Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder | Building an AI Media Business from $1K to Multi-Million Exit

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 come, that's when I realized that my stream was a big deal. 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. Being a successful musician was my dream. My dream was ripped away from me from COVID-19. It almost gave me an opportunity 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 round to my house, start a business. 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 started, everything was ready to go. That was our runway. We achieved the goal of can we quit our jobs? 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 and how he's helping others navigate the intersection of AI, media, and entrepreneurship. I have been a failure for 10 years and it's successful too. 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. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the Habsbot podcast network. Now Habsbot doesn't just have great podcasts. 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If you want to learn about how Habsbot can help your business, visit Habsbot.com, visit some other great case studies and you'll learn how Habsbot can help your business grow better. And one quick ask, before we dive into today's episode, I need your help with something important. I've just launched a quick survey to better understand what you guys want from the show. And your feedback is going to directly shape our upcoming content. It's only going to take a few minutes of your time and I made it super easy to find. Just head over to ScottyClarry.com slash survey. And as a thank you for helping me out, I'm giving away a free gift card to one lucky responsive chosen at random once we hit 100 responses. So not only will your feedback help make this show even better, you might score something cool just for sharing your thought. I really appreciate your help with this one. Adam, you scaled Mindstream from zero to 150,000 subs in 17 months before selling the Habsbot. That is a wild ride. That's fast. That'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 break next speed in terms of list building and creator economy building? What was the moment when you realized that you had something special? 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 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 everything we did was like, come on, make sure you listen to my 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 being successful with audience building in this kind of B2B media landscape in a way that I never had been able to do with music. I mean, that's 2,000 people showing up for a live stream. There's a lot of people. So it's not just building audience at that point. 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 as sort of my world that I live in right now, the switch from the sort of audience building into community buildings to start do like live events and to do live shows. And that's it. That's like very anything live is very stressful because you're like, I need to not only be someone's 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? Yeah, so I think I think as I alluded to it 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 and 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 front man 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 realise 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 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. 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 very positive. It's very, very positive. Is there a reason why after I guess 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 like, you know, like, fuck 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 of their willpower to go on another creative pursuit. Yeah, to be honest, I didn't at the time. So when I talk about my journey, I often like missed this period out, but it was quite a long period of time where I was like truly lost, you know, I'd spent all my time 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 now 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 kind of perfecting our craft a little bit. But something we were doing creatively wasn't connecting with people when 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 was the end. And it also gave, it almost gave me an opportunity to get out. But it didn't happen quickly. I moved back in with my parents. I was 2020. So I was 22 years old. And I just like 22 years old and my dream had kind of essentially ended. And 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 kind of got up off my ass and 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 worked for three years in three different sales jobs before I started Mindstream. So that period of coming back from London, sitting down into COVID-19 like life where I was doing anything. That next period of three years was very difficult for me. It took me a long time to kind of really have the energy to go again and go and do something super creative. Yeah, it's interesting because COVID, COVID was, 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 coming on the other side and built something successful. But it's interesting because for creatives, for people that are kind of in the world that that were 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. The 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 influence around social. I all consider them creative. 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? 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 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, you can kind of optimize anything to infinity. And I think somehow when you're stuck in the weeds, that is, that is the the solution. Like take podcasting for example, if you have someone who's not got a successful podcast, you know, they could be saying, oh, it's, it's because of like, I'm using the wrong camera or the wrong microphone or I'm not iterating the right way or I need to have different guests and all of these things. And you can, 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 of 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? And 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 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 one metric that made me realize that we weren't actually progressing. Does that, does that mean like, I was going to ask like 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. Yeah. I play music, but I've never tried to build an audience around it. So what's the metric? So I think, I think our problem with, with chasing