John Newtson: 0:02

All right, hey everyone, I’m here with Matthew Silverstein from WealthFactory. Thanks for being here, Matt. Thanks for having me, john. So I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while about WealthFactory. You’ve been coming to FMS for a couple of years, right, and you have a different type of business than most folks in FinPub, and so your product model, your audience, is a little bit different. So would you kind of lay that out for folks and kind of explain what WealthFactory is?

Mathieu Silverstein: 0:33

Yeah, so WealthFactory, we do personal finance for entrepreneurs. We help small business owners, entrepreneurs, keep more of the money that they make, and that’s through tax strategy, asset protection, estate planning, insurance coverage and cashflow optimization, and a little bit touching on investments as well. What we tend to do speaks to people who are active earners in their earning years the working wealthy, so to speak and their lives change. The situations get more complicated, they get less complicated, they get married, they get divorced, they build businesses, they sell businesses, and we want to be here through that entire process as critical questions come up that if only they had known some strategy sooner, they may have been able to save a boatload on taxes.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:22

Or been able to structure, corporate structure differently, to make life easier and, along the way, teach them how to find opportunities to build their wealth, both through their business and through other opportunities that are aligned with their strengths. So that’s the core of it, and it’s one thing that I think makes the demographic of our business a little bit different from traditional FinPub in terms of, if traditional FinPub skews older, high net worth looking for what to do in terms of getting an edge in the market and in investing. We’re looking at people that are actively growing, starting or maybe even, at the other end, winding down, but like in their business, and so that’s their greatest leverage point that they have that we can help them with. And I think everything comes out of that because for a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners, what they make in their business there’s a function of like that’s what, how much of that can flow down to them personally so they can build the life that they want to live.

John Newtson: 2:31

Right, right. And that’s to me that’s very interesting because, like, how would you? So you have the word. I like love that phrase. It’s a great copy phrase. The working wealthy, like that’s fantastic. And the idea of selling to entrepreneurs and business owners what types, if you wouldn’t mind, like, is it digital entrepreneurs? Is it like the doctors and dentists? Is it kind of all of those folks? Is it the kind of the restaurant owner, like where do you see? Kind of that customer?

Mathieu Silverstein: 2:59

Great question. So when we first started, our customers were a function of our network and circles that we were in. I was fortunate to start the business. One of my co-founders was a New York Times bestselling author, garrick Anderson, and he’s a dynamic individual who connects great with people and his circles were. He was speaking on stages and being invited on webinars for in the chiropractic community, for dentists, for a lot of people in medical professions and things like that. So in the beginning our customers were often condensed into a couple of different industries with specific needs.

Mathieu Silverstein: 3:42

Fast forward 10 plus years and we’re diversified across everything you can imagine.

Mathieu Silverstein: 3:49

And that’s because we had a friendly little competition.

Mathieu Silverstein: 3:52

Garrett and I in the beginning of like, okay, can we scale, can we build an engine to scale paid traffic to beat the pants off of anything that we’re able to do on a one-on-one or even a one-to-many standpoint, and so that went from $0 a day in ad spend to $5 to $4,500 a day on average in ad spend.

Mathieu Silverstein: 4:13

We peaked at one point at $13,000 and came back down because it was pushing the gas a little too hard for a small business like ours. From a logistics standpoint it’s funny to reach a too many customers moment, but it happens, yeah, so that means e-com, restaurateurs, real estate professionals, people that are high earner W-2s who have a side hustle or are starting a side hustle, and that’s an interesting trend that I’ve seen reflected directly in our business over the past few years is that the number of new business starts every year keeps going up, and so the number of people that identify whether because of how they’re interacting with social media or what they’re seeing that identify as an entrepreneur or wanting to be one, but have a skill set to start with, it’s opened up the doors beyond just a traditional small business owner for us to a much larger TAM, which seems to continue to grow.

John Newtson: 5:13

That’s awesome. I think so. For me, coming at it from the FinPub perspective, a couple of things stick out really strongly. One is that the kind of the working entrepreneur to me has always been the best tier of customers at FinPub and that includes the doctors and the dentists and the chiropractors, the people who have their own shop and professional setup. Those have always been the top tier. I think the best description of it is a little bit more.

John Newtson: 5:42

It was Richard Stanton Jones. He was a copywriter back in the 80s and 90s. He called it the you know the best customer. He called him the millionaire pig farmer, which he meant like kind of the blue collar business success, um, and I think that we found over the years that the doctors and dentists and stuff are a huge segment and so in a in a business environment where people are thinking about acquisition of on the higher price points, like the traditional front end backend model was always you’re going to use the front end product to go out and identify a paying customer, subsidize the cost of the media, and the point of that was that you would find a segment of customers that some percentage of would buy your backend products and the goal would be like you’re really using that as a filter to find those high-end buyers.

John Newtson: 6:28

What I always love about what I’ve seen from you is that you’re just getting that high-end customer. I mean, I know you have a front-end product and stuff, but like your customer is fundamentally that high-end customer. Right, it’s like you’re functioning. It seems almost it’s like a B2C kind of operation, but it’s really a B2B, right. You straddle that line so beautifully and that to me is like a really fascinating business from a lot of perspectives. Is that kind of how you see it too?

Mathieu Silverstein: 7:01

That’s exactly how I see it. I think about it from B2C customer acquisition strategies. B2c typically have a lower lifetime value but the customer acquisition cost can be lower than going B2B, where you might have traditionally different tactics cold email, linkedin, longer sales cycles, opportunities for enterprise deals. So in our business I look at where are the design constraints. A couple of years into the business, garrett asked me. My co-founder asked me, knowing what you know now, matt, what would you do differently with WealthFactory? And I said I would never again start a business that didn’t either have the opportunity for enterprise level deals, enterprise sales or recurring revenue. It’s got to have one of those for me to be able to sleep well at night and know the business I’m growing is going to be like a foundational business. So we decided to go MRR I could tell that story later on but essentially the front end B2C model books, low-end tripwire, accessible price point products, and it does bring in a wide array of entrepreneurs and people that are interesting in building their wealth, but it immediately goes into our core services that are for that ideal business owner. So to your point, if I were to go out and market our backend program, our high ticket program, um, it’s going to be pretty tough for me to go out there with ads, webinars, everything If it’s just like traffic to consultation funnel. Um, because there’s a big hairy commitment there of something Our services are very valuable to our clients. But there’s still kind of big picture and amorphous. We’re talking about oh, we’re going to help you with tax and estate planning and insurance coverage and cashflow optimization.

Mathieu Silverstein: 8:54

It’s like, ah, how do I make a decision on that? It’s way easier for people to get past a fear of there’s this. You can bleep me out if you want, but I was listening to a podcast with April Dunford from Obviously Awesome, one of the best business marketing books I’ve read in a long time. She was interviewing someone and he said that in B2B sales, people think that it’s the fear of missing out that they need to ratchet up to get people off the line and convert them into a backend program, and really what we see in environments like this, it’s the fear of fucking up fofu. And I think when we try to sell, we try to do it all the time. We keep going back and we try to sell. Ideal customer. Here’s our backend program. Here’s our program wealth architecture that you’re going to love and get a lot of value of, with the risk, reversal and everything. But it’s a big decision to make. If you haven’t made any decisions with us before, you eliminate a lot of fear of fucking up.

Mathieu Silverstein: 9:48

If you just spend a couple of dollars on one of our books, if you enjoy it we have, after people buy they can self-schedule with us on the thank you page after some upsells and downsells and things like that. And so what we find is we can run ad spend on meta YouTube. Someone that’s never heard of us before clicks on an ad, buys a book, self-schedules on the thank you page and two days later spends $8,750 and then $475 a month. Now it doesn’t happen every single day, but that path does happen and I tried it the other way a lot of times. It doesn’t work the same way with the same efficiency, I’m sure. I’m sure At the front end you at least still get 40% to 50% return on ad spend on a zero cost of goods sold type of product on day zero. It still helps us have the confidence to be able to keep investing in that engine.

