Here’s a video of me hitting milk cartons:

Here’s a pic of Tycho:

And here’s a voice memo:

The padding can be a little tight around audio files…

And here’s a PDF:

336ebae4 A2e7 465a Ba29 9b5fbfe8f553

62.6KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Let’s see how it shakes out!

We'll be continuing the Yem mission and building products that help with audience and revenue growth. Check out the post below on what we’ve been up to recently and some of our upcoming plans.

On Substack

Substack’s most powerful feature is growth

Substack makes money only when writers make money, which means we have a very strong incentive to help writers grow their revenue. Happily, we’re now in a position where Substack can drive growth for writers without them having to think about it (unless they choose to). Growth can happen magically in the background…

Read more

3 years ago · 216 likes · 103 comments

Today (October 7th) is our last day of operations. For existing customers, we'll be winding down our products (including the Yem emails) and the Yem app / site will no longer be available.

For the folks that worked with us early on — I can’t thank you enough for trusting us and believing in Yem. I admire each of you and it's been an absolute pleasure working with you, and look forward to continuing to work together from within Substack.

If you subscribed to Yem Jam as a way to learn about operating a newsletter, it may be worth subscribing to On Substack. We'll write about what we're building and sharing our learnings. For example, the post below covers different tactics to convert free readers to paid subscribers.

On Substack

How to motivate readers to upgrade their subscription

There is no secret recipe of what to put behind the paywall to convert free readers to paid subscribers. Writers have found success with a variety of approaches, including offering everything for free and putting everything behind a paywall. This post will guide you through the tactics available for converting free readers to paid subscriptions, includi…

Read more

3 years ago · 116 likes · 50 comments

Thanks again for the support and being part of the adventure!

See you soon,
Reid

March 1st marked Yem's first birthday. 🎂 🎉

We launched our first growth product three months ago. For those new to Yem or the newsletter, we help paid newsletters automate their email marketing. The goal of Yem's emails is to convert free subs to paid and prevent cancels. Nothing fancy, but we're seeing solid results — here’s where we are today:

• Our customers include 38 paid newsletters with a combined 1.7M total subs (free + paid) and 80k paid subs.

• On average, we're driving a ~7.6% lift in subscription revenue and, for earlier customers, maintaining that lift into months 3 & 4.

• Positive feedback and word of mouth from existing customers remains our primary source of new customers. We’re seeing strong retention for existing customers.

• Our current run rate is $50,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and we're aiming for $100,000 ARR by the end of April.

We've continued to make improvements to the Yem app. As of this past week, the Yem app now integrates with Ghost, allowing us to launch a handful of Ghost paid newsletters (that have been patiently waiting - thank you!).

As we've developed the Yem app, we've learned that it's important not to create work for our customers. But we also want to give them control and the ability to personalize their emails. We try to thread this needle by:

1. providing templates for each email and tips to drive better performance

2. pre-populating parts of the emails using info from their publication

3. giving customers the ability to edit or turn on / off each email in the Yem app

To show some of the above, here's a video walkthrough of the Yem app:

From the last Jam, our focus early this year is to expand to support more platforms and free newsletters.

For platforms, Ghost was a nice step forward. But we have folks that have signed up for Yem from ConvertKit, Revue, and MailChimp. We've developed great relationships with these platforms and working to expand support.

We're a month into testing a suite of messages for free newsletters with a pilot customer. This includes user onboarding, a referral program, and re-engagement emails. The goal of these emails is to grow the email list, reduce the share of subs that are dormant, and to increase per-sub engagement. We're seeing promising signs, but not quite ready to productize and ship it to a broader audience.

Longer-term, reflecting on the past year, we've become more confident in our guiding vision:

The most influential "media companies" of the 21st century will be individual creators and small collectives. The challenge for these new media companies is no longer how to publish text, audio, images, or video. The hard part is building an audience and developing a reliable income.

It's unfair that Disney, Netflix, and The New York Times can invest billions of dollars into growth, while creators have far less resources. Yem's goal is to narrow that gap by building products that help creators grow their audience and increase their earnings.

