Send & Grow by SparkLoop

Ep 25 - Mike Benitez
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Louis Nicholls: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send Grow podcast. I'm your host, Louis Nichols. In my day job at Sparkloop, I spend all my time helping the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world to grow their audiences. So I get to see, first hand, what growth tactics, strategies, and channels actually work. Which ones you should copy, and what mistakes you should avoid.

And now, with this podcast, you get that access too. Every week, I sit down with a different guest, from industry experts to successful operators, and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know, so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your email audience. Today, I'm podcast by Mike Benitez.

Mike publishes The Merge. A newsletter delivering military news and military technology trends for people in the national security space. Despite the niche nature of the [00:01:00] Merge, it's already surpassed over 16, 000 subscribers and has even expanded into a podcast due to popular demand. The most exciting thing?

Mike has achieved all of this in his spare time. Today, we're going to talk about organic growth strategies, why the Merge's referral program has been so successful, and how Mike manages growth and revenue while working a full time job. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you kick things off just by giving us a little insight into the Merge newsletter, who it's for, what it's about?

Mike Benitez: Yeah, the merge is a military technology trends and, uh, kind of happenings newsletter target audiences, people in the national security space. Uh, it comes out on Sundays and Tuesdays. And accompanying the newsletter, I also do a podcast right now, about 16, 500 subscribers with about a 65 percent open rate.

Louis Nicholls: Awesome stuff. So that's very niche, but a big niche or relatively big for the niche. [00:02:00]

Mike Benitez: Yeah. I like to say it's the, it's the largest niche market. It's a trillion dollar industry with a very niche newsletter.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, well, that's awesome. We love the. We love the niches here. That's my favorite conversations to see what people are doing slightly differently and what's working there.

So give us some context when someone's reading this newsletter, what are they hoping to get out of it? Why do they. Why'd you have a 65 percent open rate? Why do people read it?

Mike Benitez: Well, to tell that story, I kind of started at the beginning of where it all came from before COVID, like right before COVID, I actually, I was, I was in the U S military.

I'm a retired now and I work for a national security tech company right now. But back then I did an assignment to Silicon Valley for six weeks while I was in the military to do an immersion at an incubator that was doing kind of a VC backed, you know, tech scouting. And. I had a couple of projects while I was there.

I'm like, there's no way I can do these things. And I, I figured out how to do a lot [00:03:00] of these things. And I kind of came back right as COVID hit and I had all these like tools and new insights that I had acquired. I'm like, well, what can I do with that? Instead of just kind of put it on the shelf. And as I was trying to make sense of what was going on in my own market, if you will, for national security, there's publications and outlets out there.

But a lot of them were, were kind of news focused and not really. I would say value adding news. So you have to sift through a lot of stuff to kind of get the little nuggets of, of wisdom and info that you really need, the things that you can monetize on. And because I couldn't find anything to solve that problem, I try to adapt some skills that I had picked up from my, my time in Silicon Valley and said, Hey, Why don't I just create a newsletter?

Well, I started with an aggregator and then I turned that into a newsletter so I could force myself to do something during COVID. So it really was a COVID driven thing to, to be creative with some of the skills that I acquired. So that's how it started. So I [00:04:00] launched it the end of October of 2020, and I probably spent three to four months just building up, like, what am I actually going to do?

I didn't even know how to buy a website. I didn't even know that was a thing. So I started from literally zero. My approach of how my format was, we can talk about that if you want, is I ended up doing as that research was the tech stack, but there's also the content. And so I ended up reverse engineering, probably.

Six, six to seven newsletters, I would say that half of them were very, very popular newsletters and they had some common themes when you start decomposing them to their elements of what makes them readable. And then I pulled in a few elements that they didn't have, that I saw some very, very small newsletters that were serving a very, very small market.