John Newtson: 10:49

Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense and I think that I’m not one to say, oh, everyone should get rid of their front end. I know that’s a big thing that’s happening market-wise right now and I know there’s people who are using various high-priced funnels on the front end. But I think that, yeah, there’s a lot of, there’s a reason that it developed. That’s more than just um the the fact that it was hard to sell on the front end. You know higher price points, right, like it’s a much broader pool of customers. You have more people that you’re not going to catch, maybe in the other one um, and, like you said, like there is, especially with going to a price point like that, there’s some comfort that has to come with the relationship sometimes and you might be getting a percentage in a hard phone floor kind of model, but like there’s more people you would get if you kind of have both I think.

Mathieu Silverstein: 11:39

It’s a really good point. I think that does come down to trust building and also whether you are the world’s best copywriter. I mean, I’m there’s. No, I’m not going to compare myself to Porter. He’s on an entirely different level, so he can pull that off Right. I can’t, but we still have to build trust in our marketplace and make this something that someone who’s never even thought about our business before might go. I like these guys. They resonate with me philosophically. I don’t feel like I’m going to be signing up for a ton of work, for something that’s going to make my head spin, and we have to show. We have to be able to show that over a through different mediums, on our business at least.

John Newtson: 12:19

Yeah, especially with.

John Newtson: 12:19

So, like I mean in my head and you correct me if I’m wrong it seems like kind of the product mix.

John Newtson: 12:23

Is this combination of kind of what you would get from a really good CPA and somebody who really is almost like a business operations or cash flow mentor, like someone, kind of this mixture of like there’s tax strategies, there’s things that you need to do with the money that you’re making kind of systems, there’s things that you need to do with the money that you’re making kind of systems, and so you have like the I love that fofu idea, because that is such an easy like whenever you have a situation like that, like the fear of fucking up is, um, almost bigger than the fear of missing out for entrepreneurs, um, in a lot of ways, and so you have that, that uh, kind of product mix.

John Newtson: 13:04

That’s that’s really interesting and then but it’s not as, like you said, it’s not as clear cut as like here invest in these three stocks, cause this is what’s going to happen, kind of approach that a lot of people, obviously on the FinPub side, the newsletter side, stock newsletter side, are there. It’s almost like there is a there’s a certain kinship with the trader education side because there is this education piece of how to be better at the mechanics of running the business.

John Newtson: 13:34

Yeah, very much so Now let me do this first, before I go to this one. Um, do you make your own copy? You kind of alluded to that, right, are you?

Mathieu Silverstein: 13:47

the primary copywriter I am I am not, um my one of my partners. I started the business with Tom Bernthal. He’s our. I have a couple of in-house copywriters. We’ve been Tom and Steven and I’ve been working together gosh since 2011 in the same businesses and we just working together for that long. So Tom has been the voice of the business and then Garrett was the spokesperson of the business, who was able to connect with people and land that messaging. We had a really great working relationship with our internal team. So, because we’ve been doing this so long and my team of copywriters, we’re entrepreneurs, they’re entrepreneurs. They just have a really great knack for speaking to our customer and knowing what they need. So I won’t take credit for the actual copywriting piece. I couldn’t hold a candle to their skillset.

John Newtson: 14:42

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. It was great to have a team. How did you? Let me ask you the thing first, Because of the customer you have have you done affiliate work with other people in the newsletter space and the trade education space? Have you done any kind of like swaps or things that you tested out, trying to see if each other’s traffic in lists have good crossover?

Mathieu Silverstein: 15:03

Embarrassing moment to say no, I haven’t done any affiliate work with um folks in the trader education space. I um one thing I’m doing. I love Michael McDougal, who I met through you and FMS and so we’ve been. We’ve been working together to do some paid traffic stuff with with some trader audiences to see if there is a, some paid traffic stuff with some trader audiences to see if there is a there there. And in our initial testing what we were finding, at least through his systems, is that the conversion rate was off the charts compared to what we were able to get on Meta. Haven’t dialed in the ROAS side of that yet, but I think there is definitely something there and it’s going to come from some more massaging of the messaging which I haven’t nailed yet and we’re going to get.

John Newtson: 15:50

We’ll be able to get through testing oh, that’s interesting though. So there is definitely some, but there’s definitely enough like smoke to make you think there’s some fire there yeah, yeah, absolutely absolutely that’s great. I love working with like mike’s great because he can. He gets all hands on like with you guys and helping to figure out like how do we make this thing work, rather than you know.

Mathieu Silverstein: 16:10

Yeah, Interesting on the on the flip side, thinking about it from a okay, our audience like our existing audience and do they? Would they value some of the insights that people in FinPub could bring to the table? Wow, we had Matt Warder on and he did a webinar. Like lucky to snag him right when he was getting off an airplane, but he was able to just drop some values, some knowledge to our audience. None of them had ever heard us talk about coal before commodities, but we have some research on some of it.

Mathieu Silverstein: 16:41

But people, it provided a perspective that they had never seen before, which was an interesting model for them to think about how to navigate the world as an entrepreneur. I think even just thinking about not what is my next trade I’m going to make, but I think the interview you did with him a couple of years ago, where he showed that quadrant and his predictions of quarter by quarter or year by year, what we think is going to happen and what’s going to sell, it’s actually really helpful for entrepreneurs to know where the puck might be going, to be able to prepare and plan for that.

Mathieu Silverstein: 17:15

Now granted as entrepreneurs, we oftentimes we’re way too busy putting out fires in our existing business and focusing on what, what needs to happen this month, um. But to have that sense of where things could head really helps with planning purposes, and I think people really valued that Um, and so I think that there’s a lot of wisdom that could be unlocked by that kind of direction and collaboration too.

John Newtson: 17:43

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s that’s. That’s that’s why, like, there’s an interesting and matt’s brilliant because he does have such a great macro presentation of things and I feel like there’s this classical aspect of finpub on this, on the macro side, which was like I’m going to interpret the world for you, I’m going to show you how this works, and when you have somebody who’s really good at that, it is is kind of like a revelatory moment. And so, yeah, I think that would be really interesting to me to see how that develops for you guys. If you start to add product like that or do affiliate relationships or things on the back that might be valuable, what’s your product mix look like then? So I know you have their very high price, but it seems like you have a few different product types. So what are those basic types like, kind of from the deliverable perspective?

Mathieu Silverstein: 18:30

Sure. So if I were to just split them into front end and back end, let’s say on the front end, books, courses and a mastermind type membership where we meet on Zoom once a month with entrepreneurs and very unstructured, you can come in and out $197 a month, have around a thousand members in that program. Right now we call that Wealth Builders Club and that would be our largest membership type program of active subscribers. On our backend, wealth Architecture is our program where you could think about that as what we’ve always been Like, our big vision of what we’re creating is something very interconnected. For entrepreneurs that resembles almost like a virtual family office, without the price tag.

Mathieu Silverstein: 19:19

So you have a financial quarterback who helps assemble any missing pieces of your financial team that you might not have. I saw anyway, sorry, moving on from that piece, you could call that a coaching program, you could call that a consulting program, but essentially you have that quarterback who’s going to help parachute in other experts, cpas, attorneys, anything like that that you might need in your plan, and that’s our program. That’s the higher ticket $87.50, $4.75 a month, one-time price point 25,000. That was our higher tier but worked really well with an in-person event model that we knocked it out of the park on every time, but COVID hit. We had been doing this and we were able to transition really beautifully into this model.

