How to Become a Marketing Master (Noah Kagan, Appsumo & Million Dollar Weekend)

Alex: What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founder’s Journal and the fourth episode of Founder’s Journal rebooted. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Each week I'm going to curate a world-class entrepreneur and interview them about their one superpower, the one thing that stacks the deck in their favor as they build great businesses. And today's guest is my good friend and serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan. Noah is the founder and CEO of AppSumo, an $80 million business that shares deals on software. He was an early employee at Facebook, ran marketing at Mint.com, and has built up an audience of more than 1 million YouTube and email subscribers through his approachable but high-value content on entrepreneurship.

Most recently, he became a New York Times bestseller for his book, Million Dollar Weekend, which as the name implies, helps you come up with, launch, and monetize a business in just a few days. And this episode we talk about Noah's one thing, which is finding customers through organic marketing. We talk about the Growth Machine, which is Noah's repeatable marketing playbook he has used for every one of his businesses. We talk about how he marketed his way to the New York Times bestseller list. And finally, I have him rip apart my marketing strategy for my copywriting subscription business, Storyarb, and get his thoughts. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Noah Kagan. 

Okay, chapter eight of Million Dollar Weekend is all about marketing, and you basically ran the same playbook at all of your companies, your YouTube channel, your book, like everything. Can you break down what the Growth Machine is, what the steps are, and then after that, the rest of the episode is gonna be about actually applying it. 

Noah Kagan: Good to see you. Shout out to Founder’s Journal. Shout out Morning Brew. Shout out AppSumo.com. Shout out to everyone listenening. Shout out to our moms for making us. It is a reminder that, you know, we're on a planet and we're trying to make the best use of our time. And so the Growth Machine and what it applies to Storyarb, which I definitely think we should go into and how it applies to AppSumo or Million Dollar Weekend and my YouTube channel. 

Number one, it's like, have you made something people already want? I think that's generally the problem people miss out on when they think they have marketing problems. Like, how do I market or promote this better? I'm like, you don’t; no one wants it. That's really the core issue. And then that's a whole longer discussion. How do we find things that people are excited to give us money or attention for? Now in terms of the Growth Machine or the playbook that I pretty much just used over and over, it works, you know, worked at Mint and it's worked all these other times. Number one, have a very clear goal. So for Storyarb, it could be a revenue goal. For myself, for Noah Kagan, the current number one goal that we've focused on for all my personal stuff is my email list. It's my active email subscribers. So not the amount of people there, just the people who are opening or clicking or replying. And so this year it's 150,000. So that is our number one goal for growing the email list. And the reason I picked that is the past three years it's been my YouTube channel. It's like, how do I grow my YouTube channel? And when I launched Million Dollar Weekend, I'm gonna say the book's title like seven more times, people. So just get ready. I think we all need to love ourselves and love our businesses more. And then all this marketing and promotion stuff is a lot more fun and enjoyable.

So last years I've been doing YouTube. When I launched the book, almost no views and no sales from my YouTube channel. And I was like, huh. So I've created this content and spent millions of dollars literally making it. And when I wanted to actually have the audience do something specific, like I was at the mercy of YouTube. So it was a good reminder, like let's go back to the email list. Now if you have a clear goal. So mine is 150,000 active subscribers this year. Now part of the machine and part of this playbook is how do you find, what are the things that are gonna help you grow that? And so there's not, the science is being systematic of I'm gonna try X, Y, and Z. So for my email list it's we're gonna try YouTube content, we're gonna try Twitter, LinkedIn threads, Meta, blog or Threads, Instagram, TikTok. So we're trying all these things and what you're looking for is, where do you have an advantage in, and ultimately, what's driving the result to your core goal?

And so what we noticed, 'cause you can't do all these things great. And you have to find out what are you gonna be number one in the world at? And so I found that the YouTube stuff I'm actually gonna be pulling back on and really kind of creating stories. Stories specifically through Twitter seem to be doing the most dramatically well. And so when you do the Growth Machine is you have a clear goal. You try out different channels or strategies with expectation. So hey, we wanna hit a goal. So if you know your goal, you can work backward and say, I wanna get a thousand emails this month. And you say, hey, I'm 500 from TikTok and 500 from here and 10 from here and 50 from here. And after some period of time you can then double check that and see what's driving those results.