That had stuff that I liked. And so I kind of mashed that all together and that's how I ended up with, with the format and the format I have now it's, it's evolved probably three times, little tweaks here and there. And I'm always looking to continually evolve it. One of the [00:05:00] things I like about, but. The newsletter and the audience is I try to create ways to stay engaged.

And so I have a, I have a feedback button that just takes you to a Google form every week to get feedback from the, the readers. And then I use that to do things like I launched a podcast because I did a poll. What should we do next? And every overwhelming, like 90 percent of the response was like, do a podcast.

Okay. We will do a podcast and, and being engaged and responsive to the audience kind of goes to the monetizing part, because one of the models that, uh, use a kind of a hybrid model, but one of my revenue streams is through Patreon. And so I have about a 1 percent conversion of my subscriber list, our Patreon supporters, and it's a pay, it's a pay what you want.

So I'd have no gated content and you can pay. As low as $3 a month up to $50 a month. And there's different tiers and it's, it's all themed with kind of the market in, in the, it's a fighter pilot theme. [00:06:00] I flew F 15 Es, uh, in the Air Force. And so my originals core audience w were active duty fighter pilots.

And so it started with that in mind and it's kind of evolved a little bit since

Louis Nicholls: then. Awesome man. And what exactly were they or, or do they today get outta the newsletter? So if you're sitting down to write the newsletter and, and. You have the target audience in mind after they've read it, how are you hoping that they feel differently or changed or what's been the, what's the reason they would suggest somebody else should, should come and read this.

Mike Benitez: I think it gives them a one stop shop. So in five minutes. Once a week, they can actually make sense of what's going on around them and their day to day job. They probably don't have the bandwidth to sift through the hundreds of daily emails and outlets and what's going on. And so what I do on a Sunday morning, kind of distill that down.

Get rid of all the stuff that I don't think is value added. And then I package it in a way that's really easy to consume and then I make it interesting. So it's not [00:07:00] just here are the facts. I put a little, a little bit of my own color. Some of it's humor. Some of it's a little bit of snark and, uh, I make fun of some things every now and then.

But it keeps it interesting and it's gotten to the point now where it's, I talked to a lot of the, not just friends, but networking. I go to professional events and people know me in this niche and like, you know, every Sunday, look forward to it. Oh, I can't, I have no idea what it's going to be, but I know it's something that I really going to enjoy learning about.

So you're going to learn something and you're going to be entertained. And really that's kind of the two pieces that are fundamental. If I can do both of those every week, then that's when.

Louis Nicholls: Awesome. Yeah, I totally agree. So let's go back to the early days then and talk a little bit about how you started off.

So obviously you'd been you'd been reading other newsletters. If this is something that then was top of mind, then you were already looking at other newsletters to see what formats they were using, what elements you could pull in for your own. When it comes to actually getting subscribers though, where did you start off with with that?

Because I mean, this is a very A very specific [00:08:00] niche. It's not the kind of thing where you can necessarily just, you know, just, just put it out there into the world and expect people to, to jump in.

Mike Benitez: Yeah. So back then Facebook groups were a big thing and there was a group. It still exists. It's not very active anymore, but there was a group that I was in a private Facebook group with probably 2, 500 fighter pilots.

And I mean, that is, that's the core audience I was kind of shooting for. And when I set the 1st email out, I had 300 subscribers and for about almost 2. 5 years coming on 3 year anniversary. I've never had a down week. So every week I've sent an email out, it's been to a larger and larger list. So I, I think that's a credit for just trying to be responsive and meeting the, the, the wants and needs of the audience and not getting too far off really the core of where I started.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Well, let's talk about how, where the growth has come from since then, because that's. That's absolutely the answer I was, I was expecting. And it's just, we hear [00:09:00] that again, again, again, to the point where it seems almost like a rule that if you are in one of these specific niches and you are going to build a newsletter that will be successful, you almost certainly know enough people and have an existing relationship with enough people and enough credibility to be able to instantly get your first hundred, 200, 300, maybe subscribers.