John Newtson: 20:17

Okay, cool, I was actually going to ask you about did you have an in-person model, and so you’ve replaced that in-person model with this entirely?

Mathieu Silverstein: 20:23

then, yes, entirely, we haven’t done in-person model with this entirely, then, yes, entirely. We haven’t done in person in a long time. I miss it, and there’s a lot of a lot of fun, a lot of work and I I actually, from a structural standpoint, love the focus that our organization is able to have and, like the sales team, can sell one product and not. You know, when you have an in-person model, it’s beautiful, but you end up with this weird inefficiency of, okay, sell the event first, which people either want to go to or don’t, and either can make the date or can’t make the date, and then you have your ideal customer with a waiting period built in from now until the event. So the velocity is stilted in a right in a way, at least when you’re ramp, at least when you’re ramping up. Once you have a pipeline, it’s it’s, yeah, but still it is.

John Newtson: 21:13

It is an issue I know, like the, that’s a, it’s a great way to frame it. Um, where, like, especially if, like, you’re able to sell the product without that event piece as well, the price points, then why have that interstitial, interstitial, interstitial event product between those things? Right, like I love events for for different reasons, not just because of the business side, but, like I, I’m an event guy, but I also recognize that there’s a limiting factor on the event product, right, just like you said.

Mathieu Silverstein: 21:48

Sure, but, but here’s a here’s a differentiation of why yours makes all the sense in the world and the one I was talking about, the, the workshop. The one-off workshops were great but aren’t in the current model. Um, I would like to bring them back when we have capacity to do so, but your event is a community event and that’s the kind of event that would entirely be a no-brainer make sense for us, like once a year, all of our clients, members, people in the community come. I mean, this is such a great business model. You can have event sponsorships that can outweigh anything. Great renewal opportunity. These events, the workshops, were very more top of funnel-ish and so that was like why are we creating a choke point on people coming in and getting value from us? Right?

John Newtson: 22:42

Right, right, yeah, not a great front end, kind of off. Yeah, no, that’s definitely true. I have a colleague that I spoke to who does like 30 events a year and was telling me that they do a um, they do a massive event that is free once a year and it costs them like a million five by the time they’re done with it. But it’s like that’s their marketing is they just pull everybody into that and then from there they split them into the other events and get people in and do stuff and it’s like it’s a really cool model, big upfront expense, but it’s a pure event model, right, like it’s not this mix, and so, anyway, like how do you see so now that you’ve built, you have you’ve built your very unique structured business, right, and now you see all the stuff from the kind of the newsletter model, and I would say like a lot of that is like there’s the agora model, which has been kind of duplicated out into lots of different businesses in the community.

John Newtson: 23:42

We’ve seen kind of the trader education model, which is different, and there are some sub models. But where do you see, like from your perspective, what has been the most interesting kind of pieces that are useful to you and your view of your business versus things that may be like hey, I see a lot of people do this, but this doesn’t seem to make sense from us. Like, where do you see those kind of I see a lot of people do this, but this doesn’t seem to make sense from us. Where do you see those kind of I guess, that outline of similarities and beneficial things and areas where maybe this isn’t quite the same model?

Mathieu Silverstein: 24:15

Sure. So, speaking as a only sort of outsider, my own perspective may be skewed or not even accurate all the way here. So the question being how do I see what is working? Can we go over that again? How do I see so?

John Newtson: 24:34

basically like so you think about the award model, right? You have like traditionally, that you have a set of front end newsletters for a group, a single guru you are going to go up into price, into multiple backends, and then you would have another guru who would have the same kind of product ladder, and so it’s front-end Free newsletter, front-end newsletter, multiple backend products, and that guy forms a mini franchise and if he’s big enough he’s his own franchise. But if he’s not big enough then you add other people to him who have a similar model, right? So you end up with a multi-guru kind of publishing brand. And then you have the.

John Newtson: 25:13

There’s different ways that the product ladder is built. A lot of times it’s built on a risk profile. So the front-end products are basically these are the basic blue-chip stocks around this idea that the simple things you should do. And then the backend services are the higher risk. Maybe they’re small caps, maybe it’s a trading strategy, right. And then so you’re selling like this risk profile almost on the backend.

John Newtson: 25:35

And then on the trader education side, the product ascension kind of goes with proximity to the guru, right. Right it’s here’s a low price product that like here’s which here’s kind of a how I do it. Let me train you to do it. It’s a higher price product. Here’s a um, a service, where maybe I’ll have a trading service and you can follow me, and then the highest product is some form of a coaching program where it’s proximity to the guru is kind of the thing right, like we get on a live webinar or things like that. So I think of it as kind of like those are the two basic vectors of product development, with a lot of variation in between and, like I said before, I think yours fits to me, not exactly, but more in line with that proximity side. But it doesn’t seem to be like and maybe this is because you, you bought out your partner and that you’re. How do you think of that product development? I guess, is what I’m saying on your side versus what you see on some of these other models.

Mathieu Silverstein: 26:35

Gotcha. So, in terms of product development, we think about what is the max value that we are able to provide to an entrepreneur through our collective knowledge strategies, the problems that entrepreneurs face, and my team chunks as many of those out as possible into how do we productize knowledge. So there’s this snake eating the tail kind of scenario, where I think that, in order for us to grow, it’s taking value from the biggest stuff that we can do and try to condense them into discrete pieces that we can productize. So can we productize information and knowledge and strategy and then, once we’ve productize it, can we automate components of it, whether through code or other kinds of automation, or a great user experience in the form of calculators, generative tools that we’re working on. So I’ll give a brief aside on that. I just built an AI tool.

Mathieu Silverstein: 27:36

So, in estate planning, one thing that people like to do is a statement of purpose. Think of that I’m butchering it, but think of it as the if you’re watching this video, I’m dead now and here. Great-grandchildren is what I’d like you to know and what’s important to me and I’ve conveyed in my estate plan and the rules and everything like that. So you could start with a blank sheet or a worksheet and fill that out, or just built a tool where you can answer a handful of questions and it gets processed and fed through a number of training examples of what a good statement of purpose could look like and it spits out a full document for you. So we look at where are there places that for a busy business owner we can either create value that they can’t create themselves or we can condense the amount of time. So that’s the example of a tool that we might put in to one of our products to productize something that maybe they would spend hours writing on their end or even an hour talking with their estate planning attorney and get billed in part in that conversation. If we can take that down to a zero cost, that’s value that we can move on to our customer.

Mathieu Silverstein: 28:38

So my team, in terms of productization, when we launched the business, we had, let’s say, two products, our backend program, $25,000 one-time price point and a workshop that you could come in person to. Then we create our first newsletter for the front end and we go, okay, well, what else doesn’t get captured in that newsletter or isn’t the right kind of medium? And we should have video and we should dive deeper into a particular topic and so in the early days that was just launch course and then another course, and another course and another course. The courses started to become more interactive with tools. We started to publish books because my co-founder was a great author and I teamed up with Andrew James has a firm called Cerebro and he’s got this is someone I’ve worked with for a long time but he really helped us figure out how to market books and use book funnels and that became a big driver for the front end for our business. And that catapulted um Garrett, because the millions of dollars we spent in ad spend where. I mean that’s great for him in terms of his face, in terms of his recognition. Now he goes everywhere and people are like, oh you, and not that he wasn’t successful before that Um, but that really worked in that, in that model Now he was our only guru and an owner of the business.

