Send & Grow by SparkLoop

EP 32 - Anthony Castrio
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Anthony Castrio: [00:00:00] Then we ran Facebook ads pointing directly to that landing page. So we were getting people to click and subscribe for like 1. 50. At first it was like 1 each to get somebody to subscribe. And then we'd have the Sparkloop widget pop up. Wow. And we were making like 1 or 2 per referral. And so it was basically Sparkloop payout at the time was completely covering our marketing cost for like the first month or two.

So it was just like, alright, that's much money. I can afford to put in there, put in there. And so we were able to grow really fast.

Dylan Redekop: Welcome to the send and grow podcast. I'm your host, Dylan Rettigop. In my day job at Sparkloop, I spent all my time analyzing how the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world grow and monetize their audiences.

I get a behind the scenes look at how they're growing their newsletters and driving revenue. And there is so much to learn from their success and from their mistakes. With this podcast, you get that access too. Every week I sit down with a different guest from industry [00:01:00] experts to successful operators and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know about so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your newsletter.

Today I'm joined on the podcast by Anthony Castrillo, creator of Bot Eat Brain, an irreverent five day a week newsletter about all things AI. BodyBrain published its first edition back in September 2022, but a lot has changed in the AI space since then. ChatGBT hadn't even been released yet. But Anthony's not only been keeping up, he's been taking advantage of the exponential demand for AI content.

BodyBrain reaches over 20, 000 inboxes and earned just shy of 60, 000 in 2023. But what impressed me the most in this conversation is Anthony's process driven mindset. He's managed to scale and automate growth, content creation, and revenue to the point where he's largely hands off, spending only a few hours a week on Body Brain.

In this episode, you'll learn how he's doing it, plus how Anthony used a public challenge to get his first 1, 000 subscribers, how he scaled from 1, 000 to 20, 000 [00:02:00] subscribers in four months, and how he hires and trains writers to create high quality content, and a lot more. Anthony, I'm so thrilled to have you here.

Thanks for joining us on the send them girl podcast. Can you start off by giving us a dive into the story of body brain and how it all

Anthony Castrio: got started? All right. Well, hello, my name is Anthony Castro. I'm writing a newsletter called the bot eat brain. We do a daily recap of everything happening in artificial intelligence.

I've been running it for about a year, a little bit over our target reader would be USA based professional who. Working a white collar job and wants to get more efficient at it. So they're looking for education, news, and like hacks, I guess, like things that they can use to get better at their jobs. So sometimes that looks like, Oh, here's a cool new tool and how to use it.

And sometimes here it's like, you know, here's a whole new technology and how you could build your startup idea around it, that's our core demo, I would say. It's [00:03:00] usually like, okay, like what problem do I personally have? And then can I somehow monetize solving that for myself? So Body Brain started as like, you know, a year ago, it's like Dali came out and OpenAI was just launching things every day, it seemed.

And then everybody was launching something every day. I felt a huge amount of FOMO around it. Just everything in the space. I was like, I'm missing the boat. I gotta figure out what's going on. I gotta learn. And I was like, okay, well, I have so much to learn. It's going to take me a while before I can build anything.

So can I make a business out of the learning?

Dylan Redekop: I noticed you started the, the body brain newsletter. I think it was your first edition. I went back in the archives and your first edition was like in September of last year of 2022 and like chat GBT hadn't even been released yet. I mean, AI was definitely prevalent in our lives, even at that point.

But you know, what we saw at spark loop, especially is. Once ChatGPT was released, we saw quite an influx of AI newsletters. There were some still [00:04:00] prior, but you know, there's that many more talking about ChatGBT and, you know, prompt engineering and all that sort of stuff. So what was like, did you have the gift of foresight that this was going to be kind of a profitable niche or a popular niche?

Or was it, was it more just around like, I want to learn this. And so how can I kind of double down on learning and. Making something out of

Anthony Castrio: it. Uh, the hype was already very real by September of last year because Dolly three dropped and people were losing their shit mid journey. I think it's just started coming out with stuff too.