Just by fact of having announced it effectively. So, so where did we go from, from there? Well, let's, let's start with what has been driving growth first, and then maybe talk about some experiments that haven't worked so

Mike Benitez: well. Okay. What's driven growth. I'm going to go with some unusual ones. First of all, I think I was one of your, one of your original customers from smart loop, and so I just go and get that out of the way right now.

Like joining that was, was really helpful. To then create again, a reverse engineer and what other people were doing and really be very thoughtful of what a referral program could be to entice people to want to share it, to get those [00:10:00] things. The first tier is, you know, should be very low effort and free.

That's kind of the rule of thumb. And so my, my first reward at three referrals is whoever wins that gets to submit a topic that they would like me to talk about. So it's again, it's my, it's my feedback loop from my readers and content creation. And it helps me honestly, cause I have a day job. So nights and weekends is kind of what I do to the merge.

And so it helps me keep a pulse on what the, the readers want to hear about. And it gives me kind of a good list of things to choose from. I can just pick it out of the list every week. Especially if I get kind of a brain fog or can't figure out what I want to write about. It's easy to just pull something off the list that interests me that week.

And it's aligned with someone, what someone asked for. So referral program has been pretty good. And I think you've, you've probably seen my referral program. It's, it's pretty niche, niche to my audience, the things that give away or things like stickers, patches, things like that, that my audience really, really [00:11:00] likes those types of things.

Louis Nicholls: It is. It's you are one of the examples that we actually bring up regularly. Partly because when we were looking for examples, you are one of the original customers and We had your screenshots available But mainly because it's such a good example of how the better referral programs and yours does work very well I think for context something like about a third of your subscribers have come from the referral program roughly speaking So it's it's it's been very successful We think one of the reasons it works so well is that you do have rewards that are really unique and only tailored to your audience.

They probably wouldn't work very well for any other newsletter, which is normally a sign that they will, will work very well for, for your specific ones. So yeah, share some more. Cause I mean, some of these are, there's some really fun things in there and there've been some really fun giveaway or giveaways that you've done as well.

So anything you can share there, I think people would, would love that inspiration and to hear about it.

Mike Benitez: Yeah, sure. Uh, so, so one of the giveaways. That I, that I did was unique and it cost me 20 through Amazon. [00:12:00] When, when Top Gun Maverick came out, I gave away a Top Gun F18 Lego set. And so, you know, one referrals, one entries, I use the spark loop, uh, feature for the giveaway and got a lot of good exposure from that.

People sharing on social media, trying to get a chance to win the giveaways are, are really good ways to, to growth hack your way. Into that, that larger tiers of, uh, subscribers, I'm doing a patch giveaway right now. That is a certain patch from the Taiwanese air force fighter pilots that it's a Taiwanese bear, basically punching a Winnie the Pooh, which is kind of making fun of China.

If you're into. Geopolitics or national security or the relationship between China and Taiwan. That's a really funny patch and it's very, very viral right now. So I'm giving those away over the next month. And actually that's asking me nothing. I partnered with someone who was selling them anyways. And so I plugged their Shopify store and they had me, they gave me the codes to give away a couple of free patches.

And so it's, it's a win win same thing I [00:13:00] did probably two months ago, gave away a book, actually gave away three books from a friend of mine who was publishing. And so he has a massive social media following. And so we basically did a trade where, Hey, you, you give away the books, I'll promote it. And then you promote the newsletter to kind of steer people from your audience to get a chance to win your book.

And so that was very helpful. And then the one that I've, uh, I've do probably every other month. I try, I've been not as good lately. Is I actually give away a bullet casing shot out of an A 10 gun. I have a pile of them and they're really, really cool things. You can't go buy it, right? It's something that you just cannot go by.

It does not exist, but you can win it. And so that's a compelling giveaway for, for people who want something very unique and it's just something that no one else really has.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's so specific to your audience. Right. And that's such a, such a sign that it's going to, to work well. The one thing that we see with the referral programs be true across all of the, the ones that we work with in all these different niches and topics is the best [00:14:00] rewards tend to not cost very much to, to give away.