there is that we, we tried to please everybody. And, and we, part of the reason we did this is we were, we were an 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, all we probably shouldn't say, like, this thing in our song lyric on the original site, 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 causes like in our mission, in our mission statement, we, we always used to say, like, say, we were, we were 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 them 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, cold play, um, yeah, cold play. Now the line not cold play from day one. And, and you know, if you look at that in a business sense, it's like, we didn't niche down, you know, that's really, I think that that's probably one of 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 a 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 10th Ferris Joe Rogan diary of a CEO podcast, or I want to be the whatever Gary Vee of social media, 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 the Gary Vee started with wine. Um, uh, if you're a, I mean, if you're a grant card own fan and you can see all his stuff now, now he's gone to the politics. He started with sales training. Yeah, it was very, very niche. It was very niche. And now he has a big audience, right? Um, everybody, I think even, uh, I'm not sure how like the, 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, so cliche, right? It's so, but you know, don't compare your, your day one to someone else's like your 10, which is really what everyone's doing when they start creating got to 100%. In, in my world, um, like, um, obviously newsletters, but in, in linkeding content creation, one of your previous guests, like, Sahil Bloom, um, I think what he is doing now is he's taking like, um, quite generalist advice, but like wrapping it so beautifully. And someone will say to me, like, how does Sahil Bloom, like post this quote and get like thousands of likes on, 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 have, you haven't done, done the work. So you don't almost get the luxury of being generalist. No, you can't yet. And that's where, that's where, 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, my, my stream was a, a, I, like you, you did niche. Um, and I, and I, I assumed that was a lesson that you learned. I don't know consciously or subconsciously when you decided to move from, you know, create adventure 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 cold play 20 years into their career when we first started. Is that sort of how you were thinking through my stream when you, when you first kicked it off? Um, I, um, that, that might have been a small, a small part of it. But, um, maybe I'm giving you too much credit. I have no idea. Like, yeah, I think, I think you might be, you know, it's, it's, it's very tempting to look back in hindsight and like draw all the dots that tell the nicest story. But, um, my stream really came out of like pure frustration when I started my stream. So at the time, um, I was working a sales job and I had this like small e-commerce business that I was running. Um, I was selling, um, snooker and pool accessories. So like tips and chalk and all this stuff, um, like dropshipping through Amazon FBA. Um, and I'd scaled it to doing about £80,000 in revenue with like, I think I had like a 12% profit margin. Um, but what I was selling wasn't my own product. I was competing against other FBA sellers. So the price was, um, 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%. Um, and when I kind of modeled it out, um, at the, at the rate I needed to scale to make it worth it, I'd have to start looking at, um, hiring staff and like a warehouse with 4% profit margin. It just didn't make any sense to me. Um, 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 landed on this one thing. I'd spent loads of money on a coach and, and like coach at the time, like I said to her, like, yeah, 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. Um, yeah, you're, that's not good. Yeah. So I had to, I don't know if it was that, that day where, where it kind of clicked to me or like 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 four years old and we, we'd always talked about starting a business together. And I just like shouted at him for like an hour on the phone. Like what has become of our lives? Like we're going to, 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 do actually, I don't actually love the last sales. Don't know how to work with some great people, but we weren't where we wanted to be. And I told him, like, come on, come out into 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 years. That was like my main entrepreneurial motivation. And two hosts of that podcast had started an ex-tid successful newsletter businesses. So it was like the freshest thing in my mind. So 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 Safe in back in their days, like mid 2023. And they 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 Salmon 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 and within like two, three hours of being locked in this office, we we'd started. We had the name we bought the main we'd created a logo like everything was ready to go. 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 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 conversations. And then just two months, I went from a 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 four euros or five dollars per class. 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So you're going to join over 10,000 global companies like Atlassian, Korra 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 $1,000 off Vanta. That's a real money backing your pocket. Visit vanta.com slash Scott right now before the software expires. That is vant.com slash Scott. What were the outside of lessons that you learned from like my first million and obviously, you know, Sam built the hustle, Sean built Melk Road. So two great examples there. And I think they speak about them a lot. Some strategies at 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 sort of copy the playbook 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, um, uh, advice that you got, well, were some of the, because you've gone through sales jobs, Amazon, FBA, building a, building a, a band and, and being a creator before, well, 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? I think at the core of it is just having a bias for action. I think the majority of people, um, today are consumers, um, at the load of people who think they're being productive listening to, um, loads