Not Boring revenue, CEO Packy Mccormick, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2023.

hello everyone my guest today is packy mccormick he's the founder of not boring a weekly newsletter covering strategy and finance to the stories of companies big and small after starting his career at bank of america merrill lynch he spent six years as the new york city gm and vp experience at breather all right pack you ready to take us to the top let's do it dude breather's like my goat i was in i'm in la and i can't find a quiet place to do interviews i jump on breather i get a room and i'm good to go it's perfect i mean it is it is good for that that was an awesome experience i was there for six years and 500 plus little spaces all around the world it was blessed was that pre or post merrill lynch that was post so i was about to go to business school after finance had already quit finance was ready to go to business school and then found breather on angelus and decided to put business school on hold and apply and see what happened i know there was some shake i was a big fan of julian and i there was a bit of a shake up there did you sort of leave at the same time or what drove you to like leave breather yeah so i actually after julian left was in the office of the ceo with a couple other guys for uh for four months or so then we brought in a professional ceo he brought in kind of a professional exec team so i was trying to get out for most of 2019 tried to quit a couple of times and then uh and then finally escaped in october of last year okay talk to me about the sub stack romance when did it start yeah so it started actually right around the same time that we that we brought on the ceo of breather i had a learning development you know budget decided to take a writing class david perrell's did that whole thing learned how to learn how to launch a sub stack kind of read it on the side for a year uh and what year was this this was april 2019 i started taking the course and then this year um in april again actually when the pandemic hit i had left breathe it was in the middle of starting kind of something in person place based uh and obviously coronavirus put put a hole in that plant i was like you know what i like this writing thing let me see if i just do this full time for a couple months if i can get to a spot where it looks like at some point in the future i might be able to make a living doing this and it grew faster than i expected so now this is the thing i love okay so i want to jump into your content because that's obviously what makes the machine work without great content you're just another piece of you know thing out there so we'll talk about your everyone hates facebook posts some of the other popular posts before we do that i mean can we start macro for a second how on the for people not familiar with sub stack how does it work can people read your stuff for free do they have to subscribe how does it work yes you can uh just subscribe it at notboring.substance.com but it's totally free and ad supported so that's not supported by sub stack but i've been lucky enough to find sponsors for kind of every post for the past few months so that's supporting it and i want to keep it kind of free and open i think it grows better more people can read it it creates more serendipity like there's just a lot of good things that come if i'm you know kind of willing to trade off the security of a paid subscription yeah okay so let me let me understand that for a second i'm looking at your everybody hates facebook post from december 14th you have a great new thing at the top welcome to the 2121 newly is that real time either is that coded or you just manually look that up you know i manually do that and sometimes i forget and so it says welcome to the xxx [Laughter] for the most part i get it okay and it says join you know the big the number here 25 452 folks so you have that many subscribed to your sub stack yeah it's wild i had 500 in april and that many now that's i mean can you look at any serious inflection points i mean did someone mention you did you pay for ads somewhere yeah that's been you know mentions have been the biggest thing the the first big inflection point uh came in june i was working with a buddy kind of helping me on the growth side of it and he was like what if we just put up a landing page on product hunt and send people there and so i'd already had kind of like 1500 people subscribed to the newsletter and so i sent out an email kind of describing why i was launching a landing page and and asked people to kind of go check it out on product time got to number two and i think in a couple of days that drove 2 000 new subscribers and from there you know it's really i haven't i think i've probably tested like a hundred dollars with facebook ads you said two thousand from product in a couple of days yeah wow yeah i mean that's super compelling i mean so so i've got the i've got the post open i mean you got a significant amount of upvotes on the post um and you were number two on the day june 11th 2020 738 upvotes that's great so and so did this growth guy put together all these graphics you used for the product hunt preview yeah we kind of did that together just you know uh really threw the thing together in less than a week talked to a couple of people who had done product on things before and decided to go for it and we really really if we get a hundred upvotes maybe this will get some exposure you know i had a list of like 100 different things i wanted to try product that was one of the things on that list and i think it was good because we had spent the past year writing this newsletter and building up the community so by the time i hit go on product hunt people were willing to like but then also comment i think really helps the algorithm there and so between the two of those things it just kind of rocketed to the top and then it got i think top five for the week so then it goes out in their email again so it just was just like you know more than doubled the number of subscribers in a week and kind of from there you know it's just hit escape velocity where it's like wait sorry you had 15 pre-product hunt and then after seven days after product hunt you were it didn't double the 15k it doubled the 2k sorry it was a 1500 and it got me to like 3 500. oh wow okay okay so that was a big and that was a huge inflection point are there any other inflection points like that you added more than 2 000 new emails in a week so this past week uh was the first time i think since then where i've gotten more than 2000 this was actually the best week ever wow and it was a couple of different things like andrew wilkinson shared it patrick o'shaughnessy shared it um and one other you know one or two other people with big followings shared the api posts that i wrote and so that really really helps you know when it's people that that other people trust saying i really like reading this or that particular essay that helps more than anything else and my focus has really been away from growth and fully on the content at this point you know those shares sometimes they start to write amazing content they happen naturally but a lot of this is sort of like social game theory if you sort of mention certain people the right way but it's still analysis and it's still valuable they're more likely to share it i mean do you think about that strategically when you're writing it's in that is that's evolved in a pretty big way in the beginning like absolutely because in the beginning the newsletter was like you know five links and i would say you know i've mentioned this person in the link and this person would maybe i get a like from one of those people i've stopped doing that quite as much i think sometimes organically it happens like i wrote about stripe and then everybody at stripe reads the piece or you write about you know xyz company that's big enough that it can have an impact but small enough that they're not being written about every day like you know people within facebook weren't sharing my facebook post most likely uh nearly as much as somebody at a stripe or shopify or something else would share if i wrote about uh their company so so so i so that's just natural sharing so nothing else has added that many new subs in a week besides product hunt in this past week in december yeah so this is this guys it's the hustle it's the grind it's a great it's about you know it's been about writing 5 000 plus words every monday and many thursdays so it's just it's that i think um you know at a certain point people probably just feel bad that i'm spending all this time writing it like i'll throw this kid a share but you know it's it's been it's it's cool to see that that has been so aligned that i don't have to worry on the worry about really growth hacky stuff versus just writing the content because that's what i like doing i want to jump into that writing process a lot of people just struggle with writing it sounds like you taught yourself it wasn't something you were born with you know you...