It tends to be something that has more, less of them. Material value and more of a, an emotional value or an emotional, um, resonance. And it also tends to be something that nobody else would want to or understand why they would necessarily want it, which is, uh, you, you tick the boxes that super well. And the, the showstopper award you have as well.

I think up at 200 or 300 referrals. You have the, the, the flag that's been flown in a fighter jet. Yeah,

Mike Benitez: you get a, you get a U S flag that's been flown in a U S air force fighter jet. And it's got a sign certificate authenticity because I flew it personally before I retired. So I have a stack of them with certificates.

And so, yeah, I try to create something very, very unique and compelling, but it doesn't really cost me a lot of money.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah. Which is, is awesome. And it seems to be working really well. So let's talk about some of the things that haven't necessarily worked so well. What have you tried and.

Mike Benitez: Well, I'll say I haven't tried everything, but I have tried various [00:15:00] forms of ad spend on different social media platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook.

Those are probably the big three Twitter. I haven't tried it lately. It's always, you know, evolving, but it's, it's notoriously, uh, the worst interface and demographic analysis. That just doesn't have the tech behind it that Facebook or meta does. I've probably spent collectively, I don't know, maybe 3, 000 over three years of just various experimentation.

And I have seen zero impact whatsoever, you know, With the niche that I'm in, you'd think I could just target very, very specific geographic locations and times when there's expos and things like that. I've tried every variation you can think of. I've, I've never seen a single dent in subscribers, ignoring any of the metrics that are actually, they show you.

So I haven't seen any of that work, not saying it does, but for me, I've, I've tried it enough times that I just haven't seen it really work. [00:16:00] There are a couple of. I think things that I've tried to do that have surprisingly worked out better than I thought, but I haven't really heard a lot of people talk about well, please share.

Yeah. So people talk about engaging on Twitter and LinkedIn, which is great. Since I have a professional audience, I use LinkedIn a lot. I set up my newsletter as its own LinkedIn company because you can do that. And then one of the things that's interesting with LinkedIn is you can invite people to your company page if you're have a personal following.

So I have probably like 7, 000 followers, something like that on LinkedIn. And I think the merge now has like, I don't know, 4, 000 or so. The other thing that I do, and this is where it gets a little growth hacking is I actually have a LinkedIn assistant and I basically went into LinkedIn groups because they have professional LinkedIn groups.

And there's 1, it has, you know, 100, 000 people in it that are defense and aerospace focused. Like, that's your, that's your demographic. Like those, that's my, those are my people. So I basically set up a, I have a program [00:17:00] that basically scrapes that and sends them invites to like, join my network. And as part of the, join my network.

My auto reply basically says, Hey, thank you so much. Oh, by the way, I run this national security newsletter and podcast. It's it's here, here and here. Check it out. And that helps me grow growth. And I probably like my, my cost per acquisition. I figured it out once it's like 50 cents, 70 cents, something like that.

When you aggregate it all, which is extremely low. Uh, I'll take those every day of the week. Twitter's the same way I have a Twitter, a Twitter assistant. Plugin that does that the API has changed a little bit in the past few months. So I've actually switched platforms, but the same thing, if someone tries to follow me on Twitter, I'm creating engaging content as soon as soon as someone follows me, I think I have it on the five or six minute delay.

It'll auto DM them with this script that says, thanks for following me. Oh, by the way, I run a podcast and a newsletter. Here's how you sign up here. And I put the URL, uh, right for the landing page right in there. So I really heard too many people talking about those. Those are [00:18:00] slow and steady kind of drips drip campaigns.

But if you're going to engage on Twitter and LinkedIn anyways, as you grow followers personally, you should have a way to automatically steers you at the top of funnel to capture the, the email addresses.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I think, especially if you're in one of those very niche audiences where there is such a big overlap between.