And we noticed with Twitter, we were doing 30 tweets a month and we noticed kind of two tweets doing exceptionally well. Number one, these story tweets. So literally just on Saturdays I would do a podcast that would turn into an email which would turn into a Twitter thread. And these are getting like half a million to a million views. 

Alex: What are the stories about? 

Noah: So I like using frameworks and I can talk about that. I recommend that for how people should do their business in marketing. But the stories have been what I learned working for Zuckerberg. It's funny, me and you kind of put out the same tweet at the same time around, here's all the tools I use to run AppSumo.com. I put out stories like brutally honest relationship advice; that one crushed, that was a million view one. We do end up posting them on other channels. But what I'm trying to say is like you do different strategies, find the one that works, and then how do you really double down on it? Because some people have tremendous success with TikTok. One, I hate the platform, I don't use it ever. So it's hard for me to wanna win there. And two, the stuff we've done hasn't done exceptionally well either. So you have to be mindful of that. But on Twitter it's like wow, we're getting these great results and it's driving to email lists. 

So now that you understand the channel that's getting you the results for your business goal, how do you double down on it? And so out of the 30 tweets we're doing a month, literally it's that tweet which is on Saturdays and a tweet on Wednesdays, which is tomorrow's email on Thursday: Here's this insane thing you're gonna learn. Go to my newsletter, noahkagan.com if you wanna find out about it. And that has crushed. And the hard discipline that it takes in the Growth Machine is like having a goal, working backward from your goal, trying things out to see what makes a difference. Finding the one that works 'cause there is something that works. And then literally 2, 3, 4, 10, a hundred x downing. So more of my content now is it's Twitter based stories, instead of once a week. Maybe we can go twice or three times a week. That's worked for all these different systems. 

Alex: So two questions. One is, you talk about all these strategies like in your initial experimentation list, right? So you have YouTube, you have your podcast, you have all these social platforms. One is like, how do you decide how many of these things to spend time on? Because they all take time and work. And so it's probably not possible to do everything in your experimentation list. And then the second is, how long do you give the experiments before you start thinking about doubling down on the top two that actually work?

Noah: I'm trying to think of good examples 'cause it really depends. Like I've been, I think you have to think of this business stuff as like, it has, it takes patience and time. Just like a child takes time to grow. So you know, I've been doing content for 20 plus years, YouTube specifically, and this stuff maybe four years, right? So you build up a team. But if people are starting out, I would probably try to pick the platform you're spending the most time on. I watch, no joke, maybe 10 to 15 hours a week of YouTube. Which I think is abnormal. I think that's not normal for most people. But I watch just a lot of it. And so I have a pretty good understanding. Doesn't mean, just 'cause you eat food doesn't mean you're a good cook, but it's the platform I enjoy. So what I would recommend for most people, when you're doing your Growth Machine for let's just say an e-commerce business, I would try to have less tests going, 'cause what happens is people are like, I tried, it didn't work. It's like, well, lemme see what you tried. And they put, I see a video. Like if they're trying to YouTube, I see what they did. I'm like, that sucks. So I think you have to figure out maybe less channels but feel like, hey, I'm really gonna give this an ample test. So like I did ads and I really tried it and it did not work. I did affiliates, really tried it , it did not work. And I don't know if there's a binary number, but I definitely think within 30 days you can have clear indicators whether ads or affiliate or PR or social or referrals, whatever it is, are working.

So then in terms of channels, yeah, I would have less of them, especially if you're early, most people and we can even, we'll get into Storyarb later. They try a lot of, they do a lot of dabbling and there is a process of how you can dabble in intentionally. But it's really seeing, of these dabbles, for Storyarb, I looked at your website, my bet is that less than 20% of your customers if at all have come from your website. 

Alex: The vast majority haven’t.

Noah: Yeah, almost none. Because your website's crap. And I say that with love. That's how I know, because I go to your website, I'm like, you know, Alex is super savvy and he is not optimizing website, so he's probably getting it through referrals or he is getting it through DMs that are asking people to posts to say, DM me or be interested or referrals. And so the whole point is as you're doing things, the real goal is not to have a bunch of experiments going on, it's to find the actions that are repeatable and expandable. 