Mathieu Silverstein: 29:58

So it’s not, it was not a, not a risk factor. I know for a lot of guru models it can be um. I think there is a model there for wealth factory that makes sense to have more multiple um, multiple gurus. So I would take that from the Agora model and install that into into wealth factory, if we had the chops to figure out like the best way to do that, but that’s still kind of new to us. So anyway, long story short, you could say that we built my team has built 20 plus products on the front end and we don’t advertise all of those on paid traffic at the top of the funnel, probably only advertise two, maybe three of them, usually at one at any one time.

Mathieu Silverstein: 30:41

I remember sitting down with Ryan Dice at our office in Austin before Wealth Factory and he said to me in our previous business, previous business, you guys don’t have an offer, you have a product, or, sorry, you don. Previous business, you guys don’t have an offer, you have a product, or sorry, you don’t have a. You don’t have a business, you have a, an offer. We were like oh no, and that was.

Mathieu Silverstein: 30:58

We had a great business, but it was like one product. So it was like never going to do that again, learning from that piece of piece of advice. So we created multiple products, but he said, at any given point, you’re really going to only have one. That’s knocking it out of the park on paid traffic. And so it does look like that. However, people come in and if they’re not ready to join Wealth Builders Club or Wealth Architecture, my team will promote our own products to our list at least a couple of times a month.

Mathieu Silverstein: 31:25

A different product. So that’s where the content calendar comes in. So we could have a tax cut package where we give all of our tax strategies and you get a three-year tax review with a CPA if you submit your tax returns for them to look at and find some missed opportunities. Or an access capital and credit program where we teach entrepreneurs. There are certain levels that everybody’s in. Some people already know X, y and Z. Other people haven’t taken the time to go through it. So we have entrepreneurs that come to us and they’re successful, but their credit score is all beaten up and they have inefficient loan structures and their cashflow sucks because they’re paying down loans in the wrong order. So we have programs just to simplify that and make that easy, and every time rates go up or down, it’s obviously a great time to promote that program. So different hooks of things that happen throughout the year tend to match up well with different products that we have. That match seasonality for entrepreneurs, or just different things that happen in the economy.

Mathieu Silverstein: 32:32

All of those then lead to front-end product, then lead to do you want to join us in Wealth Builders Club? For our mastermind, that’s our $197 a month. Typically we’ll have a bribe to join in there. Get the full thing for free when you join Wealth Builders Club Self-schedule on the next page. For hey, if you really want to fast-track the results, results wealth architecture program schedule on Calendly here and talk with our team. So that’s how we think about productizing into discrete components that make it easy for people to go. Yeah, this one thing is really bugging me right now. I’m going to click and I’m going to check this out and I’ll drop $97 and spend some time on it. It’s low risk, low time commitment and yeah, you know what I think. I do want to bite off some of the other more holistic pieces too.

John Newtson: 33:17

Right, oh, that’s.

John Newtson: 33:18

That’s really cool though, cause I think like the idea of using like the same kind of economic events that that you would use to sell an investing product and using them in the marketing from basically the other side, right For the entrepreneur is a really cool like.

John Newtson: 33:35

I never thought that that would be something that you would do, which makes sense when you say it, and so that’s that’s really interesting piece in the marketing side that you would do that.

John Newtson: 33:44

Where you’re, you’re, you’re framing things for those guys, and I think that you know one of the one of the things that I have a few firm beliefs about the changing state of FinPub, and one of them is that, um, building very unique brands around specific customer segments whether they are traditional customer segments or new like ancillary customer segments is one of the ways to win going forward, and I feel like you guys have done that really well already, and so the copy piece is interesting to me because you have a stable set of things that are more like you said.

John Newtson: 34:24

They’re more about my experience as an entrepreneur, my ability to run my business more efficiently, do better things, or my ability to run my business more efficiently, do better things, and then you also have this event-driven kind of market-driven set of copy approaches that give you that kind of like urgency and newsiness of what we would think of as being a more normal, like newsletter type stock newsletter type promotional model, and so that gives you, like this really interesting mix of acquisition opportunities then, because, like you said, you 20 front end offers so far like Somewhere, somewhere around there, I think.

Mathieu Silverstein: 34:58

we just counted it up yesterday and it was around that.

John Newtson: 35:00

Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So like do you know what kind of mix of stable versus like newsy products you’ve done there? That’s just random.

Mathieu Silverstein: 35:10

Yeah, you know a minority uh, very much a minority of them would be um, so let’s, let’s think about some of the more um, let me just think out loud for a moment of some of the more one-off programs that we did. We created a program back when defy was hot and spending a lot of time in it, and it was was crazy and I was like I can’t believe that this works so well. So we created a program, cashflow Crypto, and it was. You know, we looked at various things that weren’t in the buy and hold but not trading. So how could you, where could you find yields and things like that? And so that had a shorter lifespan but was obviously crypto offers are doing very well right now, but that specific one that fit our cashflow ethos was I guess you could call that a moment in time, at least until something changes there.

Mathieu Silverstein: 36:01

The other one-offs we’ve done a financial trends summit that we turned into a financial trends product and that’s like what are the big things that are happening and coming up over the next, over the next few months? Now, if I was smarter about it, I’d do over the next 10 years. It’s just like Diamandis style, singularity style. I just don’t know on the front end like how many people I can get thinking on 10 year time horizons even if that’s a healthy way to think about things.

Mathieu Silverstein: 36:27

that’s tough, so a minority of them I’d call it sub five or six out of those 20 that were more specific. Now our copy to sell an evergreen type of product we might try to. We’ll try to make that as relevant to now as possible because new and relevant is always going to beat evergreen With, with the exception, go ahead.

John Newtson: 36:53

No, no, but that’s what I think is so cool about this, is that. So there is like the, the non newsy kind of trendy stuff. When you have that working, that’s kind of like your stable workhorse, right, like you can always get something there because you know it’s about an ongoing kind of personal issue I have with the business or whatever, and so you know you always have that, no matter what the news cycle is doing. But then you can capitalize on the upside of attention with kind of news, trend-based stuff, right. Which is the beauty of having those kinds of things is that you can get hey, there’s a lot of attention on this, like it’s crypto, we can bring in a lot more customers than normal right now, but it has it has a short period of time.

John Newtson: 37:36

Um, we also know that, like, only having things that are like market driven or news driven means that some, some publishing groups, and even the best ones, might go a year or two without a really effective front end acquisition product, and that sucks, Like it sucks. And so having things that are stable, um, that are evergreen as well, to kind of fill in those gaps, is is like a. It’s a really nice mix, I think. Um, as a business owner, to have um in your marketing.

Mathieu Silverstein: 38:06

It, it is, it’s. I wanted to build it this way because I want to say lessons learned from, or scars from, the early days where we had no recurring revenue, event model, high ticket, and we launched the business, did a few hundred K on the launch but, like my team, we pulled like two all-nighters in a row. I was like come on, guys, it’s going to be 5am. The coffee shop at down, like at the taco. Come on, guys, it’s going to be 5 am. The coffee shop at the taco shop in Austin, it’s going to open. I’m going to make it there. I’m going to bring back a vat of coffee and a bunch of breakfast tacos stay awake.

Mathieu Silverstein: 38:41

And so we did that. We launched, went well, and then the next month hits and we got to do it all over, not the launch part, but how do we go? Start at zero every month is something that I went. That doesn’t need to happen in this world anymore now, or at least it doesn’t, if you can think about it in a different way.

Mathieu Silverstein: 39:02

And a mentor of mine had always been beating into my head subscription revenue, subscription revenue, subscription revenue. And so I was thinking how do we do that in a stable way? So when we had that conversation that I referenced earlier of, like my business either has to be able to win enterprise level deals or recurring revenue. We went recurring revenue so we took that $25,000, lobbed it down to $12,500 upfront and $2,000 a month. That was the first recurring revenue piece that we made. I knew going into it, we knew what kind of cash crunch that was going to cash flow crunch that would create for us, but we went through it anyway and I’m sitting there, living in LA at the time and going. I am now making less money than I made in my first sales job out of college and I know what I’m doing.