People who you would be connecting with anyway on those platforms and people who would be, be good newsletter subscribers. That makes a ton of sense to me, at least my

Mike Benitez: number one thing by far that has, that has driven a audience, like a pretty good growth. I say that it's a pretty small size audience relative, and there's, there's some reasons why being a guest on someone else's YouTube channel.

Or podcast platform that has a pretty sizable audience. So I think I probably had just this year alone. I probably have a million views on YouTube from being on other people's shows. And as from being on, as a guest on their platform of writing them content, they ended up plugging the [00:19:00] newsletter and kind of hype it up.

And so I get a lot of.

And once that video is out there, you know, it's out there and people come across it all the time and I actually get recognized now from being like, Hey, you're I, I saw you on YouTube. Like, I didn't realize you else, you're the guy behind the newsletter. And so I saw it on YouTube. So,

Louis Nicholls: yeah, I mean, that, that, that is, is something that is becoming ever more popular, I think, in the newsletter space has been something podcasters and YouTubers have been doing for ages, collaborating and cross promoting each other that way.

But seeing more of that in the newsletter space is, It's absolutely awesome. So when it comes to, to the newsletter, I mean, you said it's nights and weekends. It's obviously, you know, you have a full time job alongside of it. What's the end goal with the newsletter?

Mike Benitez: Oh, that's the million dollar question. I didn't start it with an end goal in mind.

I started as a, as a kind of a passion project and a hobby, and I turned it into something that pays for itself and a little bit more. I want to continue to grow it. One of the things I've done recently. Well, [00:20:00] first of all, I started writing on just on Sundays and the, and the reason I picked Sunday, uh, it wasn't what day of the week is best to send an email.

It was, I have a, I have a day job Monday through Friday and Saturday. If I can't do it on during the nights, you know, during the week, Saturday is my buffer day. To kind of get everything right. And then I send that out on Sunday and then I kind of rinse and repeat. Well, then what happened was probably six months ago.

I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm really leaving a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor every week because I just can't fit it all into the email because of Gmail's clip limit. I try to stay under that, which is one of those life's mysteries of why it's still there. So I ended up spinning that out and creating another email on Tuesday.

That was just all of the stuff I couldn't put in the Sunday email. And it has a slightly different format, but you, and it's basically like, here's all the stuff we couldn't put it on Sunday. And people really love that because it's all of the other stuff. And, and it's called saved rounds and it's literally bullets, like a bullet format [00:21:00] of all of the stuff going on.

And you can read that in probably two minutes and get a ton of, of insights of what's going on in the market and the industry. And in going from once a week to twice a week, it sounds obvious, but the more, the, the tighter, your cycle times to publish, the more growth acceleration you're going to have. So one of the reasons we kind of growth limited for a long time is I only could do it once a week, twice a week.

I can definitely tell a difference in the rate of growth. I don't have the bandwidth to do anything more than that. And honestly, if I did more than that, I would probably see my, my audience engagement drop. Cause I, what I've, I've been very cautious of not trying to email too much to end up, you know, being either, you know, not going to open it today and maybe tomorrow.

Cause I do that with a lot of daily emails. I I'm a religious about reading certain newsletters and even then like, sorry, we'll get to it. And then by two days later, like time's moved on. I'm never going to open that email. So I try to be pretty deliberate [00:22:00] on twice a week is probably where I'm going to stay at.

Louis Nicholls: But you also have the, the podcast as well. So how did the podcast come about from the newsletter? And how do they play together?

Mike Benitez: Yeah. So the podcast, every time I'm at 15 episodes, which doesn't sound like a lot.

Louis Nicholls: What is it? Most podcasts never get to eight or something like that. So you're in the top, is it top 10 percent or top 1 percent of podcasts just by having published 10 or more?