With our progress so far, we've also become more confident we can solve these problems.

To close out, a quick programming note. Over the past year, we've learned a lot working with leading creators. We want to share our insights and will likely use this newsletter as a starting point — more to come soon.

Related to the above, I had an awesome time speaking with Nathan Barry on his podcast. Nathan is the founder and CEO of ConvertKit, a leading newsletter platform for creators ($29 million in annual revenue). We talked through my experience at Hulu, Crunchyroll, and HBO Max, and how we're using those learnings to help creators grow their audience and better monetize. Here are a few links if you want to check it out: Apple / Spotify / YouTube / Google.

Thank you for reading and for all your support. 🙏

🔨 Product update

We’re now working with a dozen paid newsletters and continue to have a solid impact, driving an average lift of +7.4% in subscription revenue. We're maintaining our impact into the 2nd and 3rd months for longer-tenured customers. Below is a chart showing revenue growth for a couple of our earlier customers:

This past week, we launched an email editor in the Yem app. The editor gives customers a suite of templates and the ability to adjust subject, copy, and other details. We had our first customer go through the entire automated flow: create a Yem account → set-up API access to Substack & Stripe → edit and finalize their subject, copy, etc. → launch their messages. For someone well aware of how arduous this process used to be, watching it happen in real-time was magical.

🤜🤛 The team doubles

It’s my pleasure to introduce Luis Del Giudice, who’s joining Yem as my co-founder and CTO.

We had our first call back in September. Luis quickly grasped Yem's long-term goal and what we were trying to do with the initial product. His enthusiasm was palpable. After our first call, he spent the weekend rebuilding our product to be more resilient and scalable, enabling us to onboard more customers.

Shortly after, Luis came to Santa Barbara to stay with me (and my girlfriend) for a week. We spent a lot of time building, but also got to know each other during bike rides, hikes, and walks around town.

Before Yem, Luis was a founding engineer at Pinwheel and an early engineer at LedgerX (acquired by FTX). He also built a SaaS product that reached $1M in annual recurring revenue. Luis has an entrepreneurial backbone, a relentless drive, and a buoyancy that helps plow through the inevitable troughs.

Luis is an exceptional technical problem-solver and has been the driving force behind our recent progress. I'm excited to see what we can do together.

👀 Eyes to next year

We’re aiming for a run rate of $100,000 in annual revenue by the end of March ‘22, roughly 4x where we are today. Our focus moving into next year will move through:

• Fortifying the existing product and continuing to onboard paid newsletters

• Expanding product features to support free newsletters and non-Substack newsletters

• Launching new products with an eye towards helping newsletters grow their email list

It hasn’t been easy, but we’re happy with our progress so far and thrilled to carry this momentum into next year. From our experience, we know what a growth function looks like within a major media company. We're one small step towards building a growth function for a more decentralized, creator-centric world. 

Have a lovely holiday and we’ll see you next year!

PS - Luis is fond of kite surfing, below is a picture of him in a recent competition:

Welcome to another Yem Jam, a summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem. 

We continue to see solid results with our personalized messaging product (more details below). We are actively onboarding newsletters from our waitlist. If you're operating a paid newsletter, we would be thrilled to help grow your revenue. If you know anyone operating a paid newsletter, we would appreciate if you share this note with them.

To sign-up for a 1-month trial, feel free to reply to this email or fill out this short survey. We’re excited to hear from you!

Let’s dive into some updates.

🌱 Progress

For our first two customers, after a little over a month, Yem has driven a lift of +100 paying subscribers and +$6,000 in subscription revenue. We recently onboarded more customers and continue to see a lift of 5% to 10% in sub revenue. We're having an impact for newsletters across different categories (business, crypto, politics, etc.) and growth stages (from $30k to $1M in annual revenue).

One of our customers texted me the picture below, showing Yem's impact on their revenue, which warmed our hearts and fired us up!