There was a lot of demos, so it was already trending on Twitter. It was already big news. And then it just kept kind of spiraling up from there. I think even chat GPT three was out already, but it wasn't behind like this really easy to use interface yet because there was like a GPT one and two right as well.

But for a while, those were just research projects when people were already excited about what they could do with it. But it wasn't like chat GPT blew up in part because it was so easy to use. It's just like a web app. Anybody knows how to use a web app. [00:05:00] That's what, when it really started to blow up, but Dali was our and stable diffusion and all that was already out when we started and was already kind of crossing the Rubicon.

I guess. I don't know if I'm just using that metaphor where it made it easy for anybody to generate. Images. So it had fully arrived. I'm, I'm no genius. I was just, uh, following the trends.

Dylan Redekop: That's awesome. So in terms of, you know, launching a newsletter, most people launch a newsletter with very few subscribers quite often zero, or maybe they have a bit of an audience built up on social media.

And. Can start with a few subscribers. So can you talk to us about sort of what that journey was for you launching buddy brain? How long, you know, did you have a bunch of subscribers off the hop? Or what was what was that process like in growing kind of to the 1st 1000 subscribers?

Anthony Castrio: Yeah, it took a few months to get to the 1st 1000, even though I had.

A few thousand followers at the time on Twitter already, I forget exactly how many, I think it would [00:06:00] have been around like 6, 000 at the time, but there wasn't necessarily a huge overlap, or at least the way I was approaching the content. Between my Twitter, like my Twitter audience was very much focused around like indie hacking building public and this I wanted to be focused more around like people trying to learn about AI and interested in the news, maybe who aren't even on Twitter already, because I'm going to, you know, at first I was just getting my news from Twitter and repackaging it as a newsletter that was the MVP or having my friends write about what they know and so the first 50, Mm hmm.

Subscribers, I just DMed people I respected and my friends on Twitter and said, Hey, I'm going to write a thing. It's going to be good. Can I sign you up as a beta reader? That's how we got our first 50, even close to our first hundred came from just sending personalized DM invitation, invitations to people to read my newsletter that I hadn't written yet.

I think I published the first issue to maybe like 50 people, maybe a hundred [00:07:00] and just focused on trying to make something really good that hopefully they would share. Especially because I did all the manual outreach, like, on average, our readers had themselves an audience of like, at least 10, 000 people each, I would say, that first 50.

Dylan Redekop: I was just curious about the first 50, in terms of their audience size, did you specifically target people who both would Potentially be interested in, but also like advantageously maybe promote it to their larger audiences. Or was it, was it less strategic in that way? Yeah,

Anthony Castrio: it was pretty strategic. I was like, I want people who kind of get what it means to build an audience because I want their feedback on how to build this audience.

It's like, let me find people whose feedback matter. Like they know what they're talking about. So when they give me their feedback, I know that I should take it. First 50 took like. Maybe a week first thousand took like three months or so and like I kind of lost motivation At first from like September to December I was posting maybe at first three times a week and then once a week and then I think we had a two month low Well, I [00:08:00] just stopped posting we had around 500 subscribers maybe less and I just kind of like got bored of the idea got distracted moved away and then Chat GPT came out and suddenly the hype got really big again.

My FOMO came back and I was like, man, I got to do this now or never. I start actually started a newsletter growth challenge. Again, just trying to like scratch my own itch called speed run 1000, where the goal was like, everybody who's writing a newsletter, we're going to have like a newsletter growth challenge and see who can get to a thousand subscribers the fastest.

I didn't even win that challenge. Uh, I think Kate from no code exits beat me in my own challenge, but I still managed to ask like five or 600. New subscribers there. So that was a good leg up and that got me to almost a thousand and then what finally got me over the edge is I was like, all right, like, I mean, my main bottleneck right now is like getting this written every day, like making sure the newsletter actually goes out.

I'm having trouble staying motivated doing that. So let me like pre sell my next [00:09:00] month of ads so that now I have a financial obligation to publish. So I dropped my ad. Well, we'd only sold like one ad to that point. So I was like, okay, the ads are worth something. People are willing to pay for an ad. Let me drop the price because they were like 100 for one.