Alex: Yep. I love that. And I'm extra excited now to dig into Storyarb stuff. So I just want to basically put a container around this, because when I was reading through this chapter in your book, I think you laid it out so well, where basically what you just described answers five questions and you've kind of always talked about answering these five questions, right? It's like, what is your one goal for this year? And you specifically talk about how it's so important to have a specific goal. So it's not just how many customers, it's how many customers by when, then second is, who exactly is your customer and where can you find them? Third is, what is one marketing activity you can double down on? Fourth is how can you delight your first hundred customers? And fifth is, if you had to double your business with no money in 30 days, what would you do? And it was awesome 'cause like you went through this example of this guy, I don't know how you know this guy, the guy who has the rock climbing business that has the glasses that flip. 

Noah: Belay shades.

Alex: But to me, what stood out about this is, right, so basically this guy Daniel started with having a specific goal for the number of shades that he wanted to sell. And he got to that goal by knowing how much profit he wanted to have a month in his Belay shades business so that he could go full time on this thing. And so he had to sell 166 glasses per month. And then basically the way you broke it down, which is what he did, is you have a table, that table has all of the marketing channels that you want to test, and then your guess of how many sales you're gonna drive from those channels. But the reality is you're gonna be wrong with these guesses. But you need to have some thought process to know that you're doing enough things to give yourself a fighting chance. Because then you played it out in the chapter. Basically what it turned out as is, you know, he had estimated that it was gonna be pretty spread across personal network, a Facebook group, wholesale, eBay, et cetera. But wholesale ended up being this massive channel for him where he got like 250 orders and it, you know, far surpassed his goals. And so I think that's a huge thing is like, any projections in life, you're gonna be wrong, but you need to do it in order to know that you're being thoughtful about marketing your business. 

Noah: Yeah, I mean let's even take the book. I had a goal, which was a thousand reviews when it came out. And then after I hit that goal I said, all right, I wanna have 25,000 sales. So I had to work backward. And that's really what you're doing is, what's your goal? When do you want it by, who is it for? And as you said, what's the thing you can keep doing more and more to make sure those people are happy and then potentially be creative to expand it. And with AppSumo, with the book, with everything, after you do something, do a debrief. So, hey, we did this episode, like even a podcast episode. Hey, we did this episode with Noah, here's what we liked about him, here's what we didn't like about him. Here's what we're gonna change. And if you keep doing that, you're gonna keep getting better each and every week. 

So we did this, you know, massive book launch in January, did a debrief, and it was kind of pretty much two things drove a lot of the sales, right? It was like my stuff, so Noah and AppSumo, and then really getting on a few shows. So I was like, hmm, this whole book launch thing sold a lot of books. Let's do another book launch and then another book launch and then another book launch. And then within the book launch we'll just do the same things that did those sales and improve what we've learned from.

So within my own audience it was selling 10 books per person. It was like, you get a few things and it was like, that was good for me and for them. Versus I think when people buy a hundred books, it's too many. It's like, whatcha you gonna do with a hundred books? 

Alex: So a lot of people actually, so a lot of people actually bought 10 books from you? 

Noah: Yeah. So we, you know, one of the things I've, I think I do relatively well is go copy success. I think I do an exceptional job of copying success. I do many things very poorly and many things I'm working on, you know, I'm trying to be a good husband. I'm working on, I'm excited to be a good father. And with copying success around that, we went and studied every single major book launch that most people are familiar with, and the incentives. So if you go Google, like Tim Ferriss book bundle, James Clear book bundle, I dunno, whoever Tiago Forte book bundle. And then we put 'em in a spreadsheet and then we try to like kind of distill down to ours. And then we came up with ours and then we went to our customers. So we have a launch team on Slack, said, here's what we're thinking. We sent them the spreadsheet with ours and the offerings, then they ripped it apart. And then based on what we thought would be also exciting for us to create, it led us to do, it was 1, 2, 10, and then we had about three or four of 'em at a thousand. And at the thousand ones, I didn't sell any of them. I had a lot of people apply. I just didn't wanna do it. 

Alex: What do you even offer at a thousand? 

Noah: I had some crazy ones. One of them was I'd fly you first class anywhere in the world and we would spend a week, 48 hours together just doing insane stuff and working on your business. The other one was, I would meet with you every week or every month for the year. Which is like, it's a big commitment and a lot of people applied, which is amazing. It just, there wasn't the right fit for me to want to commit to that. And also giving someone a thousand books if they're not gonna give it to people to read doesn't actually help me. I wanted that to better align. So maybe I would change those. But I think potentially they were good anchoring to see like, oh wow, there's like a 1,500 or 3,000 book option. 