Mathieu Silverstein: 39:54

but gosh, this is hard. What if I made the wrong decision? Right, but it started to like yeah.

Mathieu Silverstein: 40:00

I know a lot of brilliant marketers and business owners that are like way, way, way more successful than me and they say I would never sell a recurring revenue product because I can sell 10 X the amount if it’s a one-off. Um, because it’s so hard to sell a subscription and I agree with that. I just didn’t want to. I don’t think I’m such a good marketer that I’m going to be able to make it work 12 out of 12 months, year over year, starting from zero every time, because you know what else is a recurring thing Expenses, rent, overhead payroll. I want to be able to hit all those things. We never missed them, but you don’t want to be sweating it out.

Mathieu Silverstein: 40:39

So we made that decision and eventually the recurring revenue continued to stack and stack and stack until we I think it was last year we hit like $423,000 in recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue from subscription revenue, and that accounted for somewhere around half of our monthly revenue. But it just means that we go into every month and we know what we can invest back into growth. We know what we can invest into things and while we have not by any means grown as big or even as quickly as many of the folks in in uh, in FinPub um, our contractions have been it’s it’s just been a little more stable, right, even if we, even if things slow down materially and we drop off 30%, like it doesn’t break the entire thing because we have that flexibility.

John Newtson: 41:33

And that’s so like one just as a philosophical point.

John Newtson: 41:38

I don’t think anybody in FinPub at this point, other than maybe one or two people, believes that people should be growing as fast and as big as we’re in the boom right. Like there’s this whole question of right-sizing, what a franchise actually is, and $150 to $200 million doesn’t seem to be anyone’s answer anymore for a bunch of reasons. And two, like the I mean the size that you’re at is like from a publishing perspective, everybody that I know that has kind of gotten to that size and you know there’s some range there is really happy with their business. It’s always there’s a hundred, there’s always a thousand problems, right, but like everyone’s always happy there. And then whenever I meet someone or somebody that I know starts to push up above 60 to 70 million, up in that range, they’re a lot less happy as people, like they’re just a lot less happy because there’s so many more problems. And I feel like that’s in the lawsuits employee lawsuits, employee lawsuits, staffing issues, all kinds of stuff like that starts to happen, let alone regulatory issues. But like and so like.

Mathieu Silverstein: 42:37

I think that, like you know, that idea of bigger is better is is not people’s lived experience in most cases yeah, I, I think think the there’s a bit of a risk containment to by by keeping them chunked into smaller businesses too. Right, I know I I don’t want to get like I’m not looking to like, advocate for or get into a debate of like is holdco the way to go or is mega behemoth the way to go? There are obviously benefits to either of them and I know we have people in our group that are crushing it in single business models and I don’t personally have experience running a hold code so I can’t speak to that. But yeah, in an environment where there’s significantly more risk in, I think about that as insurance, estate planning, to have everything in one entity. I’m not saying that the big guys are doing that, but at least in my world, if risk can be contained into buckets, that’s fantastic. So can I even do that in a microcosm in our own $9 million a year business? I think so, because I actually I think that our business could be a $20 million a year business without adding much more complexity to it.

Mathieu Silverstein: 44:01

I think that there’s a get lucky better offer our way to it. You know that’s a strategy. Yeah, strategize my way to winning offer. That just completely takes off. That’s what we’re always in in pursuit of, but I don’t see in our existing model that we would, other than like ad spend and a few other things, need to like double head count, for example, um, and so that’s a risk containment piece to to me as well.

Mathieu Silverstein: 44:28

So to your point of the 60 to 70 and the unhappiness, um, yeah, there are so many more moving parts under one, under one umbrella, and I’m not like I have no political opinion on like break up a small business, uh, you know, a bigger business. I was talking, but I was talking with my um attorney who was talking with a long-term. He had a very successful health business but he also built a very successful um fulfillment process, warehouse fulfillment process for his health business and our, our mutual attorney said to him turn that into its own business, break it off into its own entity. He did that and that became a fulfillment uh service for all kinds of e-comm businesses and that thing ended up doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but it’s its own business. So it was able to even take off on its own because it was able to specialize in in what it does.

John Newtson: 45:29

Oh, very cool. That’s very interesting. Yeah, I love that. So, like you mentioned, like mentors and stuff, how, how have you like let’s take, let’s look at your journey as an entrepreneur, like how did you get started, and then I can just maybe specifically talk about like your relationship with mentors if you have one, two, multiple ones and how that’s kind of impacted your growth and your development in your business.

Mathieu Silverstein: 45:52

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll go back for a moment to college. I was at UCLA and I really wanted to work in the advertising department at the school paper and I applied and I didn’t get the job. I failed miserably. I had no sales skills and I was like jittery and high energy and like they’re like how do you sell this pen? And I was like never, had never done that before. Um, I’m Jewish and had to go sell Christmas wreaths around the neighborhood, but like that was the most, like growing up during those fundraisers, but like that was the most, that was the most that I had that I had done. But I applied a couple more times and the guy was like I’m going to stick my neck out for you because I could tell that you try hard, I think we can get somewhere with that. So cut my got in, cut my teeth in sales and ended it. So that was like my first bout of mentorship where the guy there who ran the advertising department just spent the time with me because I put the time in and said how do we make this even better? And I went. I like that path.

Mathieu Silverstein: 46:53

My first job out of college. I was working at a startup ad agency. Michael Eisner called it the next Google at a hundred million in funding and blah, blah, blah and I’m doing phone sales. But I loved it. I’m like I’m in the middle of like some startup tech thing and a family member of mine from across the country, who I didn’t have much of a relationship, was in town for a business conference and I was at the time. I was like I’m going to interview everyone who owns a business and ask how’d you get into it, what do you like about it, what advice do you have? Because I want to own a business someday, but I don’t know what that means, other than I took a history of business class at UCLA and loved it, that kind of thing. So it was all theoretical.

Mathieu Silverstein: 47:29

And he was like well, I want you to read Rich Dad, poor Dad and the E-Myth. And at the end of dinner he’s like how would you like to come work for me in Florida? I said, no thanks, I don’t need to. You know? No thanks, um, I’ve got these stock options and blah, blah, blah. And he was like well, how long do you think you need to know whether that would work out? I said give me a month. Month later I was like, okay, let’s do this, I can’t. And that was an incredible experience. That’s where I learned marketing. That’s where I learned I love technology and became like our tech person databases, marketing automation. I became like the 300th customer in the early days of HubSpot.

John Newtson: 48:18

I was like inbound marketing, and so just like it was a fun playground.

Mathieu Silverstein: 48:21

I ended up with this title, got like chief R&D officer, but it’s because someone yes, there was nepotism there, that was my in, but it was a long leash and hey, go explore research, come back and let’s build products, and so we would do that. I’d go out and find something in a different industry. I was really into innovation so I got to like Cambridge and do a bookstore and go buy all their books on R&D and innovation and try to go okay, love this idea. Takeaway what’s an innovation? What’s something that’s working really well in another industry? Can I bring that to an entirely unrelated industry and create a product or service or deliver value to clients out of it? And that’s kind of been. You know, I wasn’t even thinking about that going into this meeting. That has kind of been my thing for my entire career. What’s working in another industry? Can we try it and apply it? And is there an unlock there? That’s what I love about FinPub. That’s what I love about SaaS.