Let me drop it down to. 5 for an ad and see if I could just sell out all my ads. And we sold out all of the ads in like a day. And so I was like, okay, I guess I have to write the newsletter for the rest of the month. And then I was like, okay, let me raise the prices and hire a writer. And then we were finally off to the races in like February

Dylan Redekop: of this year.

And so how many, how many subscribers did you have at that point when you were selling ads for like five bucks when you took it from 100 down to like five and tried to try to sell that out? I

Anthony Castrio: think we had maybe just around a thousand when I sold the first ad for like a hundred bucks. Okay. And it helped us get new subscribers too, because again, my audience is like business builders, indie hackers and stuff on Twitter.

So they saw that tweet and were like, Oh, let me check out the newsletter. We started running ads and things and growing the newsletter. So we started growing a lot faster and raising were [00:10:00] able to, I was able to basically like double my ad price, like four or five times in a row in the first month or two.

Until we were finally at like a 20 CPM or something around there.

Dylan Redekop: And so you went from basically a thousand dollars or a thousand subscribers. And, you know, fast forward to today, you're at or above 20, 000 subscribers for body

Anthony Castrio: brain. Yeah. It basically took us like six months to get from zero to a thousand, like.

Figure that out. And then it took me once I got some like mentorship around like how to grow my newsletter better and like learned how to do paid ads and things. We grew from a thousand to 20, 000 basically in the next four months. And then we've, I've been keeping it around 20, 000, like with list pruning and everything since then.

So it's like long, slow period. Straight to 20, 000, then like kind of plateau again. And now it's like, all right, what do I want to do next? Do I want to double the size again to like 40, 000? Um, do I want to do it the same [00:11:00] way? Um, but yeah, if I could just teleport my brain back in time to September, it'd be so much

Dylan Redekop: faster.

No kidding. You know, that's a pretty significant growth cause it took you six months to get 2000. And then, you know, four months to get, you know, 20 X that. So can you give us like a breakdown of different things you were doing to grow the newsletter in that timeframe?

Anthony Castrio: In the zero to 1000 or 1000 to 20, 000,

Dylan Redekop: the one to 20, where you just like went up into the right for growth.

Anthony Castrio: So that's when we started using spark loop basically. So I had a great friend and mentor and the web three daily guys. So if you're familiar with that newsletter, it's very similar. Daily news about crypto. And so those founders were already a member of my like indie hackers community, Indie Worldwide.

And I was like, okay, these guys have like built the same business. Let me talk their ear off. And I just started talking to them like every day. They're like, okay, you got to set up spark loop. You got to do Facebook ads. You got to run your pipeline like this. And so what worked for us at the [00:12:00] time was like one, we had a body brain has mostly been published on beehive.

And so we had like this really good dedicated. Subscribe page where it just said, you know, body brain, your drunk uncle with a PhD tells you the latest in AI news subscribe. So that was like a really clear CTA, like a great landing page. And then we ran Facebook ads pointing directly to that landing page, not even using like Facebook forums, just like go sign up here.

And like, yeah, I was really good, you know, so we were getting people to click and subscribe for like a dollar 50 at first it was like a dollar each to get somebody to subscribe and then we'd have the sparkly budget pop up and we were making like a dollar or 2 per referral. And so it was basically sparkly payout at the time was completely covering our marketing costs for like the first month or 2, so it's just like, all right, as much money as I can afford to put in there, put in there.

And so we were able to grow really fast. Eventually, like, the payouts on Sparkle went down a bit, the ad price on Facebook went [00:13:00] up a bit, and it was like, okay, let's go for, like, more sustainable growth. But, yeah, there was some fuel on that fire at first, for sure. And it was a really dead simple pipeline. I mean, it still is.

We still run that. We just, I just don't put, you know, I, for a while I was spending like five, 10, 000 a month on it. It was like, Oh, I'm just going to get it back right away. Might as well. Yeah. But now we spend like, you know, a 10th of that at most, maybe, maybe a thousand dollars a month at the most.

