I already know it's the creative spaces show. Do you consider yourself a creator? I think
it's really, since they started publishing the newsletter that I became maybe a little bit more confident in saying that, Hey, yeah, I am a creator and
that's the business Inquirer. Yep, exactly. At least to me, you are prototypical modern industrialist. I use the term to describe somebody who's creator, investor, entrepreneur. And the reason I say that is it seems like the things you're working on as an entrepreneur now are directly related to your work as a creator. And I'm guessing if you're not investing yet, you will be someday just based on the areas that you have chosen to create and building. So, what do you create?
I think it's relatively
easy to define the term creator, right? But I think it's a bit harder to define a creation price, but for this conversation, we'll steer it towards the side of a couple of things. Right? One, we even share ideas. That's why I publish a free weekly newsletter called the business acquire. I'm the founder of transact Philly, which is a. Software business. So that's three, our recently launched two DeLeo, which is a business to diligence marketplace for. Yeah. So I think
so how do you build up your audience now? I'll say
I think a huge caveat. I don't have a big one. So I have maybe, I don't know, a hundred Twitter followers. I have 600 newsletter subscribers, and this is the first podcast I've been invited. So number one, I don't think you need a big audience. I think you need the right audience. I think right now there's a lot of conversation about how many followers do you have Instagram? So I don't think that's the right conversation.
And I'll tell you that the thing has, that has worked for me to build the right audience is really to share my ideas, gr content in relative communities. That's one. And then number two, that I think I started doing more recently is built in public. Whether it's sharing the progress while you're doing on Twitter or sharing an idea on kernel or sharing the newsletter and a particular community. I think those are the key just fearing relevant content. Yeah. Public. Yeah. That makes sense.
Yeah. So it seems to be working so far for you. It has, I'll tell you this little story. So this I've had this idea for a little bit. I have an idea of basically building micro acquire, but from no code project and that today in this town where I'm like, okay, I got to explore this a little bit more because I think it's a great. I posted the idea and online and the group called trends. I posted the idea there. I got a bunch of replies to people like, yeah. Oh my God, they're great.
I think I'm looking for it to buy a no code project. I think that doing diligence on a no-code project, that's super easy. So there's less friction to buying and selling a no-code business. So they like to have a little bit of validation. I post those at the same idea on a kernel, K E R N dot a L. It's a new community where anyone can share a business idea and a get feedback on it. Get collaborators. If anyone wants to help build it and investors, depending on. So I showed the idea on kernel.
I tweeted it out immediately. The Colonel folks retweeted, it included Andrew gets Decky and it sends the founder might require even back messaged to me. Yes. I love this idea of micro required for X. It should be more of these. Let's do it. Then on the kernel platform, another person commented saying, Hey, this is awesome. Uh, I'm an expert at building community. I'm going to help you build a community around this. This happened between 10 30 or 11:00 AM. And right now it's 1:11 PM.
Wow. I think that's a prime example. You don't need 20,000 subscribers unless you're promoting fifth, it's better to have a hundred followers, but the right followers, but then a thousand of random not targeted.
I'm interested about how you think about that, because you talk about really technical topics. When I think of the topics that you really focus on for your work, it's like the only people interested in this already know the definition of private sector. And they're actively looking at transactions in the 10 to 10 million range. And they're in many cases doing this entirely online and that's something that most of the world doesn't even know can happen.
I know it took my dad four or five years to realize that I could actually make money on them. How do you go about thinking about that sort of audience size issue? Or is that even an issue to you given that your topics are so specialized?
Yeah, I'll be honest. That's not something I thought about. Um, when they launched the newsletter, I was doing it for fun. I was doing it too as a creative outlet and yeah, I didn't even think about who's the audience, how they want me to talk to them. These businesses that I highlight in the newsletter. I just thought what's interesting to me, what value can I provide?
And that took some time also, it wasn't right away that I got the format and the found my voice, all of these things really happened over the last maybe couple of weeks where I finally feel like the newsletter is my voice, it's in the right format. And it adds the right amount of value. And I launched it seven months ago, six months ago. So. That's something that happened right away.
