of them, though.

[00:14:34] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Yeah. But I think you had said on another podcast that some of these Face-- some of your best performing Facebook ads come from those replies because you get that incredible, like, word of mouth thing with people. Yeah, that- That one ...

[00:14:45] Tim Huelskamp: that is a, a truncated version of a real reader email.

[00:14:49] Chenell Basilio: That's

[00:14:49] Tim Huelskamp: awesome. Right? So we take, like, the, the pains and what they tell us and then turn them into ads.

[00:14:53] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. So, like, build an incredible product. Yeah. Actually listen to your customers. Right. Don't have a no reply at 1440. No, yeah. That's- Join 1440 dot... [00:15:00] That,

[00:15:00] Tim Huelskamp: that's terribly-

[00:15:00] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Horrible. Yeah. Um, that's great.

[00:15:02] Chenell Basilio: I love this. Um, okay. So actually, I think this one was supposed to be earlier, just an example of what it used to look like versus now. But, um, yeah, okay. We'll keep going. So with the monetization stuff- This was one of your old sponsorships. I'm sorry, I'm making you like-

[00:15:20] Tim Huelskamp: No, it's good. Good for my eyes.

[00:15:21] Chenell Basilio: I'm trying to zoom in.

[00:15:22] Chenell Basilio: Um, this is one of the old sponsorships, and I'm just curious like how you thought about delivering for your sponsors over time. Like this is [00:15:30] probably a good chunk of your revenue is coming from sponsorships and brand deals, so-

[00:15:34] Tim Huelskamp: Yep ...

[00:15:34] Chenell Basilio: it's definitely a focus for you. I'm curious how you've thought about getting better performance for your sponsors and that kinda thing over time.

[00:15:41] Chenell Basilio: Um, I have more.

[00:15:43] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. We, I can talk to this. Yeah. I think, I think one of the big things I've learned is when I talk to younger, uh, newsletter founders, and I try to help as many of them as possible, the, the two things I, I see are they don't put enough, they don't put enough love into the product, which we talked about earlier.

[00:15:56] Tim Huelskamp: And the second one is even if they put love into the product, they just assume that if they throw an [00:16:00] ad in, they're gonna monetize. And it is really, really hard to do this work. We have an amazing team. Amanda's here in the room somewhere that focuses on this for us, uh, with many others. And we actually took

[00:16:10] Tim Huelskamp: If you look at our first ad we ever ran, um, back in 2018, we spent like two or three quarters on the ads as well, right? So just split testing them. How many characters should they be? How many paragraphs should they push? Is there three links, five links, six links? What's the title? Does it lead into curiosity?

[00:16:28] Tim Huelskamp: We split tested that for like [00:16:30] multiple quarters, and by the time we had done those little like 3% gain, 6% gain, 4% gain, you add them all up, it was something like what we used to see as like one click now is three clicks.

[00:16:40] Chenell Basilio: Wow.

[00:16:41] Tim Huelskamp: And like with our business model, a lot of the, uh, the, the revenue comes from, you know, driving customers and conversions back to our partners.

[00:16:47] Tim Huelskamp: So that's basically like we, we essentially tripled our revenue early on by deeply focusing on what the ads look like. And I think that's another thing that a lot of folks don't do is they just don't put the love and the, and the time, and like really understanding, [00:17:00] how do I make this ad convert my, for my partners, right?

[00:17:02] Tim Huelskamp: Like the, uh, the other thing too is we all know this, but like it is so easy to just take your entire budget and give it to Mark Zuckerberg or Google or these scaled platforms. And on top of it, like with newsletters, it's a little bit more work, right? So we have to develop, we have to deliver value to our partners every day, and like if we don't do that, they will just give all their money to Mark Zuckerberg.

[00:17:22] Tim Huelskamp: And I think a lot of the early founders in the space just assume like, "Oh, I'm gonna write the newsletter. I'll throw an ad up there and everything's gonna be great." You have to like work your butt off to make [00:17:30] sure that you develop the, the system that works for you. And then even today, we were on a call yesterday with our sales team.

[00:17:35] Tim Huelskamp: We're trying to figure out how to make tweaks now because, you know, there's, yeah, there's things, things change and you have to make sure you're constantly evolving and, and delivering for your partners if you're, if that's how you, uh, drive revenue.