of business podcasts. Um, and the year, the year before I started mindstream, like 20, 2023, uh, 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 the best assets I have. The problem is when you're selling yourself, but you're not actually doing anything, it's just, it's just a lie at the core of it, you know what I mean? Um, so, um, I set myself the challenge that year of becoming the person who continues to sell itself, but has some, has something that's really exciting to sell. So having that bias for action, um, 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, you know, started my first business at 14 doing events, went out and did the band, you know, I've always had the energy to kind of go out and do things. Um, and then also, um, 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 a life building. And, um, whenever I like discuss it, it always comes down to like being intentional. That's how I get happiness and success out of something. Um, 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 of you're really in the weeds. You, you just end up being reactive. So being able to kind of step out, analyze a situation, know the angle you're going towards, and then make intentional decisions that will help you get there. Yeah. 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. Yeah. I think that's very wise. I think that even without intention, um, her mostly speaks about this a lot, how entrepreneurs sometimes last in this cycle their entire life about starting something, get it, you know, getting excited about it, then the hardship happens, and then, uh, 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 the hardship happens, and then you move onto 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 about 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 and 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. Um, it's so, so, so important. Uh, I know that when you started mind stream, um, it didn't like blow up right away. It took a, it took a second. So early days of sending that newsletter, um, actually before we even talked about early days of sending newsletter, what made you want to focus on AI content? What was like, what was the signal in the market that that was the good idea? So this is a May, May, the 24th of May, 2023 that we sat down, um, 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. Um, 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, uh, maybe, of course, maybe a little bit of our bound. 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, um, following, talking about AI. If anyone thinks back to that time, it was just everything. Like, someone could put a lead magnet of 100 chat GPT prompts and get like thousands of emails overnight. Um, 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 copyrighter 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. I think that, listen, um, there's something to be said for, 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 riding AI newsletter. 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. Um, 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? Definitely not. Definitely not. Um, you mentioned about the competition, even when we sat down to, to start mind stream, they're, I remember looking at it and there were more than a thousand AI newsletters on Beehive, like on our pay one, there was more than a thousand, uh, uh, that's ridiculous. I think, I think a reason for that is Sean Peary had said six months before someone needs to go and do the hustle for AI. Um, so I was, I was late. Like we were late, um, 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, um, were quite smartly using AI technology to, um, to just consolidate what's going on. They were doing like a pretty good job of curating all of the buzz and there were so much buzz and then using AI to write these newsletters and they were just basically saying like, here's what happened. That, that, that was it. And they were all formatted in the same way, um, 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 looked the same. Um, what we had was, with Matt was like a real copywriter, like a real experienced copywriter who, who, who knew, who knew how to connect with people, who knew how to, you know, have a journalistic angle to something. 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, it happened. It's here's what happened and this, 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. Yes, Martin, you make it to include a human component into it, not just, not just aggregating. 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 in buttons. So this brings you 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 really, really early startup shit, right? Not like, not like immediately you get a thousand subs. So 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 frame it, whatever, a couple hundred or a thousand AI newsletters, there's some with 500,000 subs, you start, you've never built a newsletter business before. I mean, you realize that it's a sort of kind of like a crowded competitive space, you're not getting traction. There's some people throwing 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 one percent of podcasters just by releasing 10 plus episodes. So what made you continue? So we had, we had pretty humble goals at the start. We both invested £500 to get it started and that runway like gave us I think a few months just in terms of like the small SaaS 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 our sales and copyrighting 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. Like Matt was writing the newsletter, I was trying to build a following on LinkedIn to generate subscribers. I then scheduled that piece of content, go to work and do my sales job. I would then run home for my lunch break, like five, five, five, ten 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, like creating content on LinkedIn, like engagement is pretty key. So I'd literally be sat on LinkedIn, like writing, writing comments to all these people, lines of comments 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've got a thousand impressions on the post for the first time. I've just hit a thousand followers on LinkedIn. And that was probably the first six or seven weeks, 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'd match your investment into their boosts program, which is like a paid cross collaboration across newsletters. So we then dropped in two and a half thousand, which was the maximum. So we got five thousand dollars of boost credits and started paying for subscribers that way. So suddenly we were having like two thousand, three thousand 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 two, three hundred dollars for our first sponsor. And it's amazing. So that's like now you validated. It's been in a small way, the idea. Yeah, that was it. 