Mathieu Silverstein: 49:11

When we moved to recurring revenue, I went what are the best playbooks for SaaS? Growth retention, mrr, reactivation campaigns, trials, all of those things that there are proven playbooks for growth, playbooks in SaaS. Which ones of those can I try and apply in this business that are not necessarily being applied in the personal finance space, and that’s how we’ve built this. I’ve looked at what works in FinPub Can I try that here? What works in SaaS Can I try that? Can I try that here?

Mathieu Silverstein: 49:45

What’s happening in FinTech to productize boring, clunky financial services? This is an aside. I think that I’m bullish long-term on this idea of embedded finance. So can we take embedded finance products like bookkeeping and accounting and what are some other ones that I’m able to bring in and put into our membership site, put into our product that customers can interface with best of breed user experiences, get better lending and financing through an embedded lending program? That’s not our business. It doesn’t make a material amount, but it allows me to transition us from knowledge to productized knowledge, to automated software that improves the user experience, can lower costs for them, and I just took us on a bit of a tangent, but that’s where I’m going.

John Newtson: 50:41

That’s a great tangent. The embedded finance conversation is one that I wanted to have for a while. Maybe that would require a little bit more of a focus on it, because I think it is a huge area, obviously unrelated to FinPub and things, but specifically in relation to it, I think there is a lot of things that are coming in, that are out there, that again like change, user experience change, product mix, change, all kinds of things and it’s a really cool area. I haven’t really done a conversation on it because you know there’s not a lot of people who seem to be very interested in it in the community right now, and so I haven’t, but like it’s really exciting to me to hear you talking about it, because I do.

Mathieu Silverstein: 51:26

I think it’s huge, I think it’s a massive area of opportunity, so many, so many areas in it to map out some, like you know. A quick, quick aside. So Michael Milken was famous One of, I mean, other than being a junk bond king for this critical thinking time. Right, he’d be like four or five in the morning, just sit there and think about complex problems and before doing any meetings or any other kind of daily work, and just sit there and think about it. And so I sit there and think every now and then about what are all the different ways that there could be embedded finance, like what? Okay, well, what is there in the finance world already? Like, just in terms of traditional stuff, there’s insurance and estate planning. And so I write down each of those and go, I put the word embedded next to that and go, what would that be? And if it doesn’t exist, first I’ll just go lazy, I’ll go Google embedded insurance. You know, a few years ago there was nothing. No Google search results for that. Last year, googled, it came across and met a woman who’s founded this embedded insurance company and it’s like it’s incredible, embedded insurance company. And it’s like it’s incredible. I love what she’s up to and so I’ll. So I’ll continue to do that over time and evaluate all of these different areas, because that’s only going to continue to grow.

Mathieu Silverstein: 52:49

It doesn’t mean that it’s a no-brainer, because they can face really high customer acquisition costs. It can be complex to integrate. Man, if you’ve spent any time with I’m going to oversimplify for a moment but if you spent any time with some of the with quad, gpt, any of these things, it’s able to. We’re really quickly getting to this point where, if you can think it, you can build a prototype of it. And if you can build a prototype, you can actually turn it into some piece of code. And maybe you don’t become a full stack engineer just because you’re a marketer and a product person and can come up with good ideas. You could get a lot farther than you could have just a few months ago and doing these crazy things, thinking things up and Matt Paulson was mentioning recently how hard it was that someone on Twitter commented I love the heat map of all the stocks that you have on MarketBeat.

Mathieu Silverstein: 53:42

And he’s like thanks, that was a beast to build. And last week I just came across an open source version that uses generative AI and employs the TradingView API and just builds it like that. You don’t even have to code that stuff yourself anymore. So what does that mean if? And that was created by a kid who’s currently in college, and so it’s like what does that mean when these things get easier? It means to be competitive. Doesn’t just mean we need to be able to capture more attention by being awesome on social media with short form video or anything. It’s like what are the table stakes for building products that people want to use? Um, go up, and I’m not saying that we’re there where you can’t build a fin pub or a wealth factory without it, because we’re not a software company, so we’re not there yet.

Mathieu Silverstein: 54:35

But I think that even just thinking about that embedded finance, the oversimplified version was if you can drop an iframe into your membership site, that’s step one.

Mathieu Silverstein: 54:46

But if you could just even envision doing that, wow, there’s a widget there for your clients in your verticalized business where you work with a bunch of, let’s say, dentists because I know a lot of people in public will have that and hey, for dentists, here is a. You don’t have to get on the phone, we already have some information about you. Click a couple of buttons, no credit checks, and we’re going to be able to show you some really compelling funding offers for your business. That’s like a step two beyond the iframe embed, but you can do that with very little technical knowledge now. So where are the opportunities in things like that that can create personalization without the kinds of risk that we have as publishers when we get the personalization, because I don’t want to step on that right. But if you can embed another service that is doing, you can do content recommendations, but ultimately a licensed professional. You know it has to be a different company in order to button that up, but I think that embedded finance is going to really help bridge that.

John Newtson: 55:54

Yeah, and even things like insurance. Like the money in insurance is very big right, even like old school direct response, like kind of direct mail telesales. Infomercial people have, like those guys would sell leads to insurance companies, right, because they would pay out so well, especially on things like term life and things like that, and so there’s a ton of money there and things like that, and so there’s a ton of money there. And so the idea of wealth building in FinPub is very narrow, which is great from a marketing standpoint, right, there’s a lot of reasons for that. But that customer again is in his whole wealth kind of journey, has a lot of other things that he’s thinking about and talking about and spending money with. That a well construction, constructed franchise could capitalize on.

John Newtson: 56:45

And the embedded finance area is one that really just kind of takes it to another level. And then I think that, like kind of to your point of the ease of these tools out there, like the ability to do anything in finance is so much easier than it ever was. I mean you look at like Carta and things like that, just to raise SVB, um, um, special purpose SPVs, um to do things like that, and like do direct investment models direct to investor models, like there’s this explosion happening of alternate models because the the tech stuff is no longer a barrier for people. Right, it’s not a barrier.

Mathieu Silverstein: 57:21

Yeah, big time. And I think that FinPubs are sitting on a gold mine here. They probably already know it. So sorry if this is. If we think about, I remember a couple of years ago some college friends of mine from like 20, whatever yeah, 20 years ago created a little stock picking club just to meet on Zoom during the pandemic and talk about our ideas, what we see emerging, what might be a good whatever, and I remember looking I spent some time at the time it wouldn’t be a trade now but looking at Square Cash and there was a really interesting dynamic that they had at the time where their customer acquisition cost for their little banking app was like I’m going to butcher the numbers here because this is off memory was like 50 bucks. But you compare that to the customer acquisition cost for a traditional bank that was offering a similar service and that was hundreds of dollars. It’s the arbitrage there. If you think about a financial publisher, they have way lower customer acquisition costs than the guys who are directly trying to sell insurance, trying to sell banking products, trying to sell wealth management, who are like let’s go out golfing and I’m also going to take you to dinner and obviously that works. Don’t stop the things that are working. But if you can acquire a customer for 50 and build a relationship or acquire them for 100 or even 200, you still have an edge. And the FinPubs have scale and that’s one thing that I only have a 400,000 person database and had maybe like 100,000 people buy stuff from us over the 10 years. But FinPubs that were in our group here that have the scale to be able to launch an embedded finance product that, because of the scale, the distribution that they have, they could win right out the gate from rolling something like that and I think that that’s incredible. They have that arbitrage opportunity right there.