[00:17:46] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. I was just looking at the, the three ads. Like before you didn't even have blue links, they were just like the same color as the old ones.

[00:17:53] Chenell Basilio: You have added in the logo. You've changed up the copy. I just, I think it's awesome how like you can see the [00:18:00] progression, and it's very cool to, to watch and just know that you guys didn't start from this- No ... like amazing place. You like put the work in to get there. Yep. So I think that's awesome. For sure though.

[00:18:08] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Um, cool. How did you, in the early days with sponsors, like how were you finding these, these brands?

[00:18:14] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. Well, Ryan and Jesse didn't have WhoSponsors stuff yet, so we didn't have that school. But we just would look at the other brand. I mean, the nice thing about this industry is you can see all the other folks in your space, like who their customers are 'cause they're in the ads.

[00:18:24] Tim Huelskamp: So we would just go out and look at who, um, who ran similar ads with similar, um, similar, [00:18:30] uh, audiences, and then we would just go to them and say like, "We have a very similar audience. Here's our CPC, here's our CPAs. Give us a shot." Yeah. And then hopefully turn them into long-term partners. We've had some partners with us for six or seven years where they're running multiple times.

[00:18:42] Tim Huelskamp: Um, but so we always wanna look for partners that Yeah. Our, our audience is, as I said, like 50/50 male/female. They have three trillion in assets. Uh, they like to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. So most of our brands are in like the finance space or better for you consumer goods, [00:19:00] largely speaking. So like we also have a really good gut now if, if someone comes in like an inbound, we're like, "Hey, that's probably not gonna work.

[00:19:05] Tim Huelskamp: Like maybe we can test it for you." But we're getting really good at knowing what brands will resonate with our audience as well, which is a really important part of it, right? Totally. So like we're trying to find those long-term partners that we can build with for the long term, and then they run over and over again with us.

[00:19:20] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. I'm curious how that works 'cause we- I was listening to some things and you said you make five cents per open, which at a 60% open rate, 4.67 million [00:19:30] subscribers, you- that's- you're charging like 130K per email to be a sponsor, which is crazy.

[00:19:35] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. It's a, it's a little under that. Okay. But yeah, it's in the ballpark.

[00:19:37] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Yeah. So how do you like go to a brand these days? Are you working with like an ad agency at this point?

[00:19:44] Tim Huelskamp: Uh, most of our revenue's direct.

[00:19:46] Chenell Basilio: It is direct.

[00:19:46] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah, yeah.

[00:19:47] Chenell Basilio: Okay.

[00:19:47] Tim Huelskamp: So like we've started to do things where we can cut up the audience or we can like sell a, a smaller placement where they can prove that it works.

[00:19:54] Chenell Basilio: Okay.

[00:19:54] Tim Huelskamp: And then if it does, they'll eventually buy the larger one.

[00:19:57] Chenell Basilio: Interesting. And you're just working on like packages of like [00:20:00] could buy X number of spots?

[00:20:01] Tim Huelskamp: Yep. Yeah.

[00:20:02] Chenell Basilio: Wow.

[00:20:02] Tim Huelskamp: But usually we have to, we have to prove like everything. You have to prove it to them that it works, and then if it does, they'll come back and, uh, buy more.

[00:20:07] Tim Huelskamp: But then if you don't deliver for the next time, they'll come- they won't come back. So I think it's just- And it's up or out ... always making sure that, yeah, iterating every t- every week and making sure that you're delivering something for the, for the, uh, for the partners.

[00:20:16] Chenell Basilio: Nice. I like it. All right. We have about 10 minutes left, so I kinda wanna make sure that we get to, um, the future here.

[00:20:23] Tim Huelskamp: Cool.

[00:20:24] Chenell Basilio: So you are now delving into topics. Um, this is [00:20:30] currently the homepage, which is awesome. So we started here with just the newsletter. Now you have podcast, video, all this stuff, and topics is this huge undertaking that you're going through. Um, and I'm very excited about it for you 'cause I think it's such a cool mission.

[00:20:43] Chenell Basilio: And, uh, yeah. So essentially you can see it here. Um, if you go on their website, they just have like multiple buckets of new information that you can kind of go down the rabbit hole with. And do you wanna explain how this came to be?