Alex: And did you approach your book launch in the same way that you just described with the Growth Machine from your book? Like as in, you set this goal, you had this table of all these experiments, you did these experiments, and then you focused on the few things that actually worked. 

Noah: Yeah, we had like, I think the original idea list was around 10, and then we cut down to five. Yeah, Noah Kagan's email list. So all this Noah Kagan stuff, big YouTube, a big YouTube launch for me, book buys. So like getting Morning Brew to buy a bunch, AppSumo to do a huge promotion, a massive podcast tour. It's kind of a standard playbook. A pre-launch promotion. So like going to all these people that are, you know, Alex Lieberman, you know, 10 years ago. We considered going, doing like a book tour.

Alex: Why do you say no to a book tour? I'm curious. 'Cause that's always a common one for authors. 

Noah: It depends. It just felt like to fly somewhere in the intimacy for 30 people. Like I could spend that same time creating content or going on another show to potentially have more books sold like, you know, books sold per hour. It just felt like a higher leverage in terms of the time. I did like meeting some people. I had one if you bought 10 of the books. We did have a customer meetup in Austin and we ended up, we had 69 of those available. And so those sold out and that was very popular. So in our next book launch, I'll be doing that again. 

Alex: Got it. And what ended up actually being the most effective? So you did these 10 things, what were, you said there were two that were most effective?

Noah: Very few, very few things. So number one, my email list. 

Alex: How many people sold do you think that drove? 

Noah: Man, that's tough. It's tough to say. Probably in the range 3,000 to 5,000. Which is, here's the thing, dude, we sell internet stuff. No one buys books. I mean, 

Alex: But also you're talking about 150,000 active emails. Like, you know, you're talking about basically more than 2% of your active people buying your book, which is a very solid amount. 

Noah: It is good and I appreciate everyone, but it's like there's other ways…books are not, if you're trying to make money on a book, it's not the way; you do it to build your brand. To sell other things. I don't really have, I don't have more courses or things I'm selling. I wanted to write something I wanted, I did want some status and I did want it to be a promotion for AppSumo and I thought it would help people. I thought people could, you know, Noah 20 years ago would have a chance to copy me. And I think that's cool for a lot of people out there. 

Alex: By the way, what I also think is cool about it, just I wanna point out is like, again, like I've, I've built a business but I also feel like actually today more than ever before, I feel like there's more for me to learn today than I ever thought. And I think in some ways, like I, and I mean this wholeheartedly, 'cause I told you before we started recording, I've read the book twice. I think what's cool about the book, and I'm not sure exactly how you were able to do this, is I think it's as valuable for me today as it was when I started the Brew in 2015. And I'm not sure why, but it is. 

Noah: Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting 'cause a lot of people I think are excited about the Growth Machine and marketing, but I think people miss out that I've spent over, give or take over 10 years working on the book. And what I mean by that is, I put out an article in 2011 that went viral, then I put out a course called Monthly One K that helped over 10,000 people. And then I hired the best writer, one of the best business writers in the world to spend three years with me crafting this material. And then we had a thousand person launch team that went over every single word of the book to make sure it really helped them. And so when we finally got a product where I had to go promote and get people to find out about it, it was a lot easier knowing that there was demand for what we had.

Now in terms of promoting it. We had a launch team. This is kind of like, I think you've done a really good job with this. Like how do you build up a group of people that are excited about what's going on? You know, like, think about like Supreme, I don't dunno if these are still cool, like no one does Supreme anymore, but like, you know, whatever brand you're kind of like excited about, like Free Fly clothes, I like those guys. Or I like Marine Layer. And so get your customers in the kitchen with you. And so we had this thousand person launch team. 

Alex: How do you put together that team? 

Noah: Dude, that was a grind. Lemme just put this out there. Every cliche you hear is true. There's a reason it's a cliche. So embrace it. Like when people say do things that don't scale, like literally that's the secret. I wanted a thousand reviews for my book. So I was like, well, lemme just get a thousand people on a spreadsheet. And I'll tell you the thing that worked; the surprising thing that was interesting that worked well is I posted on Twitter, hey, I'm building a launch team, go to my newsletter to join. And then as I wrote that, I deleted it and I was like, no, no, no, I have a launch team, I'm starting a launch team if anyone's interested just DM me and I manually just DMd everyone back. 