I think something,

Mike Benitez: something like that. Yeah. It's kind of ridiculous because my newsletter is again, 16, 500. And my, by my, I think my fourth episode podcast that I published, I was in the top 20. Apple podcast charts for technology. I'm like, Whoa, like how'd that happen? That's weird. Then I figured out there's some, there's some algorithm stuff going on in the background because I started with an audience.

So every, every newsletter basically drives you to like, Hey, remind me there's a podcast so new signups can go, Oh, you have a podcast. And then when a new podcast comes out, I either [00:23:00] feature it. Basically give you a written summary of like, Hey, here are all the good stuff. If you want the rest of the info, like listen to the podcast.

And then obviously I do it with the video camera so I can put it on YouTube. So my last one actually did pretty well. It was trending for a little bit. I probably got, I just looked up the metrics yesterday, actually for someone else. So probably 3000 downloads. Audio 40, 000 views on YouTube and 190, 000 social media impressions across Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.

So taking the, the 1 hour or so podcast and. Chopping it up into 32nd or so little clips really, really helps drive awareness, which thing, you know, you click on who is this person and then your Instagram profile basically gives you the landing page. And it's just another top of funnel opportunity.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, for sure.

And is it the same content as you're publishing in the newsletter? Does it have a different format for the podcast? How does that work? [00:24:00] Uh,

Mike Benitez: it's interesting. I like to call it, you know, we're the world's best newsletter producing the world's most okay. As podcast we've, uh, we've adjusted the format a few times.

Sometimes I have on coho. Sometimes it's just me and some other person. What I haven't done yet though. And people are like, why don't you just do an episode where you just record yourself, like, Reading your own newsletter. I'm like, well, I guess I could do that. It's so easy that I haven't done it. I'm doing all the hard stuff first, but yeah, it's probably something I need to do.

I've tried to go with a few different, like I said, a few different angles. Sometimes it's like three or four main topics discuss. Sometimes it's one topic and we kind of go pretty deep on which we did. The last one, we spent a whole hour, a little bit over an hour, just talking about the F 35 engines, the stuff that's going on with that right now.

And so it bounces around a little bit. Sometimes a, a feature, a small business. So I love the underdog. I have a special place in my heart for a small business. And so having, having them on and featuring them as a, as it's something that I value. [00:25:00] Well, awesome.

Louis Nicholls: And talking about featuring small businesses, when it comes to, to the monetization side of things, you've mentioned that you, you have a Patreon pay what you want subscription model that's converting at around 1 percent at the moment.

How else do you monetize the

Mike Benitez: newsletter? I started probably six months ago, uh, using, I started with swap stack and there's a few other ones out there. There's probably four or five spark loop has a plugin. Remind me what the name is. It's an upscribe.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, we have our upscope, we have our part in the network and this,

Mike Benitez: yeah.

And yeah, I haven't pulled the trigger on that yet. I admit I'm waiting for my audience to hit a certain number before I, uh, I start pursuing that, but it is on my list to do. I'm not ignoring you. I promise.

Louis Nicholls: It's okay. It was what we bring you here for is it's the podcast into the pitch. That's the

Mike Benitez: way we do it.

But yeah, doing newsletter swaps and then swap stack has been good because you can plug and play some deals like morning brew. I've plugged them. I've probably earned [00:26:00] just from morning brew, which is, you know, obviously like one of the biggest newsletters out there. Their cost per acquisition is pretty high on that platform.

So I probably I probably made 800, maybe a thousand dollars just off of using their plug and play ad when I have nothing else to put in my newsletter for that section. So that's been good. More recently, there's another newsletter and I think they also use spark loop is international intrigue. And they have a, they have an audience.

It's probably three times the size of my audience, but. We have a pretty strong overlap there in the state department, dip diplomacy, geopolitics, I'm in the military national security. So there's a pretty big overlap in those audiences. So we've actually joined forces to, to join our metrics together with two different platforms for potential advertisers.

