Lessons - From $1K Investment to Multi-Million Dollar AI Media Exit | Adam Biddlecombe - Mindstream Founder

In this lessons episode, discover how bias for action and intentionality fueled the rapid rise of a newsletter in a saturated AI content market. Learn why building something meaningful starts with small, consistent wins, understand how differentiating through voice and human touch creates standout content and explore how humble goals and focused execution turned early traction into a funded media business. What are your thoughts on the future of your project? 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, advice that you got, what were some of the, because you've gone through sales jobs, Amazon, FBA, building a, building a band and being a creator before, what were some of the most important ideas that you've learned up to this point in your career? I know you're still young, but what were some of the most important business ideas that helped you make mindstream successful? I think the core of it is just having a bias for action. I think the majority of people today are consumers, and the load of people who think they're being productive listening to loads of business podcasts. And the year before I started mindstream, like 2023, 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 sell myself as 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 a lie at the core of it, you know what I mean? So I set myself the challenge that year of becoming the person who continues to sell itself but has something that's really exciting to sell. So having that bias for action is something I'm very, very grateful to have to have it kind of like in my core. And it's been there all my life, 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. And then also the thing I'm really like my word of the year of 2025 is intention. Like I'm working quite hard to analyze all aspects of my life and optimize and really work on life building. And whenever I like discuss it, it always comes down to like being intentional. That's how I get happiness and success out of something. And to be intentional, you have to have like a big, you have to have a big picture. I don't think you can be intentional of you're really in the weeds. You just end up being reactive. So being able to kind of step out, analyze a situation, know the end goal you're going towards and then make intentional decisions that will help you get there. I think those having those two things really is kind of the core of what you need to go out and be successful in something. Yeah, I think that's very wise. I think that even without intention, her mostly speaks about this a lot, how entrepreneurs sometimes last in this cycle their entire life about starting something and getting excited about it. Then the hardship happens and then you get kind of disenchanted with it. Then you start the next thing and then you get the motivation to start it and then hardship happens and then you move on to the next thing. And I think it's because you don't have that big picture or that North star and you and you aren't intentional 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'd have a vision bigger than the city thing that's bound to happen on the way to building the impressive incredible amazing thing. It's so, so, so important. I know that when you started Mindstream, it didn't like blow up right away. It took a second. So early days of sending that newsletter. Actually, before we even talk about early days of sending the newsletter, what made you want to focus on AI content? What was like, what was the signal in the market that that was a good idea? So this is May 24th of May 2023 that we sat down and when we sat down to decide on what we're going to start, we didn't know it was going to be a newsletter and we didn't know it was going to be AI. We made that decision in the space of two or three hours. So I have to think about what I was influenced by at that time. And most of my, like I said earlier, most of my time at work was spent outbounding on LinkedIn. That's a little bit of a lie. Most of my time at work was spent scrolling through LinkedIn, right? You know, and maybe of course, maybe a little bit of outbound. And obviously, there's an algorithmic effect to someone's LinkedIn feed, but mine became all about AI. And I was following 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 a hundred Chatchy Pity prompts and get like thousands of emails overnight. So it was the obvious thing to go for at the time. That's not the, that's not enough, I don't think. So when me and Matt sat down and talking about it, I said, I think AI is the thing. Do you, as the 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, there's something to be said for, like, writing a trend. I think that's, I think that's a, it's smart, but and trends are also busy. So that means that there was probably a whole bunch of other people writing 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. 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 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 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 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's 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 differentiated from day one. Yes, Martin, just 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 by use. 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, 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. You realize that it's a kind of like a crowded competitive space. You're not getting traction. And some people throw in the towel very quickly. I think that if you look at like even stats for podcasters, if you've done more than 10 podcasts, I'm pretty sure it's something ridiculous. Like you're in the top 1% of podcasters just by releasing 10 plus episodes. So what made you continue? So we had, we had pretty humble goals at the start. We both invested 500 pounds to get it started. And that 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 sales and copywriting jobs? And we weren't earning a lot of money here in the UK at the time. So it was just about these tiny building blocks. And my day used to be wake up at 6am, go to the gym, come home, write a piece of content for LinkedIn. 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, 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 comments to all these people, kinds 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 they'd match your investment into their boosts program, which is like a cross paid cross collaboration across newsletters. So we then dropped in two and a half thousand, which was the maximum. So we got 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 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 this CPM, a charge did this CPM for my LinkedIn. And you can just model it out from there. And with this model, we were able to secure some investment. So we had two and a half thousand subscribers. We'd made like maybe five, six hundred pounds at this point. And I secured a forty thousand pound investment for a 10 percent 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? Oh, 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. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.