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 from 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 four hundred thousand pound valuation. And that was it. That was our runway. We'd achieve the goal of can we quit our jobs? You know, three. So what, I'll go ahead, sorry. Three months in this was. So it was launched in May. And then yes, September, October, we got this deal over the line. 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 it 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 know a lot of creators. And they all go into a 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 of months. I don't think that's a normal thing for most creators. Yeah, I think the problem is often the gene or the mindset of creativity, like, whatever it is, doesn't normally come in parallel with like a business mindset. And this is what I saw in music. You'd sit in a room with all these musicians and they'd be talking about the latest strings they've got for their guitar or the new time signature they were writing their new songs in. A very, very, very rarely met another musician who was like, I just charged this much money for a show. 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 a 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. Yeah, I think it's very, I think it's very smart. So let's talk about, let's talk about scaling the newsletter. So I mean, he 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 running paid and doing, swaps, if the quality of the content's garbage, first of all, it's going to 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. The thoughts on that, how do you know what's your metric to figure out whether or not your newsletter 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? Yeah, so the two top line ones are obviously open rate and click through rate. That's that's kind of the main metric you're looking at every every day. Unsubscribe rate is pretty important. You know, you have like an industry benchmark of like 5%, so if you can be below that, you know, people are unsubscribing your newsletter and a better rate. The others reply rate. This is so key. You know, if you put a call to action out, so like what did you think about 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 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. Yeah, I mean, if somebody's if somebody's constantly replying or reposting you were like, you know, like saying like, hey, I just read about this and in this newsletter and posted 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 your content with the hills content. They're getting clipped out and the ideas are getting shared everywhere with no prompting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead, sir. 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 yeah, we would very regularly sit down and analyze our competition. We didn't 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 a we had an inbox that we had like thousands of newsletters subscribe to and we analyze 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 you can view six from this down the line when it gets a bit stale. Yeah, 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 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? 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 Matt Hitz. He was a Slovenian guy who had built up a huge email database 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 like loads and loads of buzz. The idea at the time was it was like AI agents which are coming now, but this was like 2023. People believe 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 Matt Hitz, his 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. Amazing, good for him. And once he realized what was happening, 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, etc. But he was struggling to operate. He was struggling to hire. He was struggling to sell ads. He was a developer by trade. So I 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. 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 mind stream. And then he would bring all of his newsletter subscribers, his blog revenue from product sales over to mind stream. 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. 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 a good 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 post seen on all these other job sites. 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Just go to indeed.com slash clary. A huge thank you to net suite for supporting today's episode now. What does the future hold for business? If you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers 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 proof their businesses, their operations with net suite 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 net suite 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. 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You're going to learn about the triumphs, failures of all her guests, the hard lessons of the best and brightest in business so that you too can make billion dollar moves, adventure and investing in business and in life. I want you to go listen to billion dollar moves wherever you get your podcasts. It is one of my favorites. Sarah is one of my favorite hosts. If you like success story, you're going to love this show and a quick pause. If you haven't had a chance yet, I'd love your input on our listener survey at scottdcleary.com slash survey. It takes just a few minutes and one lucky respondent when a gift card once we hit 100 responses. Your feedback directly impacts what we cover on the show. 