And that's gone, that's gone pretty well so far. It helps, it helps me because I don't have to do some of the work. And then we kind of adjust the revenue share based on audience size and work and who brought what deal. For, for advertiser placements, but that's been pretty, pretty interesting. I'm, I'm [00:27:00] enjoying working with them right now.

And never really thought of that day actually brought the idea to me. I didn't have that idea. So I give them all the credit.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah. I mean, it's the challenge, right? As a, you're still a solo operator on this business. You have a full time job. It is a hamster wheel to a certain extent. You don't get a Sunday break, really.

It's, it's, it's Sunday, Tuesday, and then back down to Sunday and Tuesday. Again, you have the podcast as well, finding the time nights and weekends to think about growth and monetization. All that kind of stuff is, it must be a challenge. What are you doing to, what ways have you found to streamline that to give yourself a bit more flexibility and a good chance of being consistent?

Mike Benitez: That's a great question. I try to do nothing on Monday. That is my mental down day for the merge, but every other day of the week, it's, you know, it's full, full, full up. I try to pace myself. And so if I wait to the end, I know I'm going to have a really, really terrible Saturday. So I try to. Do a little bit at a time in the mornings.

I work [00:28:00] a interesting schedule. So I get up very, very early in the morning, do some fitness stuff. And then I probably have a couple hours before my my workday day job starts. So I put a little bit here and there. I read a ton and I have some aggregators, uh, use Feedly. I kind of have a pretty good list of things.

That's kind of to wean through, but I probably go through a thousand. Articles a week to kind of build what's going on. And then, you know, a lot of that obviously is it's, you know, chaff, you got to sort the wheat from the chaff, but I've kind of streamlined everything as possibly as I could and to the point now where I can't afford to hire anyone or outsource anything, really, I use mailer light mainly because it has two things that as one person, I didn't want to have to manage because I lived through this, which is, it has its own built in landing page, so you can build your own webpage at hostess.

It does everything for you. And it has a archive, like an auto archive feature. You don't have to code it or anything. It's just automatic, mostly automatic every week for the first four or the last four [00:29:00] newsletters. After that, you have to manually load them, which I keep telling them like you need to fix this beehive.

I may go to beehive. We'll see. I've moved platforms so many times and it's so disruptive as a one person doing everything that, you know, I need to take a week or two off to make sure I rehost it correctly. And as the audience gets bigger and bigger. Moving platforms becomes, I think, a significant emotional event, but yeah, I do take a couple of weekends off throughout the year.

I took one off for the 4th of July. I generally take one off in late October, which is kind of the anniversary of the newsletter. It's also my wife's birthday. There's, there's, that's for the real reason why I take the week off. And then the, the Christmas holidays, I take those two weeks off. So those are kind of the three, the three planned breaks I get throughout the year.

Awesome.

Louis Nicholls: Yeah, that's great. And what are the plans for the future audio hopes for the newsletter?

Mike Benitez: Well, I'd really like to get to, if I can get to 50, 000, [00:30:00] I think it'll be, it's, it'll be enough where I can invest in, in some growth growth tools. So hiring people and doing, and maybe making some adjustments to keep growing.

And it becomes more of a sustainable business and not so much of a hobby right now. It's a hobby that makes, that makes money, which is good, but it's not something I can quit my day job on. Not yet.

Louis Nicholls: Does it help with the day job in any way? I've noticed when you have those niche Newsletters, there are a lot of people who It becomes very useful for on a networking side of things in the, on the, the domain experience and authority side of things, just to be someone who is, who is respected and known for that.

I don't know if that's the case in your industry, but it happens quite a lot.

Mike Benitez: Oh, absolutely. That's, that's been one of the, one of the best things that's happened because I started it when I was still in the military, because I wanted to know what was going on. And then when I decided I was going to retire, I had decided I wanted to stay in the.

National defense [00:31:00] tech sector. And so the newsletter helps me keep a pulse on my, my day job of, of what's actually going on in the market. What are the things that we need to track? What are our partnerships and competitors? And it's, it's worked out very, very, very well for my day job. So the, the, the newsletter and the podcast have really, and I try to do.