[00:20:56] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. I mean, it came to be by like, uh, listening to the reader again. So like [00:21:00] every day in our, in our inbox folks would tell us, "I'm a doctor with three kids, and you're talking about the Fed, and F- Fed Chairman Powell lowers rates 25 basis points.

[00:21:09] Tim Huelskamp: I have no idea what the Fed is." That's just like re- most people don't, right? Like you think about like you're expert in like 2%, 3% of content. There's all these other things like the gut microbiome, CRISPR, Burning Man, venture capital, inflation, that are always in the news and people don't really understand them, and no one ever takes the time to help them really understand them at the foundational evergreen layer.

[00:21:27] Tim Huelskamp: So we heard that over and over again from our [00:21:30] readers. Similarly, when we'd run our top three section and say- Uh, an update on the Fed, we would put something like, "Kinda know what the Fed is but kinda don't, click here for a 101," and tens of thousands of people would click on that link. So we could see the signal in the data, and then our customers were asking for it as well.

[00:21:44] Tim Huelskamp: And then on the other side, we have these brilliant editors that are just reading the internet all day, and they're really passionate about their topic page-- their, their topic spaces, excuse me. And they come across this, like, incredible knowledge, right? So, like, maybe you're learning about CRISPR, which I still don't understand.

[00:21:57] Tim Huelskamp: I'm trying really hard to. I don't know if [00:22:00] anyone does. Um, and you know, MIT, like MIT, the most prolific science, uh, institution in the country, has these incredible videos and white papers and, like, 101s and 401... It's incredible, but no one can find it, right? So, like, the way the internet works, it's just scattered all over the internet, and you-- on one side, you have, like, this curious knowledge seeker.

[00:22:21] Tim Huelskamp: On the other side, you have the world's best content, ideas, and knowledge, and we just don't think they're getting matched. So we're trying to build, we call it, like, Pinterest for knowledge. It's kinda like if [00:22:30] Pinterest and Reddit had a baby, but all around foundational, evergreen, and knowledge and ideas.

[00:22:34] Tim Huelskamp: So what we do is we have our really smart writers go down these rabbit holes. We currently have five verticals: business, finance, science and tech, civics, health and medicine, and then human interest. And in our business and finance vertical, Phoebe, who's here in New York, she'll go down and learn about Bitcoin, 401Ks, the Rockefellers, bond deals, IPOs, venture capital.

[00:22:56] Tim Huelskamp: And she's super curious, like everyone on our team, and she goes [00:23:00] down there, and she's looking, and she's connecting the dots. And, like, on our venture capital page, it's like, why does, um, the power law of VC, it keeps coming up in my research. What is that, right? And she goes and researches it, and she finds these ideas, and then she summarizes them into, like, Reddit or Pinterest cards, where we can do what we do best, which is succinctly describe to you what the power law is.

[00:23:21] Tim Huelskamp: 20% of deals in VC lead to 80% of the returns in, in the asset class. And then that's what we do so well, is like, here's you can learn something in five [00:23:30] to 10 seconds. And then if you wanna dive deeper, boom, there's the best link on the internet if you wanna spend 10 or 15 minutes. Not everyone wants to dive deeper.

[00:23:37] Tim Huelskamp: Some people just wanna have these fascinating pieces of knowledge put in front of them. So we have the top at the, you know- Venture capital. Then we have a category to business and finance, which is I think like 130 of them right now and growing. And then we have like a global feed, which is like you just sit back and like think about like Instagram for smart people or Pinterest or Reddit, where you just learn all these ideas about Steven [00:24:00] Spielberg and the gut microbiome and bioluminescence and how people used to sleep 400 years ago, right?

[00:24:06] Tim Huelskamp: Just all these incredible insights, but the big differentiator, like everything we do, is we make sure everything is fact-checked by humans and then worthy of your time. So like we think that if you look at these UGC platforms, the reason why YouTube is now bigger than Netflix is because YouTube doesn't have to pay for any of the content because the readers just are putting up all the content, right?