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 to people drop off? Are they as valuable to the advertiser? Yeah. So we we churned quite a lot of those subscribers over 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 you know, one to two percent click rate. They weren't amazing subscribers. But the quantity of them was so high and we were still bringing in like three to five thousand subscribers every month from this blog. Over the course of the next year, we we managed to take the amount of traffic towards a GPT from like 90% home page traffic. So these were the ones we thought were going to the project to like 30 and brought and wound 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 that the lifts 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 P.O. You know. So suddenly when we had 110,000, 115,000 subscribers, I was able to secure deals with companies like Guide, Tapio who had a bunch of advertising money to spend. We started, 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, you know, our open right now is like 46, 47%, whereas this time a year ago, just after the acquisition, we were sitting like 27, 28%. Oh, amazing. So it's tough because it's always like a chicken and anything, right? Because you need the subscribers and even a 100,000 subscribers opening at a 20% open right is not perfect, but it's enough to interest an advertiser to write a P.O. Because then they can actually cut a check and they'll get results and they won't be as good, but there'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 amounts at the beginning. And that's where a lot of people struggle. Yeah. Or they just take longer. It just takes a long time. 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 dollar 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 just a well-negotiated deal. Yeah. Yeah. And we, by the way, Mattis came on a 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 a great journey. Amazing. So yeah, getting getting to that critical mass, as you as you mentioned, where you can start making money and start recycling and start spending on paid is important. And it's very, very, very difficult to deal with out a lot of money. This is one of the reasons that, you know, these styles and AI newsletters, most of them are gone now. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, not a lot of people have 150, 200 grand to build a list, right? Not the, 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, 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, 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 said about a dollar, $1.50 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? Where should they spend the money so that they get that result? And not $3, $4 per subscriber. Yes, you can get, you can get $1.50 to $1.50 per subscriber with paid co-reads pretty easily. So, Spark, Group, and Beehive Boosts. I think there's something inside to, 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 generally, they're generally upscrived. 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 Spark, Group, and Beehive is they have, they have software that analyzes the metrics of these subscribers, so you can only pay for engage subscribers, so you can kind of promise to get, you can be sure that you're going to get engage subscribers. The one problem with Spark, Group, Boosts though is, as you know, 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, every day. I don't think it's possible for anybody to have 10, 20 newsletters that they read regularly or 10, 20 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 Sparkloup 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 returns, 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 products or come to your talk or whatever. I think they're always going to be more invested in you because it's not just it's like a, there's like an extra level of action required to go through this process versus like a one click subscribe to four emails at the same, as we 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 wear a podcast? I'm like, how do you market it? I'm like, well, how do you market any business? You do, you do all of it. All of it. Now, anything you can possibly think of run paid due 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 everything that you can possibly think of for a business. You do it for the newsletter for the creative product 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 there's something that you're interested in? Why did that not work? 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've seen like dollar signs at the end, it was one of those moments and the logic was like, could we buy leads cheap enough through like Apollo or other strategies in the, you know, hundreds of thousands and then across like, you know, 50 email domains with three emails each send emails at such a scale that you get enough people to kind of 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 3000 of them subscribed. So we were like, Oh, shit, this is this is it. That's awesome. Yeah. What we didn't realize is they're kind of, they're like a bot, bot analysis of like Gmail 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 to our list, you didn't realize. And yeah, you can imagine what like open rate and click through rates were horrible. And I'm assuming a lot of angry emails back. 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 another open rates. 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. We thought they could help us and we just never found a 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 know, you can be getting engaged subscribers at maybe 30, 40 cents, which is super exciting. Well, I think 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, two million people? I mean, if you can do that, then a small percentage of them actually subscribe. Now you just figure out how, how much is it going to cost and how, how do we actually with GDPR and CCPA and all the 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 Hasselcon that he turned into his first, you know, his first whatever 100,000 or even like 50,000 Hassel subscribers. So there's a million different ways to do this. And I think acquisition is smart. I think paid is smart. I think he, I think the way you did it was incredibly smart because it saved you about $200,000. So like, yeah, like fuck 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 masterclass, 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 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 mill 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? 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 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 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 stimulus 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 and something and you or you have access to data that other people don't, you're so much better off going for paid. And like I know one of my good friends is 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 were 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 send through that medium is going to dictate how you should monetize it. I love it. So just thinking about pricing stuff out for advertisers, how did you think through what to charge people? 