How do you go about monetizing now? That's the million dollar
question, right? So today, uh, really only one of my projects this month. And that's transactionally, that's the legal tech software business. The newsletter is free and I don't have any sponsors to Dalio. The business to tell was marketplace it's too early to monetize. Transactionally is monetized just as a normal monthly subscription typically. And I think the newsletter is really going to be a promotion tool for do Teleo for the due diligence marketplace, as well as, or the no code.
Mark. Are you
interested in starting another marketplace at the same time? Yeah, I am. I got one for you. So my theory, whenever you're building marketplace technology niches is that you copy paste it, or you should copy paste it into as many related ones as you can at once.
And so if I look at micro acquire, which wants to be focused on SAS, then the unbundling of it, where I see things that don't fit on micro acquire right now are things with service revenue, things that are no code, and then things that are pre. I'm not sure about the pre-revenue one. It seems like people do buy and sell those on micro choir, but I'm not sure if that's really the place for that sort of validated, but not yet grown idea.
Yeah. I agree. I think all of everything that, you know, all the marketplaces that I'm launching are unbundling or something else I to Dalio's on the un-bundling of Upwork and Catalent, the other ones. For no-code, there's an unbundling of Mike required. I 100% agree. I think, I think that's the right strategy.
What's your north star metric for success? Yeah.
An easy question to answer. I think personal metric of success is just be happy and engaged with what I'm doing. So working on something. Learning that brings me more connections. I think that's a personal metric of success from a business standpoint. I really want to have three or four businesses that I enjoy working on. Each one brings me certain amount of cashflow, but that's really my north star for today. I think that's yes. Yeah, I know. They go hand in hand.
Yeah. Yeah. What to optimize for lifestyle? Um, I don't have an interest in kind of building the next Facebook or. Something huge. That's not my goal, but the people that I really admire are really the ones that have a great lifestyle are engaged. Have a couple of days, businesses says working on different things, have good relationships. That's my both business and a person star. So what's
your current goal as a creator then?
One of the beautiful things about being a creator is that it opens up a lot of opportunities. And many of them are really unexpected. If a year ago you told me that I was having useful letter and working on two marketplaces, I would say, there's no way that's going to happen today. Here I am. I want to make sure that as these opportunities come, I'm really taking full advantage of them and not letting them slip. Yeah, that's a little bit of a broad
answer. So let's get into some specifics. Then
next goal is fro Fidelio. I launched that about a month and a half ago, so I think there's a good amount of work to do there. And then the second goal is to launch a different marketplace, uh, micro acquire, just for no code businesses. I really want to be better at growing a scaling a project. I think one of the things I'm good at is launching and taking action. What. Not so good at is really growth and scaling something. I want to be better at the marketing part.
I want to be better at building partnerships. Could you
elaborate on that? I mean, is there a learning plan in place for you to develop a growth
plan? Yes, I was the first, I think I'm starting to reach out to more people that are good at growth and just getting on conversations with them and, yeah, that's the first step is just getting. Number two is I think being more deliberate about it when you're coming up with ideas and launch thing everything's fast and topsy-turvy, and when you're trying to grow something and scale it, I really do think you need a more methodical approach.
You need to figure out, okay, these are the resources that I have. How can I deploy those resources to grow this project? And the most efficient.
So that's just partnerships. You keep doing partnerships and then you keep doing partnerships and then eventually you have enough money that you can set up a paid ad budget, and then you keep doing partnerships, retargeting the people with ads that you do, partners just to keep partnerships. That's what I needed to hear. Yeah. Like you find newsletters with 500 to a thousand reads.
You go out and you partner with those newsletters to do a swap of mentions and a little classified style ads in each of yours. And then you do two of those every week. And then in two months you'll be at 5,000.
Got it. So I need to get better. Yeah, methodical.
Very methodical. Yeah. I'm so bad at doing it myself, but I do it for clients and I know I need to start doing it for myself because that's just the steadiest growth you can get. If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And you get to choose the story.
And they get to choose the start booth. Oh man. I think I'm just start. I think that's the biggest kind of advice that I give to anyone that asks is if you're thinking of doing something just dark and I wish that we just started to use letter earlier. I wish I started my entrepreneurial journey earlier. Everything that I'm doing now, I wish I started earlier. So that's the big three I would send to myself.