Mathieu Silverstein: 59:20

And insurance here’s a quick little story on that. One of our books that we market used to be called what Would the Rockefellers Do until the Rockefeller Family Foundation said stop using our name. So now it’s called what Would Billionaires Do, and it’s an awesome book, one of the strategies in there, where it looks at how John D Rockefeller created this like multi-generational wealth structure using trusts and using vehicles that you can emulate with overfunded whole life insurance right when you get the tax benefits upon transferring the wealth you could borrow against the cash value to invest in entrepreneurial pursuits and pay that back at whatever rate you know, whatever pace you want. People that read that book love it to such an extent that it has gone on to generate so much life insurance business for a life insurance shop that we because people would read the book and go who do I go to and we’re like you can go to? It depends you have to structure it the right way, but any reputable insurance provider. But you don’t want to work with agents who are going to try to sell you whatever let’s say, variable, universal, because people get crushed by that or anything like that. Obviously it’s not like someone might be watching this and go. I don’t like overfunded whole life, that’s okay.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:00:42

My, my, my illustration is it ended up generating so much business for the people that want because of the people that wanted to implement that structure and the people we referred to, that the two agents that we referred people to ended up becoming two of the top 10 producers at mass mutual in the country and the up becoming two of the top 10 producers at mass mutual in the country and the CEO had their cell phone.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:01:03

It was like that is not even our business and it should have been my business, I guess, but maybe I would have not thought about it the right way. That had been my business I’d be like would I be trying to just like market life insurance and then be in the same boat as everybody else who’s marketing it? Or my customer acquisition cost was $20. And everything that happened on referral on the back end if that was part of my business would have been I could have factored that into the financial model. But you could call that icing on the cake If I’m still getting. At the time I was getting 100% return on ad spend day zero or 90% return on ad spend day zero, 90% return on ad spend day zero and still had our own programs to sell. That’s where backend can be really interesting.

John Newtson: 1:01:45

Yeah, that’s what I don’t know. I feel like there was a period of time when people were a little bit more interested in kind of some of this stuff and the FinPub kind of you know, not quite collapsed, but that real massive pullback has really sucked the air out of the room on on anything other than, like, hey, we need to get back to whole, which is which makes total sense, and that’s not a criticism whatsoever, that’s just the reality of it, sure, um, and like, people are, you know, less, less experimental right now than maybe they were, obviously, when everything was flying high.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:02:24

And it makes sense. We have to be prioritizing profitability. We have to be a little more risk averse in certain ways right now than when interest rates were zero and consumers were feeling really great and going I’m going to do this thing. They were doing that every day and now the demand certainly has dropped off. You know, it’s not the. It’s not where we were a couple of years, you know, a couple of years ago. From that perspective, so I’m sure we all have our hands full with what’s the thing that’s going to work now in this environment, right Cause we can’t we can’t wish our way into a different situation with macro. We can’t control that.

John Newtson: 1:03:01

Right, right, but I do think that the issue of tools and the ease of tech development around tools everybody that I know who has a tool, trading tool, whatever that has become a bigger and bigger part of their business. I think there is a lot more demand and just acceptance of the need for or interest in investing in trading tools right as a product or service, and so I think ignoring that piece is a mistake for most people, because there is again like it’s so easy to build screeners and scanners anymore. It’s not the same you know expensive development that it used to be. Now they may not all be up to snuff the way same. You know expensive development that it used to be. Now they may not all be up to snuff the way that that you know a fully developed one is, but there’s so much interest there that a lot of the groups that I know that have them are like this is our fastest growing part of our business.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:03:50

Yeah, I think that’s going to continue.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:03:52

Yeah, I think it’s a. It’s interesting, you know. It gets me thinking, though. Like it gets me thinking, though, how do you think about R&D in the FinPub space? How should a FinPub, what are the best practices for how a FinPub thinks about where to allocate towards experimental stuff, and I don’t mean A-B testing, necessarily copy or funnels, but let’s say, let’s say product. Sometimes we see private equity by businesses and they go for profitability and get rid of the R and D side. That was like the founder was dumping a bunch back into building better experiences or building new innovative stuff, and then the business collapses right. So like, obviously it doesn’t always work just to turn it off. Where’s the space for it? And how do you think in FinPub about allocating in different economic cycles towards I don’t want to call it tinkering, I don’t even want to call it experimenting, but trying to figure out the next thing, separate from the messaging and campaign side.

John Newtson: 1:04:59

Right. So there’s a dynamic here in FinPub and maybe some people are going to get upset with me when I say this, but I had a really good conversation one time with Andrew Taylor over coffee about kind of all of the problems that hit the industry up through the FTC issues pre you know, up through you know, the FTC issues, the, a core financial getting banned on Facebook and Google, all the different stuff, the stuff even with, like the, the case against what’s his face? Who was taking money out of the table to feature stocks, like all of these issues. If you group them all together the Visa, MasterCard audits, just all the stuff from across all the companies, what you essentially have is a management failure. There were things that were not being looked at, that were not being managed. It’s a management failure and that’s a symptom of the culture that is kind of your strength is your weakness.

John Newtson: 1:06:00

We have this very marketing forward culture that is very much about customer acquisition, copy promotion, and that’s a huge strength in the industry and the standard pattern for somebody running a publishing unit is that they were a great marketer who really drove a lot of things and made things happen, and then you put them in charge of things, give them no management training whatsoever none, pretty much. And now they’re running a large, in some cases, a business that grows into the hundreds of millions. And now things start to happen. And they’re still doing what they’re great at, but things start to happen, and so that even the idea of like, well, how do you allocate towards R&D? Is a management question, and what I would bet is that, by and large, the thought isn’t crossing most people’s minds. Right, Because we’re not a very sophisticated industry from a management perspective, and that’s good and bad.

John Newtson: 1:07:04

But it’s also an area of opportunity, I think, for some people, once you get to a certain size, to really think about well, how do we manage this business better? How do we really think about that? Take your view of well, how do we look at our cash flow? How do we look at all the things that impact this? And how do we think at our cash flow? How do we look at all the things that impact this and how do we think about R&D? Because the only people who are thinking about R&D that I come across generally, with a few minor exceptions, I would say Tradesmith has their tool-based software business. You’ll think about Matt Paulson at MarketBeat. He’s very focused on development, but, by and large, the only people who are thinking about it are the marketers and copywriters, specifically in the realm of what can I sell and offer? Right, it’s offer development, and so otherwise it’s very much an area that, from my perspective, is undiscussed right.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:08:00

Yeah, so that’s interesting Cause. So a couple of thoughts at the. I remember a principle that my very basic, foundational one that when I was in my twenties, a mentor taught me. He’s like solve problems, you will get paid. You will. If you solve problems, you’re delivering value and that’s how you’re going to make, that’s how you’re going to build your wealth. So, find out what they want, go out and get it, give it to them. That’s like a simple mantra that a guy, keith Cunningham, who was like rich dad of Robert Kiyosaki, right what he said find out what they want, go out and get it and give it to them. So we do think about that as marketers. Right, we think about the solve a problem. Are there other ways to solve problems? That or are there other problems that we can solve that can be done through unique experiences? I’m looking at this.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:08:56

I saw this tweet this morning from a guy, greg Eisenberg, great marketer. I really like a lot of his content. He said when I first moved to Silicon Valley, engineers were gods. A 10x engineer could make or break a startup. And now things have changed. I studied computer science at school, so it pains me to say this, but marketers are the new engineers and attention is the new currency. So I think, based on these tools that are coming out not that this will happen overnight, but I think there are going to be some incredible innovations coming out of the marketers in FinPub because, okay, marketers are the new engineers. Here’s more from Greg Attributes of a marketer the ability to spread ideas, master the art of copywriting, speak visually, create engaging narratives, understand product psychology, build brand and community engineer distribution that’s what the FinPubs have and build dynamic funnels.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:09:50