Dylan Redekop: Now. Got it.

And you were talking about how you had your, your newsletter ads at a certain, at a certain point at a thousand subscribers, you'd drop them all the way down to. Five bucks, obviously, then, you know, you said you were able to increase those a number of times. So what's your, what are your, um, ad rates, you know, now for a, a 20, 000 subscriber newsletter about, uh, AI

Anthony Castrio: and so on.

Yeah, nowadays. So we have about 22, 000 readers, open rates, like 41 percent usually, and usually try to get our, the CPA for, for the advertisers in our newsletter. are typically around 2 or [00:14:00] CPC. I mean, I don't know what their CPAs are. Typically the cost per click below 2 for them. So we charge right now, 949 for three issues.

So that works out to three, about 300 bucks an issue. But the majority of sponsors end up doing like a pack of five or more and they get a 20 percent discount. So they're usually spending. A bit under 300 an issue. Sometimes like they're buying lots, they might get it closer to like two 50 or less. Yeah.

And then we have, that's for like the main sponsorship because we find that's about the rate where it's profitable for our sponsors and keeps up, keeps them returning. Uh, cause that's really been the backbone for these last like five months is repeat. Repeat buyers.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. Which makes everybody's lives a lot easier when you're not having to always source out new, new advertisers and new sponsors.

So you don't even offer a single edition ad spot. Pretty

Anthony Castrio: much. No. If somebody really wants one, we'll do it. But we're like, you know, it's going to be expensive. You're not going to. Get the [00:15:00] return. I don't want the other reasons. I don't like to do just the one office like one. If it's a bad issue, then you're kind of getting screwed.

Whereas if you do 3 issues, the chances of all 3 of them being a dud is very low. Like, you're gonna you're gonna get. The performance that you're looking for, I'll make a guarantee on it, you know, if they're buying at least three to five issues, then I can be like, yeah, I can guarantee you this rate because if one's a dud, I can run one more issue and fix it for you.

But if you just buy one, I can't really guarantee anything. So I don't think it's a good test. And they end up spending too much money, but it's just like, and it's a good litmus test too. Like the kind of sponsors you want are the ones who are like, yeah, put me down for five. That's the test. But the ones who are like, yeah, maybe we'll do one.

They're also like, give me a big discount on one issue. And I'm like, no, we have returning sponsors who we save those discounts for because they're buying 10 issues. So if you want to skip the queue, there's not enough space to do that.

Dylan Redekop: And so right now you are running a weekly edition. Is that correct? We post up to

Anthony Castrio: every, [00:16:00] sometimes every day of the week this month, we've slowed down because it's the end of the year.

So there's not as, there's not as much sponsorship interest in December as there was in like November. But yeah, we typically post five days a

Dylan Redekop: week and what is, so what would be, I mean, we could do some simple math here, but what would be a typical month in revenue if you do have all your additions sold out

Anthony Castrio: average about 5, 000 a month, I'll usually do my sales like every other month.

And part of like the benefit of keeping prices a bit lower and focusing on repeat buyers and big, bigger packages is that, you know, three or four sales might be a month of sales done. Cause. There by multiple issues. So I've been finding like over these last four or five months, we're in a cadence where it's like, you know, September, I'm going to sell out September and October, October, I have nothing left to sell.

So I'm not going to make any money that month, but September, I made like 7 grand October. I made like 2 in November, you know, 6 again, December. I don't know, zero maybe, and then [00:17:00] January it's like eight, so it's been like every other month, but over the last like four or five months, it's averaged about five grand from just like sponsorship

Dylan Redekop: revenue.

Are you able to share what kind of the overall revenue for 2024 has been for BodyBrain? Let me pull it

Anthony Castrio: up. Well, it's about the same. So 5, 000 times 12, that's 60 grand, I guess, because for a while we were making, I mean, there were a couple of months where we got 10 K from sparkly.

Dylan Redekop: Yeah. From using upscribe,

Anthony Castrio: right?