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 news than as we're charging, we could look at we could find out how much they were charging for a main ad, how many subscribers they had, what we thought their open papers and then calculate the CPM that they were that they were charging and we would just undercut slightly. Sorry. 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 newslet operators. 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 auto GPT, our own blog. We created this article, put ourselves in the top space. I can't remember the name of the others for the life of me, but our Forbes was one of them. We didn't pay for Forbes. We managed to get on Forbes, but we were kind of top spot on Google if you were searching for advertised 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 for advertisers at like a quick rate. That's very smart because just the energy and it's 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 of balance itself out. I'm assuming that's very smart. Yeah. 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 for 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 so I'm 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 because you were pricing them right and and they were happy. They were happy. You weren't like pushing them so that they were like oh we're almost you know positive row ads 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? It was pretty quick. They started advertising with us in February 2024 and then in April we had the first conversation about acquisition. Then we then closed in October so it took a long time to get it done or 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 advertiser to that conversation and and whatever you're comfortable sharing 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. Yeah so we were doing like 40 to 50 thousand dollars a 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 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. Do you are you were you always building to sell was this something that would like 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 prep us you weren't going around like shopping a deal you didn't have like an investment banker go into a whole bunch of like private equity firms saying hey you know this newsletter is 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 it something that you that you were expecting or wanted or were looking for no we weren't expecting we weren't expecting this we certainly weren't expecting anything so early you know this 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 I talk about this moment where we got the hundred thousand 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 mattets I love them 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 everything clean let's try and operate in the right way because you never know who's going to come knocking and then you want to you want to have the foundations right and then you can take advantage of the opportunity exactly you built it right from the ground up exactly but yeah help spot coming in that early um was like such a surprise it was it was such a surprise and it's and it's quite funny really you know I have this idea um I think I got it from Chris Williams and a modern wisdom that in life you have to choose your regrets like every decision that you make if you choose to uh 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 mind stream 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 um 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 yeah I know I get good no I was going to say uh I didn't mean to interrupt I'm sorry I was just thinking 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 uh he said offers obviously for his channel and 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 anyways 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're 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 yeah I was um I was at a co-working space this morning um and I bumped into a friend of mine called James he runs a company called Rupert and we were talking about exactly this I gave him the analogy that if if there was a two offers on the 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 has sold my company to HubSpot and that's going to open and already is opening hundreds of doors to me and the 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 money yeah I believe that I mean I've seen what they've done with with I mean with Sam 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 yeah exactly exactly so you know a lot of people say to me like oh okay you've sold your company you're kind of done now right like well done mate part on the back and I I worked very hard with MindStream I think 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 this acquisition you know the next few years working with HubSpot looking at opportunities that come up coming on your podcast is a prime example you know if I was someone who'd sold a company to someone you'd never heard of you know it's not too exciting 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 chapter and outside of like forget forget the jumping on podcast 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 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 the world I said cool how do I let's let's go 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 yeah 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 that so like it's that that just like the kind of irony of that like push me towards making that deal 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 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 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 two thousand subscribers that was sort of almost enough data for me to build a spreadsheet for the next two years to look at if we grow at this right 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 be hive there 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 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 I know and news letter you know whereas today you can just pay behive fifty bucks a month or whatever and get going so 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 for what what is one thing that people believe to be true about your success story that maybe is not true one thing people believe to be true that isn't true 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 that people know yeah I think is 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 you hear that story a lot of times you know I am working harder than I ever have right now post exit post exit on lifebuilding 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 fact 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 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 when I was when I was young I