[00:24:26] Tim Huelskamp: So 99% of that content is not good, right? But that doesn't [00:24:30] matter 'cause the algorithm sorts it out. Our whole thesis is basically-- Actually, there's this 1-9-90 principle. If you look at social media, 1% of the people post the content, 9% consume, like, comment, share, and 90% lurk or they just read it, right? So our whole thesis is basically can we be the 1% where our team, who shares a vision and a mission, goes out and learns these principle-- sorry, learns this knowledge, and then again, makes sure it's real, it's worthy of your time, it's [00:25:00] fact-checked, and then puts all that 1% knowledge in the ecosystem, and then our readers can do what you do on UGC platforms, which is save it to a library, share it with your friends, add a comment.

[00:25:09] Tim Huelskamp: But none of the misinformation and all that crazy stuff that plagues the internet, all that vitriol, we want that all out of it, and we want this like pure knowledge place where you can just come and explore your curiosity among like tens of thousands of topics.

[00:25:23] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. So this obviously takes editors and writers a long time to put together content.

[00:25:28] Chenell Basilio: Yes, it does, yeah. So you have to finance this [00:25:30] in some way. Um I know you have, uh, 'cause now you're on-- People are coming to your website, so you have ads on there too. Uh, I actually just put together how people get there. So this is an example from one of the, um, the emails they send out. It's like, "Hey, here's this little, uh, quantum computing explained," and then you go over to this page.

[00:25:49] Chenell Basilio: It has an incredible video. You keep going, but then there's these, these ads on here. So these are just, like, dynamically inserted ads for now, but I imagine- Yeah ... you probably are planning [00:26:00] for bigger and better.

[00:26:01] Tim Huelskamp: Yep. Yeah, we also partnered with a really, I can't say the name, but a really large, uh, financial s- uh, financial advisor company, and they bought everything on our business and finance page.

[00:26:11] Tim Huelskamp: Okay. Because what they said is like, "Wow, this audience with three tril- We have this audience with $3 trillion in assets, and now they're not learning about the news, but they're learning about, like, how to build a 401. Like, we need to be the front of them." Mm-hmm. So they bought all the traffic around the business and finance vertical.

[00:26:24] Tim Huelskamp: Um, so we're building out the programmatic stack so people could do, you know, interest-based advertising [00:26:30] eventually. But we also hope that those big companies will just be like, "I just wanna buy the whole thing," is 'cause you have this curious audience that's learning in a different way. They're not on social media.

[00:26:38] Tim Huelskamp: On social media, you're just looking for, like, a quick fix. What we've learned is, like, people that are learning on 1440, they're d- they're, they're nerding out, right? They're, like, deep in that thing, learning about, like, their mind's open to different perspectives, and they're opening up their brains. And when you do that, you tend to get more conversions and customers on the back end.

[00:26:56] Tim Huelskamp: So we're trying to eventually sell it to all the big brands, but we'll [00:27:00] see how that all goes.

[00:27:00] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Sounds like a good idea.

[00:27:02] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah.

[00:27:03] Chenell Basilio: And the, so now you've built out these weekly newsletters around these different topics as well. So you have business and finance, which people will sign up for right on the page if it's, the topic is business and finance.

[00:27:13] Chenell Basilio: Makes so much sense. How are you, with your, the daily digest emails, like right now, five cents an open, whatever, how are you thinking about the economics of a weekly email? Like, are they-- Obviously you're a lot less inventory to sell. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. A

[00:27:26] Tim Huelskamp: lot less inventory, but the way we're thinking about it is- [00:27:30] Not only so that the, when we monetize those smaller weekly newsletters that have, like the business invited one says 300,000 people on it, we're breaking even on all of the research, but we're building a library that hopefully will be around forever.

[00:27:44] Tim Huelskamp: So like when we started, we had a couple topics in business, but now because it's evergreen knowledge that people can always come back to, that library keeps growing. So it's essentially like a new flywheel for us where these ads s- fund the growth of the product, and then as [00:28:00] we drive more traffic to the website and our audiences get bigger, rather than like our paid acquisition flywheel for the newsletter, you have a new flywheel over here that, that funds all this, and that leads to s- hopefully significant profits.

[00:28:11] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. And if someone joined this, they could go d- join the Daily Digest if they're not already on it, and that kind of thing. Correct. Exactly. I love that.

[00:28:16] Tim Huelskamp: Yep. Yep.

[00:28:16] Chenell Basilio: Uh, how do you think about the topics that you pick for people to read and start

[00:28:20] Tim Huelskamp: with? Yeah. So it's a little, it's mostly, it's data and then gut.