Cause we were spending so much on marketing that they was all just coming back to us. I like to prefer to what I'm thinking about the health of the business, just focus on what are people paying us directly? Because that's like, to me, that's real money where it's like. Return from like spark loop and things aren't real money.

If we had to spend a dollar 50 to make a dollar 49, like it's a rebate. It's not really revenue. So just on the ad side, it's been like 36 grand, like a bit under 40, I guess. And then once you add in referrals and stuff like that, [00:18:00] like total revenue is like 60 or something

Dylan Redekop: and body brain. Is that your full time revenue

Anthony Castrio: generator?

So body brain, I set up to be a pretty easy business to run. Like these days it takes me, you know, a couple hours a week to run body brain because we have brighter writing most of the issues. Like I said, the sales, that's usually like a couple of days job once or twice a month. And it's a machine, it just keeps going.

My other full time job is running the Indie Worldwide community, which is the community I ran that newsletter challenge on. It's something I've been working on for like five plus years now, I guess. It's a community of startup founders. Like our unofficial tagline is like the ADHD founder community, because everybody seems to have, you know, six projects that they're working on and a million ideas.

And it exists to give that kind of founder some structure. So it's like, okay, I'm working on my own. How do I stay motivated day to day? [00:19:00] We have this accountability group where you can show up every day. You can do virtual coworking. You've got like a 15 minute daily stand up where you can set your goals for the day, check in and it keeps you accountable.

And then it's like, okay, you know, I'm a founder making five grand a month. How do I meet other people who are doing that? Especially if I don't live in like San Francisco or New York city or one of these startup hubs. So we do one on one introductions between you and other founders making similar revenues.

So you can just go straight into that, like peer relationship or finding a mentor or mentee. And then we host like challenges. So we did a speed run in 1000 newsletter growth challenge. We did a Twitter growth challenge this year. And previously we did like get a hundred users in a hundred days challenge that we're going to be running again in January should be when that starts.

It

Dylan Redekop: seems like your hands, you've got your hands quite full with indie worldwide. You've managed to scale growth to, to a good degree for body brain. I guess what I noticed at the beginning of body brain, you published, you wrote and published a lot of it yourself. And then, you know, you started, it looked like you started hiring on or getting people to write for you, publishing [00:20:00] additions.

You still wrote some yourself as well, but I noticed there were other people publishing for you. So could you talk to us a little bit about, I guess, when you decided to hire writers and at what point, like how you found that to be, you know, that point of like, yes, I can afford to do this. Or were you making a bet on the newsletter?

Kind of taking some money sort of out of your own pocket before the newsletter was profitable

Anthony Castrio: in hiring them. Yeah. From day one, I knew I wanted to hire writers because the goal from day one was a daily newsletter just because of the economics of it. You know, if you, you can make 200 once a week from an ad, or you can make 200.

Five times a week from the same audience. It was like, okay, no brainer. Publish five times a week. You make five times as much money. There's no way I can write a newsletter five times a week and have it be any good. So yeah, right away I wanted to hire writers. At first I was like, all right, I'm going to recruit my friends and then we'll each like write once a day, once a week, and then we'll do it that way.

That didn't really work out. I got some great [00:21:00] articles from my friends, but most people that are like building stuff in AI don't want to write a newsletter about AI. So it ended up making more sense to hire writers and then just train them how to find the right information and like think critically and ask the right questions and things like that.

And so we, I was able to actually start hiring writers around the time of the speed run challenge, I think is when we. Maybe even a little bit before. So a

Dylan Redekop: few months into the newsletter. Uh,

Anthony Castrio: yeah, a few months in one, I think after I already did that ad sale. So one, it just like proved to myself that this thing can make money and like people will read it and click on the ads.

And then like that hype made a friend interested in like being a part of the business side. So he's like, sell me part of the newsletter I want in. It was like, okay, you know, we had like only a thousand subscribers at the time. I was like, I'll sell you 20 percent of the newsletter for 10, 000. So I got 10, 000 in the bank to then go hire writers and run ads with in a less [00:22:00] risky way.

