Not Boring Company Profile (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 really focused on you bought perel stuff before we do that though i want to talk economics for a second so just to be clear we're never going to see you on the sub stack top grossing list because you're free you'll never see me on that list also because today they rolled out an update there's no more leaderboarding i just saw that didn't get and now now it's gone in prep for this i'm going where where i know there's a leaderboard where the hell's the leaderboard they i wonder why they took it away they got scared i was climbing up the ranks with an unsupported model which they don't support and they had to take the leaderboard so let me i mean let me ask a very real question they write some code that allows them to strip out this on juno post somehow they can tell it's an ad that you organically wrote into the post i mean do you have any way to pull these leads out and put them in a mailchimp and keep going uh for sure yeah you do they've been good about that from from day one so i can download all of my emails it's really not that they're i've spoken to people there they're not anti ads necessarily but they're just really focused on building a subscription product yeah and so i don't think they're going to be building an ad network any time soon which is fine by me but um you know certainly uh it would be tough if they if they did that last second nothing they've done so far would suggest that they would just rip it out so you do one again i'm looking at this last one you do one ad per post so one ad one sponsor per week basically occasionally i'll do one kind of post that's a sponsor but for the most part i do either at the top kind of sponsor on monday or thursday or tomorrow i have a deep dive coming where a company will pay me to do kind of full analysis on the company which i think is fascinating in its own right because i thought that everyone was going to unsubscribe when i did the first one of those and people actually loved it because i'm writing about companies that i would actually use myself i actually find interesting all of that and so the fact that these companies are willing to pay me to do an analysis wait how much would a company pay you to analyze their own business and have you not like make it a mushy gushy article like you actually be critical yeah i mean my style is generally not super critical so i think that works actually like i again would only write about companies that i'm optimistic about and the way that my brain works i'm terrible at seeing the downsides and i can see the like way bigger vision than even maybe the company has easily and so like that's kind of my writing style anyway so people aren't like well that's weird packy's normally very bearish and then he gets paid and he's super positive yeah my filter is you know if i'm really optimistic about a company anyway like i wrote about a company called main street which just gives companies free money by finding grants the government owes them like i'm super excited about that because one it's an amazing thing for companies but then two i think the stuff that they're doing is actually like building a really interesting company or another one called pipeline these are companies that i just feel psyched that i can even you know get a conversation in with the founder and like really dig in and learn the business and so the fact that you know it's a sponsored thing it really feels like a bit of a win-win so i mean we have a ton of sas entrepreneurs with a bunch of funding listening right now i mean what should they expect to pay you for something like that are we talking like five grand 10 grand more yeah 10 grand in january kind of it scales scales linearly with the audience is how i'm thinking about it now interesting okay so that's sort of like a post for you to sort of look at someone's business but a company like that just wants a placement like juno what would you charge them typically i think in january the rates are going to be about 4 000 for a monday and uh 2 500 for a thursday interesting you know they go out to the same amount of people but the thursdays typically are just like the real media deep dives and so they get shared a bit more so like you know the 26 thousand person list the past few posts have gotten 50 000 plus views just the past few mondays because they just kind of take off a little bit at this point which is great and so when a sponsor says hello 4k that's like right on the edge of my budget what do i get for that you say well it's probably gonna get 50 000 views and it's going to get x amount of what clicks is that what you say we don't even typically go that far sub stack has pretty crap metrics to be honest so i tell people that and i think there is you know most i've been lucky that most of my sponsors read the newsletter and so they kind of understand what the content is like and they understand what the audience is like and all of that and so it's really kind of a mix between brand and direct response and there's obviously a rackable link in each one of them but a lot of it is really you know a brand thing as well we've got four minutes left we have to go to writing stuff i mean this is 5 000 words every monday i mean i remember when i wrote my book and my publisher goes okay ready right i rented an airbnb in the middle of nowhere and i was like i'll just write i sat down i couldn't write for an hour straight how do you write 5 000 words every monday it happens every single week where i hit send on monday i'm like i'm never going to do that to myself again this week i'm going to get out of it and i'm going to pick my topic on tuesday and you know then i'll just like never work it out over the week never works it's always thursday afternoon if i'm