[00:28:23] Tim Huelskamp: So we actually went out and looked at like what are the biggest topics people search for on Google. We looked at Reddit, Pinterest, Wikipedia, like basically tried to [00:28:30] size the market. And then also we have like our editorial team that just looks through, for instance, like executive orders. No one talked about those until about a year ago, and now it's clearly a hot topic.

[00:28:38] Tim Huelskamp: So our, our humans have that gut pulse, like we should do an executive orders page. So it's a little bit of, um, data and then a little bit of, uh, the human instinct.

[00:28:48] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. That's interesting. So, and I'm sure you have a ton of click data in your emails that you can say like, "Okay, every time we talk about bio lubricants, people click through and they go down a rabbit hole.

[00:28:57] Chenell Basilio: We should be building this out."

[00:28:58] Tim Huelskamp: Exactly. And one of the things we did too [00:29:00] is we, we looked at There's power laws in search and knowledge as well. So like I'm f- I, I live in Chicago. I'm from this small town called Barrington, Illinois. Probably no one's ever heard of it before. But if you think about how many people wanna learn about Barrington versus Chicago, it's like 100X bigger on Chicago.

[00:29:15] Tim Huelskamp: So even when we do that work on the topics, what we've seen is basically it's something like if you cover the top 10,000 topics on the internet, like Picasso and Spielberg and Oprah and colleges and cities, right? Not every city, but [00:29:30] the top ones, it's something like 20% of what people are looking for on the internet.

[00:29:35] Tim Huelskamp: So we're basically just focusing on like these big ones that people actually wanna learn about, and like not doing the long tail like Google and Reddit and Wikipedia would do, like where they have a Barrington page 'cause they're like, it's like five views a year. Mm-hmm. We're just not focusing on those.

[00:29:47] Tim Huelskamp: We're focusing on the big ones that can drive returns to us.

[00:29:50] Chenell Basilio: Interesting. How else are you getting people to these topics pages aside from email or-

[00:29:54] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. It largely comes from our existing, uh, audience, and then we're doing like the SEO [00:30:00] game, but like that's getting a little tough 'cause of Google Zero.

[00:30:02] Tim Huelskamp: And then I think the big growth mechanism for us has to be once people are on the site and they're going down the rabbit holes and they find one of these really fascinating insights they love, bringing their friends and family in, like to their learning experience. If you look at Pinterest and Reddit, that's how they blew up.

[00:30:17] Tim Huelskamp: They didn't spend any money on paid. They just created such a wonderful product, and then people shared the knowledge with each other. So we hope it's like a product-led growth strategy. We're, we're seeing that, but we have to sc- step it up significantly.

[00:30:28] Chenell Basilio: Yeah. I could even see a [00:30:30] world where you had just have like custom social share images for each page of like, here's a specific thing you can...

[00:30:34] Chenell Basilio: Like Substack does this pretty well.

[00:30:36] Tim Huelskamp: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:36] Chenell Basilio: I like that. Um, anything else coming in the future of 1440? Is this big- Uh, I mean, we,

[00:30:42] Tim Huelskamp: we, we launched a podcast recently. We have a, a video strategy recently, but we're basically trying to focus and like we think that, you know, we built a terrific newsletter business that does a million in revenue per employee and we have 27 employees.

[00:30:52] Tim Huelskamp: But we think this thing, if we can do it the right way, you know, like a Pinterest or a Reddit on these big knowledge platforms, one of our principles is swing [00:31:00] for the fences, and it's like, how do you take this audience of curious people, know what they love, and then go really big? So we're trying to do that here.

[00:31:06] Tim Huelskamp: Like, we'll, it will always be a newsletter at our core, but how do we trans- transition from just a newsletter company into this larger knowledge platform?

[00:31:14] Chenell Basilio: This is awesome. The fact that 1440 is successful makes me very excited about the future of the world because you guys are doing it well. You put your heart and soul into this, and you're focusing on keeping good employees and just making your customers happy.

[00:31:26] Chenell Basilio: And so I'm excited that 1440 is succeeding.

[00:31:29] Tim Huelskamp: Thank you so much.

[00:31:29] Chenell Basilio: Thanks [00:31:30] for doing this, Tim. I appreciate

you.