So that was great. So then I was, that's when we started spending much more money on ads. And also when I was able to hire, uh, newsletter writers without feeling like it was this huge risky move because I knew we had this runway. Yeah. And so we found our first writers on the very first ones, probably Upwork.

I found a guy on Reddit who was just like posting and like entrepreneur subreddits. I just sent him a DM. He's like, Hey, you want to help me? You want to work on this? He was like looking for an internship or something and then hired some friends like people off of Twitter and stuff like that. And then yeah, I can talk more about like our process for training writers and things like that if it's interesting.

I

Dylan Redekop: would be curious to hear about how you, um, yeah, because you obviously had a process of Sourcing the information, curating it, and then, you know, writing either your opinion or your, the, the, the update on it. So yeah, if you, if you could give a little bit of a background to what your process was like for people, a hiring, like, how did you know the right people to hire?

Were you hiring just good writers or people who were like writing about AI specifically? And then how did you, how did you go about training them?

Anthony Castrio: Yeah. [00:23:00] So I landed on hiring people who were just good writers. Turned out to be the. The better decision because, um, the AI news, like most of the time we weren't writing technical tutorials and so we didn't need somebody with a PhD.

We just needed somebody who was technical enough to understand what was going on and summarize it and be able to learn quickly. So the way we found who was good is like, I don't know who's going to be good ahead of time. I don't know if you're writing sample was actually written by you, but there's a few things that I found that helped.

So one was like in any posting include like. Okay. You know, describe to me what I'm asking for in this post helped filter out a lot of people who were just mass applying or who didn't speak English well enough to write a newsletter in English. And then of the, there were usually a couple of standouts where like, they really understood the prompt.

I tried to put a lot of personality into the posting. And if I saw that coming back in the voice of the newsletter, it's like, okay, cool. I know they can write in the voice of the newsletter. And I would hire up to three at a time to do a, [00:24:00] an issue and then the just keep the best, you know, one or two out of the batch.

So I might hire like four people at a time for a trial and they keep the best one or two on in the future and give them more issues to write. That worked out pretty well. And then to help them, we created this really kind of like in depth template of like, here's, A bunch of different news sources.

Here's a bunch of different things to search on Twitter. We take a lot of stuff out of like directly out of research papers. So it's like, here's what Arxiv is. Here's how to look for good papers there. Here's how to read a research paper. If you've never done that before. So like a lot of documentation and looms and just like.

Giving people a week or two to kind of ramp up the flag, you know, they write the article, I tear it to pieces, make a loom about why each thing, how to make each part better and then give it back to them a few of those cycles. And they end up being pretty good writers pretty quickly and then helping them kind of create creating a template like a structure.

So you're never starting from a blank page. So each section is already kind of mapped out. It's like fill in the blanks a lot of the time for [00:25:00] like the daily munch part. And then for the main articles, try to use like this question based approach flag. Yeah. Okay, this is the topic, you know, explain it to me like I'm five and now why does that matter?

Like, why do I care about that? Like, all right, you've said they've got, you know, AI widgets. What's an AI widget? What does it do? Why do I care? How's it gonna affect my life? Those kind of questions. And I think our training is actually really solid because we get really good writers and they ramp up really quickly.

That's

Dylan Redekop: awesome. It sounds like a Pretty dialed in process. I'm curious what, is there anything in terms of, you know, growth and monetization? What would be your advice to, you know, a new newsletter publisher who is kind of seeing the opportunity, maybe not necessarily in AI as you did, but in. In a niche or a market, what would be like your number one piece of advice to somebody who's kind of starting up looking to grow a newsletter and make a real business out of it?

Yeah,

Anthony Castrio: I think the first thing is having a really specific [00:26:00] offer. I try to think of the newsletter as a product, right? So it's like, what problem are you solving? And for who? Why should I sign up in a line? You should be able to tell me. In one sentence, like, what I'm getting out of this, why I should read it.

And a lot of people are just writing a newsletter to, like, clear their own head, you know? It's like, this is Anthony's newsletter, here's, you know, what Anthony was thinking about this week. I prod a newsletter like that, my personal newsletter. But that's not really a newsletter business, right? So if you're trying to make a newsletter business, it's kind of a different beast.