So now, if you can take a component of your funnel or of your product and literally go to Claude and say, turn this piece of my content into an interactive widget, it will do that instantaneously. You give it to your web person and now you have it. I mean I’m oversimplifying, but that can happen. So just to prove how not much I’m oversimplifying, I saw someone last night share on Twitter a cool couple slides from BlackRock of what they saw in a couple of market dynamics in Europe. I didn’t particularly care about the content, but I went to Claude, take these two slides I just dropped the screenshots in there Create an interactive dashboard from the charts and stuff that are in these slides and then create an analysis for me as to what’s happening, and instantaneously.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:10:51

It created an interactive dashboard that presented it way better than the slides did, with charts and graphs and menu items and all kinds of stuff that were interactive. You can hover over it and you can see. And then down below was an analysis that wasn’t captured in the initial slides, because it’s able to derive that by looking at the charts, just like someone who knows what they’re doing might be able to. Now you don’t want to take that as factual, that it didn’t make an error, but generally, if you’re a marketer and you can take a screenshot of a chart and you can drop it in and create an interactive dashboard of that data immediately. That takes one minute.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:11:34

And if you don’t have time in your life to play for one minute a day, even just to get the ideas turning, because no, someone’s probably not going to like buy because you put an interactive chart on your sales letter, but can we build that muscle? For as marketers, we build that muscle, for how do we show what we’re trying to sell? How do we prove it? How do we show? So this is just another way of showing it right. So we have the muscle, for how do we show and convey these ideas and demonstrate. We now have even more ways to demonstrate at our fingertips. I don’t know which methods of demonstration are going to be the highest converting, but you could start to create uniqueness in your business differentiation if you replace a piece of content or something static in your product with something interactive. Your conversion doesn’t get made or broken by putting that in your product, but allows you to experiment with that and at least provide possibly a different or a better user experience.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:12:42

You get the feedback from your customers and if they like it and go wow, then maybe you can look at how could I turn that into a marketing tool or how could I get that wow. On the other end and that’s how I try to think about that Lower risk to put a better productized experience into our products that people have already bought. Get the feedback, productize experience into our products that people have already bought. Get the feedback and if people like it, is there a hook there that would resonate with people that haven’t bought yet? And can I use that for engagement or to get them to opt?

John Newtson: 1:13:10

in or anything like that. No, that’s awesome. I think you’re right. I think that’s a path of development here for marketers.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:13:17

You know I think about your.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:13:18

You know we’ve talked about before. I love when we’re at the conference and you have your, your. Your kids are learning entrepreneurship by helping with, by helping with everything there, and I’m sure they’re doing more with you too and I love that. And as my six-year-old’s getting into dad, how do I, how do I make money? I want to make money so I can buy more Legos. Um, we look at how do we make it fun and I think about on marketing to adults. The answer is not just like make it entertaining and go viral on TikTok. That doesn’t necessarily as we’ve discussed in our groups here, that doesn’t necessarily translate cleanly to buyer intent. But if you can make the experience delightful, then they’re more likely to retain the information. So I think about that with my kid when I’m teaching him about money and entrepreneurship. So there’s this like AI tool, suno right, where you could literally just think an idea for a song or you could write the lyrics or any combination of, and within five seconds you have a song. So I went okay, summer project, because we were having a lot of fun with this. He said my band name is Muffins in a Hot Tub. I was like what’s that? He said I just made it up. Great, you know what I was like. That would be a great.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:14:30

I wrote the whole song in my head within a few seconds, just because I like doing that. I’ve always liked doing that stuff. But it was going to be style of Ramones Muffins anyway. Style of like Ramones, um muffins anyway. So so I’ve got like a punk punk song, go to Suno, drop it in. You’ve got a banger here and I went okay, here’s what we’re going to do this summer. If you have other songs you want to create for your friends things that you’re doing we’re going to publish them on Spotify through CD. Baby, 10 bucks to do like. So now, his song.

John Newtson: 1:14:58

He’s got an album cover his’s on Spotify.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:15:00

Yeah, you could go find it in your in your local.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:15:01

Spotify. But I was like here’s how we’ll make that fun. It’s hard to make money as an artist. It doesn’t mean you’re going to make money on this. In fact it may be a good experience to learn that you can have fun and create something that’s delightful, but it’s really hard to make money. But like, let’s just see, let’s publish it and let’s make some swag print on demand shirts and maybe a couple of your friends want them and maybe you make five bucks and if you do, that’s the first $5 ever made in an entrepreneurial pursuit. And maybe that’s not enough to be a business. Maybe you learned it’s really hard to sell. Maybe you learn it’s really hard to make something work, but you got that, you started to build that muscle and you can go back on that.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:15:45

So, as we’re experimenting as busy business owners and as busy marketers and we’re going to live and die by, can we figure out the next promo, the next product that resonates? There is some low drag experimental stuff that we can do with some of these tools that are really compressing the time from idea to prototype, and I’m excited about that and that’s why I think, with distribution, that FinPub has the ability to acquire a customer. So the customer acquisition costs, arbitrage for banking products and other products that have higher stick or higher lifetime value or are significantly more competitive. Who can think about how to connect with people? And you can think a mini product solution into existence or at least a prototype of it, a working prototype. I am extraordinarily bullish on seeing, like, what innovation comes out of this, because it’s going to we’re going to see it in like now yeah, no, I agree with you.

John Newtson: 1:16:38

I think that’s the thing and, like, the more people who are thinking about it and playing with it, uh, the more stuff that’ll come up, for sure. Um, I love that. The music I’ve seen that in, like, uh, that’s like, that’s a cool way to do it. I love the idea, like with my kids, I do the after the event, like I force them to do pnls and like everything else and like then, of course, it starts the the most, most annoying part, which is, um, they try and renegotiate their fee for like, oh, yeah, yeah, but that’s good Cause. I’m like okay, let’s talk about this negotiation tactic here.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:17:15

Yeah, come on, kids, never split the difference.

John Newtson: 1:17:17

Let’s make this right yeah.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:17:18

Yeah, my kid is becoming a fierce negotiator, but they’re engaged, they’re thinking about it. It’s amazing and it’s like they’re not viewing it as work as much as enjoying solving the problem. Right, yeah, and my kid’s only sub seven years old, but like so I created this GPT called Dream Factory, and it was. He can speak anything into the app. And I created this GPT called dream factory, and it was. He can speak anything into the app and it’ll create a bedtime story for him.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:17:45

And but the twist on this one was that every story teaches a lesson in entrepreneurship or investing. So you may go. Is that obnoxious? But like it’s still the story he wants to hear. It’s just that the octopus, or whatever it has to solve a problem by collaborating with the clownfish in order to blah, blah, solve the problem, in order for them to have an undersea lemonade stand or something. And it’s like it gets those reps in. And as adults, how do we get our reps in that mimic play but have business use case? And that’s how I like to think about how to fit in R&D when we still have to turn a profit every day and keep the lights on.

John Newtson: 1:18:25

Yeah, that’s very cool. That’s a great point. That’s a great point, awesome. Well, I appreciate you doing this man. This is a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming to FMS and being a part of the FMS Pro community too. You’re a cool addition into the ecosystem here and, yeah, I can’t wait to hear more about what you know, what you guys are doing next and what else. And if anyone wants to connect with Matt uh, you know I’m happy to make connections. You can find them on LinkedIn. You can find them at WealthFactory. You can find them in FMS pro.

Mathieu Silverstein: 1:18:53

Um so yeah, thanks, man. Thanks, john. Love the FMS community, fms community, excited to continue being a part of it and grateful for what you’re doing and you’re touching so many lives and helping people like me connect with other people and the thoughts. I mean. You have such a wealth of knowledge about it and it’s opening a lot of doors to how I think about the world and how I can deliver value to my customers now and next year and the year after and the year after. So thank you for everything that you do.

John Newtson: 1:19:19

Appreciate that, thanks man, yeah, all right, take care Bye.