Alex: There's such a good insight in that. And I think you mentioned this when you were talking through it on your podcast, but you just decreased as much friction as humanly possible. 

Noah: Yeah. And as you do it, you know, it's nice if you think about business in its simplest form. You're interacting and helping another person. Like either you're putting out Morning Brew and people are enjoying great content or you know, we have deals on AppSumo and people get deals on their software. It's like, you're helping people. And so I think you can embrace the one-on-one communication as much as…yes, over time you can automate, but I think people prematurely automate way too often. 

So in terms of promotion launch, team crushed, I did do other things to grow the launch team. So I would send an email and I would ask like, hey, does anyone want me to come speak in their city? Please fill out this Google form. Whoever filled out that form to me is probably someone that might be interested in my book. So I then put all of them in an email and said, hey, you seem like you're interested in me speaking at your city. Do you wanna pre-order my book and join our launch team? So a lot of it, you know, going back to old school marketing, it's looking for permission, what Seth Godin’s talked about. Like people were raising their hands saying they're interested, or open to it versus kind of forcing it down someone.

So that worked super well. The incentives worked well. We did, you know, talk about experiments. We sent a book to Sam Parr or Anthony Pompano and they posted it before the launch. And that wasn't something we were planning on doing, but they posted it and it got like a hundred thousand views. 

Alex: Were you happy about that or no?

Noah: Yeah, I was surprised. You know, I was thinking, I've been thinking more and more how all of our failures or all these limitations we have really bring out a lot of the creativity when you're like, oh, everyone quit and I had to do something else. And that other thing actually worked. And so how do we all embrace that more, maybe these failures more or maybe the lack of things more or that things aren't working out more. And you know, we tried it. I think it wasn't like we're gonna do this thing where everyone's gonna tweet about it, but once we saw that it's kinda the Growth Machine that's working. People are responding to it. And in marketing what I've always aimed for is, depending on who your customer is, you want them to feel like they're in an echo chamber. They're like, dude, I see you everywhere. It's like, no, I see you everywhere, not everybody else. And so then we sent it out very strategically based on people who've posted about books or have audiences of entrepreneurship, real estate, or finance. 

Alex: By the way, that's such a true thing is just like, and by the way, this is what we're thinking about with Storyarb, and and I'll share one of the ideas of how we're gonna do it, but this idea of basically feeling like you are everywhere for the person that matters to you or your business is everything. And I think about it, like when your book came out, you were everywhere. When Nick Gray went to Japan for his date, he was everywhere. With Beehiiv, Tyler Denk and Beehiiv are everywhere. And I think being able to manufacture that everywhereness is such an incredible ninja skill.

Noah: It is. I think it's part of just being targeted. And some of the times, one, I think the still most number one underrated marketing strategies is prefluencers. So what that means is go to hitting up someone like you and me. Now, you know, I do think we respond to people, but we have families and we're busier and it's a little harder to get through, but there are people that are just getting started. Like we created an algorithm to look for these people automatically so that we can find them through AppSumo and they become affiliates for promoting AppSumo.

Alex: So smart. 

Noah: And for other people out there, whether you're doing pottery, whether you're doing journals, whether you're doing software, whether you're doing services, there are prefluencers out here are just getting started. You can just go search on any platform and they will respond to your DM and they don't have a rate sheet, meaning that they don't have, like, they're not full market expense yet. And it's something I literally talk about in the book. It's something we still have a lot of success with at AppSumo and as well as through my own promotion. So that did work well. I would say I did a hundred plus podcasts. The reality, even though it was good to practice on all of them, only three, I would say three or four really moved the needle. 

Alex: Which ones? 

Noah: So, you know, Founder’s Journal number one, this one. 

Alex: Which ones actually drove it?

Noah: Tim Ferriss, number one. Tim Ferriss, Tim's like one of the GOATs of this. Ali Abdaal. Ali Abdaal, he put out a video about the book that's almost at a million views. 

Alex: Wow. His audience loves him. 