I try to keep them separate and I don't ever talk about where I work on the podcast or the newsletter, but if you've looked on LinkedIn, you can see the connection of where I work. And I try to try to keep those lines. My, our CEO is like, Hey, I'll come on your podcast anytime you want. I'm like, well, like.

We'll try to keep the line there for a little bit longer, at least. Yeah,

Louis Nicholls: we know the feeling. We have the same line. We have to walk a sparkly as well. So I have two questions to finish up for us. The first question is looking back now. I mean, you can see from the intentionality behind how you research the other newsletters that you were looking at and put something together that really worked well for you, that you had that open rate.

You had the [00:32:00] audience that was very eager for what you were producing and really resonated really well with them. If you were talking to yourself in that same position, again, someone who's in your shoes beginning for the first time with their own newsletter, what's a piece of advice you'd give them or a mistake you made that you would warn them to,

Mike Benitez: to avoid?

Yeah, probably my biggest lesson learned was I'd say that there was a point where I was just got so busy. I kind of lost focus of like, what is the big takeaway from this that the reader is supposed to get? And so in the military, there's a big difference between information and intelligence, and a lot of people confuse the 2.

And so. Information. It's easy. You can aggregate that, put it in a newsletter and push it out there. But the unique value proposition of the merge isn't just the information. It's my 25 years of military experience, working all kinds of different technologies and strategies and Congress and the Pentagon.

I worked at DARPA, which is advanced [00:33:00] research, operational tests, flight tests. So I've done. Five combat deployments. I've done a lot of things and it's applying my, my experience and my insights to the information to make it intelligent. That is where I think the magic is. And so I, I, I'd say don't, you know, that that's the unique value proposition, like what I personally can do that no one can really, you know, copy me is that my opinions are my own.

And they were formed by my insights and my experience. And so I, there was a time where I was very careful not to share any of my personal thoughts. It was very like, here's objective, but you can be objective and subjective, you know, at the same time without turning off a lot of the audiences that are looking for something straight down the middle.

Cool. And so I've, I've kind of leaned back into that over the past month. And actually I, I I'd made an adjustment and I got an email from one of my top Patreon supporters who is a, uh, retired three star general. [00:34:00] And he was like, this was the best change we ever made. Like, this is perfect. Do it just like that.

I'm like, Oh, that's good feedback. So again, I have that feedback mechanism and I listen and I, I read every, every comment that everyone writes every week from a newsletter. And

Louis Nicholls: that's awesome. I think the, that tip as well that you gave at the beginning about using that feedback mechanism as a source of inspiration.

And, and potential content for when you do have writer's block or when you're struggling to, to put pen to paper is also a really useful one. It's a, such an easy way to be a little bit lazy and to, to save some time and make sure you're in tune with the audience. I love that. So to finish things up, then we've been talking now for about 41 minutes.

What is something that I should have asked you, but I didn't,

Mike Benitez: I don't know. I think you covered everything. Okay.

Louis Nicholls: Well, then we've done our job. I've never had that happen before. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the next three years of the merge. I think it's going to be awesome. I love being able to [00:35:00] bring it up in conversations about how people are using SparkLoop in really fun ways and doing really well on the growth side of things and with such a super niche.

Audience. And I mean, it's been a real inspiration to me to see the consistency with which you've published that and see the resonance that your audience has with it is, is, is amazing. So thank you so much for taking the time, Mike, and, uh, all the best of the future with it.

Mike Benitez: Hey, and thanks for Sparkloop. I couldn't have done it without you.

Thank

Louis Nicholls: you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Send Grow podcast. If you liked what you heard, here are three quick ways that you can show your support. Number one, leave us a five star rating or review in the podcast app of your choice. Number two, email or DM me with some feedback with your questions.

forward 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 [00:36:00] support. Thanks and see you next week.