lucky friday or saturday morning uh if i'm unlucky that i figure out what is kind of interesting that week that combines but being interesting to me and something that kind of people are talking about um so there's really no you know no real process there something at some point will hit me i'll sit there i'll bang my head against the wall and then once i figure out what i'm going to write about i try to read the best things that have been written on the company if it's a public company then i'll dive into their kind of recent earnings reports listen to their their call because that typically gives kind of a sense for what the company thinks is important and what investors think is important um i will listen to podcasts with the founders or people talking about the company and just really for like a day or so immerse myself in it i always tell myself i'm going to do an outline i rarely get past kind of the first section of the outline and then i just dive in and start start writing mother and wife at it for me because they're saints and we go from there and so what do you i'm curious what you see long term here right do you you know audience if you argue that social capital is a precursor to financial capital right you're setting ourselves up beautifully to do something in the future but like what is that do you have a gut sense of what it could be or you're just like trust the process trust the process i mean i was i was a bank of america for four years i was a breather for six years it feels really nice just to have kind of this this optionality and like you said you know every week i get to put my thinking out there if there's a time in the future where i want to go get a job i can hand the company you know 100 200 300 000 words of like here's how i i think so i think it's an interesting uh interesting type of funnel thing for that process but for right now if i can make a good living on this i get to have a syndicate on the side that lets me scratch kind of the early stage investing itch getting deeper into the public markets this is kind of my dream job right now so i don't know if i'm gonna change too much two quick questions wrapping up the monetization strategy on just the newsletter so your first full year is coming to a close which is great for anyone thinking about getting started in january like a new year's goal you're a great example are you comfortable sharing how much revenue you did your first year writing i am if i knew the number i've been i've been uh monetizing since call late august early september okay uh so we kind of it'll be three months of monetization and i would imagine it's somewhere around 50 000 or so so it's a good it's a good run rate that's great yeah and who knows what you'll do with a full year performance in 2021 talk to me quick last minute on the syndicate side of things what's the size of the syndicate how many lps yeah there's about 500 lps in the syndicate geez louise it's i mean to your point right if you build an audience and it's related i think if i wrote about politics and then tried to start a syndicate it might be a different thing but because every week i'm writing about how i think about companies i think people are like oh okay cool i know that i can kind of back this guy review the materials all of that myself still but i know that i trust the way that he thinks about the way the companies work and so this is at least a good way for me to look at deals that i think i might be interested in and how much total capital in that syndicate what's that how much capital is in the kit yeah so the way this indicate works is it's committed on each deal um and so you know i'll bring a deal get an allocation people can say yes or no so we've done this is our sixth deal tomorrow we're launching our seventh deal oh great yeah so it's been super fun how much capital deployed in the first six deals about a hundred thousand each a little bit more oh great now it's 200 the next one's two up 250 so they're getting a little bit bigger as the lp base you're doing your own your own way or through angel list evangelist yeah good stuff man dude what have i not asked about i think this is this is it i mean my life right now is writing and running the syndicate and could not be enjoying it more unbelievable and so just to be clear if a bigger media brand uh came to you i'm gonna actually let's just use sam parr we wanna hustle he came to you and said listen i wanna write a million dollar check to just buy your whole thing come in and like lead our content would you take the deal no just you love the freedom right now the freedom and you know maybe at some point it stagnates and i the revenue doesn't keep going up and the audience size doesn't keep going up the fact that i get to do like to do this on my own schedule and it's 60 70 hours a week it's a ton of work but the fact that it's my own thing like i'm even hesitant to hire anybody because it just it's kind of freedom limiting so i'm sure i will and i'll need to figure out how to scale at some point but for right now it's in a pretty good spot and i'm happy with it folks packy mccormick live from a bit his basement started at merrell lynch then debris their launch this year started teaching myself writing in june 2020 put up a landing page on product doubled his list on sub stack now with well over 24 25 000 subs doing 10 000 ish per week in revenue as it combined between company breakdowns and also sponsor revenue also has a great syndicate on the side but most importantly he has freedom lots of freedom he loves what he's doing packy thanks for taking us to the top nathan this is a lot of fun one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan laca dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know 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