Noah: They love him. I love Ali Abdaal. I'm part of the audience. Yeah. Lewis Howes. 

Alex: Yep. You're talking about audiences, you know, that have millions of people who've, not just millions of people, but like these are also creators who have built deep trust with their audience for the last like, you know, 10 to 15 years. 

Noah: And I mean, I think for someone listening, they're like, okay, that's for you. How does that apply to me? And so I think there's a few things to consider here. So number one, how are you finding the next Noah Kagan or the next Alex Lieberman? They're out there, there's some woman or man out there that is gonna do cool things and you could just be around them or help them today. Like Tim Ferriss, I helped him in his original book in 2007. Lewis Howes I promoted his LinkedIn, how to do his LinkedIn course in 2012. Ali Abdaal I interviewed on his podcast five or six years ago. So it was all before the amount of attention they have today. And so I do think that's available to everyone. Number two, if you are going on these kinda shows, how are you preparing? I think very few people are actually preparing, which is fine, but like for Tim's, we spent two months creating, like, what's his most popular questions? Like how do I practice these questions on other shows? How do I find out what's gonna be unique? So when I talk about it, people are gonna then be like, damn, that was a really good show. So it was less a surprise. So go practice these things, you know, like I hired two speaking coaches, I had two sessions with these two different speaking coaches that really helped me craft how I talk about the book.

Alex: Do you think that was worth the money, outta curiosity? 

Noah: One of them, I just had to buy her lunch twice. The other one we just had one session. So is it worth the money? Yeah, I would've paid for it. So I would say the practice and the preparation made those more effective. But I, you know, I went on a hundred plus shows and it was so cool to be on a lot of these shows, but I think it's moving in the future, you know, it's probably just being more strategic. Which shows do you think will move the needle? And it, it was hard to know that; I asked people which ones did, and it was still cool to be on a lot of shows to practice. 

Alex: Totally. I think to to your point, and maybe the best way to talk through this is to just work through Storyarb. But I think a lot of people will be listening to this and will be like, they'll be like, Noah, I'm listening. I understand the method of how you do growth, and I understand how you did it for your book, but everything you listed out related to your book was based on having a massive audience or relationships that you've built up for 15 years. If it's someone who literally is reading your book, so it's like a first time entrepreneur, where do they go if they want to get customers, but social is not accessible to them?

Noah: I think a great example is, you know, I think you've heard me talk, but Jay Yang, he's 17, he doesn't have a huge following. He's in high school, but he contacted me and he did a thing called pre-work. So what that means, let me just give you, I'll give you a Storyarb example. He contacted me and said, I can see you're doing social media, I can see you're doing email and it's not very good. Here's a 19 page slide presentation about what's wrong with it and how I'd fix it. And I've already done the work for you. I literally get 20 messages a day like, hey, can I edit your videos? Can I help you with email? You know, some guys are a little bit like, hey, can I help you make your first million dollars? I'm just like, I wrote a book about that. Anyhoo, anyhoo, the point is, is that Jay did the work. He doesn't have all, Jay's not some like, you know, 20 year plus expert. He's in high school, literally. And because of that I hired him on a trial and now Jay makes six figures. 

So let's extrapolate that out for Storyarb and potentially anyone out there who's just getting going. It's that don't let your inexperience be an excuse. You have the time advantage. And so if you're doing Storyarb, I don't know exactly your value prop, your website's a little confusing. But if it was like, hey, we're gonna grow your social media following, go create the social media for me and send it to me. Hey, we're gonna help you build out your YouTube content, send me thumbnails and titles and make it obvious what the result is gonna look like. 

Alex: I love where we're going with this. So let me, I'm gonna tell you what Storyarb actually is so you know exactly what it is. 

Noah: I didn't say it's crap, I feel guilty I said it's crap. Not your business, but your website. 

Alex: No, it's honestly, I feel great that you said that because I'll be honest, we've gotten so many leads, but the conversion rate has not been high at all. And part of my worry is like our website is confusing to people. I think it's a beautiful website, but I don't think it brings the whole story together. So here I'll explain what Storyarb is very simple. It is copywriting as a service for businesses. If you want the best copy created for your company, whether it's your email newsletter, your ad copy, your company, social executive, social blogs, et cetera. We have the best copy that we create for your business because great content has never mattered more. There's gonna be more of it than ever before. It's gonna be hard to stand out. And we have the top 1% writers in the world who work for Storyarb and write for our clients.