It's like you need to have a specific problem you're solving and a really consistent product where people know when they click your email, what to expect. And they have like a compelling reason to click that email every day. Or every week, or however often you're going to do, it makes sense. I think to kind of pencil out the economics of like, how much is it going to cost you to acquire your readers?

And then how much money are you going to make per week or per month from those readers? Try to understand if [00:27:00] you can understand those numbers, then you're starting to think of it as like a newsletter business. Now, if you're like making a creator business, if you're just going to build an audience and figure out how to monetize it later, that's fine too, but it's not going to make you money for a lot longer.

Whereas if you're thinking of it as a business and you know how much it costs you to acquire a user, a reader, and how much money you can make from them per month, then you can start doing things like selling ads. And your ads will convert because, you know, the top of the ad is a compelling reason to read in the first place.

It's really hard to like write an ad for your personal newsletter, but like a productized newsletter is a lot easier to do such a thing. Oh, it's good to know which camp you're in before you set out. Yeah.

Dylan Redekop: That's good. That's sound piece of advice. Good to distinguish between those two. So 2024. 2024. Is upon us.

Right. So what is, what is 2024 look like for you and body brain? Like what are, do you have any big goals and what's what's, what are the plans?

Anthony Castrio: Yeah. So I think we're at like a pretty solid place right now where it's just like cruising and so [00:28:00] now it's how do we level up to like from 20, 000 to 200, 000 or whatever it is.

So I think one, like AI has gone a lot. You can do a lot with it now. So probably going to see if I can actually automate more of the content right now. It's all human curated and written. And I think at least part of it every day could probably be automated and take some of the burden off of the writers, which would free them up then to do more like marketing tasks, which would be great.

That's on the cost side. And then on the growth side, it's getting more competitive, I think, in paid ads. And so I'm starting to think about like generative social media content, generative content in general, and just like getting more into video and stuff as like a pipeline to new readers. So that's the growth side.

And then on the monetization side, we've only monetized with ads, which is. It's only one way to monetize a newsletter, right? So I think the next step for us is to start developing products based on what we've seen our readers really engage with, and then just [00:29:00] vertically integrate and sell products directly to our own readers because we know them best.

So those are the three things I want to do next year to try to get from a 5k a month to like 20k, 20, 000 readers to ideally like a hundred thousand plus. That's the goal. The other idea is like, okay, that's a lot of work, you know, but if somebody wants to buy the newsletter. In the next couple of months before I start doing that, that's cool too.

That could be an outcome, so

Dylan Redekop: probably one or the other. Yeah, we'll, uh, we'll drop your email address in the show notes. So people who are interested can reach out with.

Anthony Castrio: Anthony at bot eat brain. com. There you go. Yeah. If you want to advertise, if you want to buy us, go for it.

Dylan Redekop: We've, we've talked a lot about, uh, your newsletter, but can you share with us about, um, where people can find you where you're most active online and, uh, where they can sign up for a body brain.

Anthony Castrio: So about eat brain. com. You can misspell it a bunch of different ways and you'll probably still get there. For myself, you can find me at castrio. me. So that'll take you to my website. I'm on Twitter, Anthony Castrio and [00:30:00] YouTube as well. Anthony Castrio.

Dylan Redekop: Awesome, Anthony. Well, I really appreciate you coming on, talking to us all about how you've, you know, done a great job growing in monetizing.

What's essentially a side gig for you. So it was really insightful. So I think it it's going to be, there's going to be a lot of great lessons for us to extract out of it for, for our listeners and for our readers. So appreciate you coming on and best luck to you in 2024. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the send and grow podcast.

If you like what you heard, here are three quick ways that you can show your support. Number one, leave us a five star rating and review in the podcast app of your choice. Number two, email or DM me with some feedback. With your questions or with suggestions for future episodes. And finally, number three, share your favorite quote from the episode on social media and tag both me and our guest.

All of the links for that are available in the show notes. And whatever option you choose, I am really grateful for your support. Thanks and see you next week.

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