had quite I had a few relationships with mental 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 think that's the main main one when you're for 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 fuck you're only 14 like that's amazing and then when I was doing gigs when I was 18 and 19 people would be like fuck you're only 18 and now people say to me like fuck you're only 27 you know like it's really been a thing throughout my life but that I think that also you also attract bad players when you're something this young and exciting and up and coming so learning how to see them and avoid them is it's something that was very difficult but it's very I'm very glad I have it now I don't think I'll get burned again 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 can take advantage of that there are a lot of good mentors and 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 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 4550 and you have you know a lot of responsibility um 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's getting uh 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 um 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 it's tough I think I think doing business with friends or family is like the heart that like um high risk high reward potential but also you know you could you can also burn yourself really really badly um 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 it really become our thing rather than my thing you know it's a it's a it's a step that I need in my business but it's also uh a very exciting step to take in our relationship 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 fan media family or close close family and friends um because you solve for trust like you don't have to worry about trusts anymore right you can just be super candid um you 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 it 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 and you can still love this person outside of the business and care about this person but that's what people get fucked up and they then the business shit yeah go into their family shit and then that's just I don't know it's tough it's very tough yeah if you can do it right with my co-founder it's been it's been very interesting and one of the things that I think has um made a 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 and we were 15 go for a walk we go for one run together workout together play video games and just make sure we have that time um to kind of still work on that friendship and then the business relationship is a is a different thing yeah I look I think that's very very smart I think it's smart especially if you're gonna bring like you're you're you're better half like not just a friend from childhood but like you're your partner if you bring that person into the business you do have to find time to shut off and just do like regular human shit and I always talk about business um what would be some of the most toxic entrepreneur advice that you hear a lot that you think people shouldn't listen to the main one is that um to be successful you have to sacrifice everything um this I think is some of the most common business advice like people talk about um like uh house all sprints and uh monk mode and like all this kind of stuff and the thing I realized like as I started building mind stream um 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 um my mental health is better like I have um I have been able to kind of progress horizontally across all the verticals of my life and I genuinely think this is true of 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 um some don't but I think they use this uh 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 are you 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 a damn good entrepreneur um you can you can build another part of your life too and you should I agree with that completely I think that a couple ideas I think the first of all 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 dollar five hundred million dollar exit to be happy so I think that also when you look at your you know entrepreneur heroes that you look up to um 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 most people don't want to be a billionaire I know billionaires I'm sure you do too like they are not they're not all happy people like some of them are old and working very hard still yeah 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 this shit but I think that billionaires is a whole other level of neurodivergence drive something that is not applicable or or wanted by most people I agree 100% when I was when I was uh 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 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 um too many material objects you know some but with very very intentional um with with our spending with our life building and you know in a couple of months a couple of weeks time we're moving to a part of the country we want to live in um we're spending more and more time traveling we're spending more time on on date nights more money on date nights and um you can build like a pretty amazing life with um a bit of money and that is really excites me yeah and that's what I think most people should optimize for I think that that would like listen um 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 life changing and again at the end of the day only one thing really needs to work and then your setup financially so that you can make smart decisions that actually fulfill you as opposed 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 um 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 second you have a little bit of money you realize like what's actually important I wish more people would um learn that before they make the money so I mean you made your 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 fulfill the cross all areas of their life while they're building not just after the exit I think it's very very important um 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 bit of wisdom actually I'll ask where can people connect with you first that's important um 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 so um to connect with me you can head over to LinkedIn that's where I post content every day to to read the mainstream newsletter you can head over to mystream.news my one piece of advice is um plan plan your life like it's the priority be intentional with your days um 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 um make sure of your spending time doing something that it's something you have been intentional about.