Noah: Who's your best client and then what part do they use? 

Alex: So it's head of marketing at an 800 person HR tech company. They don't want in-house writers or they've had no success with them. And they use us for writing customer case studies for their website, their company social, and their landing page and website copy. Those are the three things they've used us for. And they're like, killer. 

Noah: Do they love you? Like are they excited to pay every month? 

Alex: Yes. This is a relatively new product, but I have confidence that this customer won't churn for a number of years.

Noah: And is it cheaper? I'm guessing for them it's like, hey, we have a content team. I think it's like $60,000 a month. Some crazy numbers. 

Alex: Yeah. Like if you wanna hire a great copywriter in-house, it's a hundred thousand dollars. If. you wanna hire a great content strategist in-house, it's $120,000. Storyarb, the lowest tier is $4,000 a month. 

Noah: And how have you gotten your customers so far? 

Alex: It's been almost all through my social channels. So me posting about it on LinkedIn, me posting about it on Twitter, and then someone fills out a lead form and then either we have a call with them or they just subscribe via Stripe. 

Noah: How many people actually just subscribe straight up to $4,000 bucks a month?

Alex: I would say we've had like half a dozen so far.

Noah: Over after a year or two?

Alex: No, no. So the way I described the business to you was a pivot that we did like two months ago. So in two months.

Noah: So you've had like six people commit $24,000 a month. That's pretty good. 

Alex: Not $24,000. $4,000. 

Noah: Well you said six, I thought you said like half.

Alex: Oh well yeah, yeah. $24,000 total. Yes, correct. Yeah. And just, just to give you a sense of the business right now, it's like $130k top line right now. And the goal is end of this quarter to be at $240k top line. 

Noah: What's your current goal to double in the next, by the end of Q2 or Q3? 

Alex: Q2.

Noah: Oh, so you have a month and a half to double. 

Alex: Yep. 

Noah: What's your plan? 

Alex: Okay, the short answer is mostly through my social content for the next month and a half because I don't think we actually have enough time to do anything else, like in a short period of time to drive a ton of leads. So basically I'm posting two times a week about things we're doing at Storyarb to drive customers. Now what I will say is, again, like I'm worried we have a ton of leads right now, just so you have a sense, like we have 200 people who have requested demos for Storyarb in the last 30 days, 200 demo requests. The conversion rate on that is pretty low. Now it's also possible it just takes time. Like it's a longer buying cycle. The buyer of this is like a head of marketing, a head of growth, et cetera. But what I will, like I can break down for you how I'm thinking about marketing so far. Okay, so the goal I set was to get us to $5 million top line, like that's the goal for this marketing plan and the goal is by the end of Q3. 

Noah: I think doubling in like 40 days is pretty impressive.

Alex: Okay, so end of Q3, I wanna get to $5 million top line and actually I'm just gonna share this with you so that you can look at it as we're doing it. So basically to get to, my goal is by the end of Q3, I want us to be at a $5 million run rate. Okay? So that is $400,000 and change a month in revenue. Assuming our average customer pays $6,000 a month, which is our second tier. Like that's the middle tier for Storyarb, we need 70 customers. Okay. And so then the way I try to back into that is I assume that our lead conversion rate, so of all the people that fill out demos on our site, we're gonna convert 10%. I have no sense of if that's high or low. I just went with 10% because that felt right to me. If anything, it felt low. So then I was like, okay, we need 700 leads to get to 70 customers by end of Q3. So then I listed out the marketing channels, you know, basically I literally followed the thing in your book.

So I was like, okay, Alex, Lieberman’s social is the first one. It has to drive 250 demos. The blitz marketing package, which I'll explain what that is in a second 'cause that's the one that may blow your mind, is 250 leads, and then channel partners is another 50. Product Hunt is another 50, influencer is another 50. The blitz marketing package, I'm just gonna explain it to you just 'cause I think you'll have fun with it. You mentioned Supreme before and I think applying the fashion scarcity drop strategy to B2B is like so untapped. And I think it's what Beehiiv has done exceptionally well. I think what Beehiiv has done except exceptionally well is they have a list of things, like they have their marketing blitz package that they do every two weeks. So they have their product roadmap every two weeks, there's some big new thing on their product roadmap and they do a drop and they have all the same activities they do around that moment. And so basically we're planning on doing that for Storyarb. And so what it's gonna look like is every two weeks there's a new content format that we're dropping at Storyarb: newsletters, ad copy, sales emails, you know, landing page tear downs, customer case studies. And I'm gonna basically make it like a launch week where I do interviews with experts in that content format during the week. I get influencers who I'm friends with to promote it. But the kicker on all of this is I'm actually gonna sell sponsorships against it. And my goal is to actually make enough in advertising to pay for our whole headcount at Storyarb just from doing this whole marketing blitz. 

Noah: So let's take a step back. How many people are at the amount that they could spend $6,000 per month for copywriters? 

Alex: I don't know the exact number, but what I would say is, I want this to be a $10 million a year business and that requires 140 customers. And I believe there are 144 companies in the world that are willing to spend that much. 

Noah: That's what you want. But I guess I wonder what the customers want, and I say that with love. So I think the way that, I think you're jumping to the marketing a little bit, one, being at a hundred thousand, you're already doing epic, dude. So don't take anything negatively here. I think what I'm trying to, I think what would help for me with you is like there's probably like a thousand companies that are at the size that you're talking about that could afford you and that it's a no-brainer for them. That feels like a much more targeted audience versus maybe going as broad. So like what do those thousand or 500 customers look like?

I think number two is that the offering I think could be tighter because like we're, AppSumo’s a hundred million dollars a year business, we spend $60,000 a month. Like should we not be using this? 

Alex: You probably should, but the fact, yeah, but to, but to your point, like the fact that it isn't obvious to you means that's not positioned in the right way.

Noah: So that's number two. I think the positioning could be there and I think instead of like getting right to the pricing, especially at these price points, personally, I think for now at least I would do more of like everything is this demo and make it more exclusive. Like you literally have “request demo: and it's like first name, last name, company email. Like make this be like you're Harvard and I want to get in it. I think it's like almost underselling, like literally get the genius behind Morning Brew? I can have access to like your marketing copy magic for $4,000 a month, like $50,000 a month and I gotta hire Alex Lieberman? That's a steal. So I think there's just some elements of the packaging here and then who the customers that would need this packaging. And then I think the marketing and scalability of these options you're recommending is a lot easier.

So again, I think my three recommendations would be, have a tighter list of who those companies are. Make people do demos to actually talk with you and make them have more information in the demo so you can qualify them better. And then I would talk to a few of these customers to be like, okay, what are the three things that you're just like losing your mind about how good of a deal this is? 

Alex: Yeah, I love that.

Noah: I think then you come back to this marketing experiment sheet, you're not gonna be worried about it. 'Cause you're like, I know I can either do my tweets and I'll get the demos and I close a shit ton of 'em, or I do the referrals. I think it'll be a lot easier for you to execute almost any of these to have that success. 

Alex: I also think it's like such a good reminder of like, we always, at least I find this, I always kind of am magnetized towards the things that I just have the most fun with, obviously. And it's like, I love just like brainstorming marketing ideas. I just like live for that. And so it's like obviously I'm gonna go there. But I think to your point, being super clear on who the product is for as specifically as humanly possible, exactly what it's doing for them and how it's making their life a whole lot easier and making sure it's positioned in the right way. It just makes everything about my marketing experiments and these crazy ideas so much easier. 

Noah: And I know you're not getting it from your website, but I think that's the point, which is like, hey, we do everything. Which is pretty appealing, but it's almost so broad; instead of like, Hey, we will 10x your marketing returns. Okay, well, what do you mean by that? We have content we can do for your blog, for your landing page, for testimonials that we know works. And I've done it for Morning Brew and I've done it for like these other big companies. Which you have like you're, one of the legit people out there. 

Alex: Yeah. Well, first of all, this is super helpful and I'm going to force you against your will to give me free consultation on Storyarb marketing, specifically the website, because I think you're gonna have a lot of good thoughts there. Thank you so much for the time. That was my conversation with Noah Kagan and I would love to know what you thought about it. Shoot me an email to Alex at Morning Brew dot com and let me know what you thought about the episode and about this new format of going deep into a founder's one superpower in general. Thank you so much for listening to the show and I'll catch you next episode.