There's plenty of opportunity to experiment, improve performance, and elevate our impact. But over the past few weeks, our focus has shifted to adding new customers. We've onboarded some of the largest Substack creators and have had newsletters from other platforms (MailChimp, ConvertKit, Revue, etc.) sign up for Yem. We have ambitious growth goals and continue to ramp up customer acquisition efforts.

Our primary challenge is overcoming lack of awareness with potential customers. We’ve received positive feedback from warm intros, but have a lower response rate on cold outreach. For interested newsletters, the onboarding process can be a bit cumbersome, with prospects stuck at different points. 

It would be surprising if these weren't headwinds. While these should go down over time, we're also attacking them head on. 

We recently launched an automated onboarding flow and had our first customer sign up using it. It was magical to receive the Slack alert letting us know everything worked. This removes a ton of initial friction and enables creators to sign-up for Yem without having to set-up a call with our team.

On the marketing side, we designed and launched a new landing page. We also have a video update we’ll be publishing to Twitter and LinkedIn this week. Here's a sneak peek — if you see it out in the wild, any love and support means the world to us! And of course, any referrals or word-of-mouth are deeply appreciated. 🙏 🙏

That’s all we got for now — let us know what you think!

Welcome to another Yem Jam, a summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem. In this jam, we cover performance of our automated lifecycle product and next steps. 

Let’s dive in!

💌 Automated lifecycle messaging for creators

Lifecycle messaging is often the most cost-effective channel to drive growth. In particular, email remains one of the best channels to create value. At Crunchyroll, we used email to onboard new users and convert free users to paid subscribers. We improved retention by increasing engagement, both in depth (hours watched) and diversity (series watched). We ran special promotions and contests, and deepened the relationship with our audience by featuring fan art and guest posts. 

These lifecycle efforts were set-up like a machine, constantly running in the background. We ran tests and used data to improve existing messages and add new campaigns. This approach to user messaging is common these days, with some larger companies dialing up the sophistication (e.g. how Netflix measures lifecycle efforts).

When we started working with newsletter creators, lifecycle messaging was mostly absent. Setting up an effective series of messages takes a lot of time and mindshare. It takes even more effort to keep it running and improve performance over time. Further, some of the newsletter platforms offer limited or no tools to automate lifecycle efforts. (We experienced first-hand how difficult and cumbersome it is to run these as ongoing ad-hoc emails.)

There was a clear mismatch of what a larger company could do relative to an individual creator. To reduce this gap, we've built an automated lifecycle product for creators. It's always on and always improving. The initial product is tailored towards newsletters with paid subscriptions. The goal is to lift subscription revenue by converting free users to paid subs and preventing paid subs from canceling.

🍿 Is this thing working?

Through the first 26 days for our first customer, the automated lifecycle product has driven a lift of +$1,415 (+3%) in subscription revenue. We’ve added 10 paid subs (+$700) and saved 18 paid subs from cancelling (+$715). Below is a per-email breakdown of performance:

While the immediate lift in earnings is great, we’re creating even more value in future earnings. Hypothetically, let’s assume the customer lifetime value of each paid subscriber is $100. For the 28 paid subs we've saved or added, that's a lift of $2,800 in future earnings, nearly double the immediate lift in earnings. 

🛣 What’s next?

Looking forward, we have two goals: 1) improving the product and 2) onboarding new customers.

On the product side, there’s a lot of room to elevate our impact. We recently launched tests to optimize existing lifecycle emails and add new campaigns. We've been working through various bugs and making the product more resilient. On the reporting side, we've put a lot of effort into making sure we're attributing value to Yem's efforts as accurately as possible. As much for us as our customers — we need to prove to ourselves that this product is driving real value. 

Our goal is to lift our customer’s subscription revenue by +5% per month (vs. +3% at the moment). If we can do that on an ongoing basis, compounding will work in our favor. We'll be able to propel a creator earning $100k per year to $170k per year within 12 months (+$70% growth in ARR).

So far, we have focused most of our resources towards building the product. With the product delivering a solid impact, we want to shift attention to bringing on new customers. We recently integrated our second customer, paying attention to how to improve onboarding. We're aiming for 10 customers by mid-November to amplify our feedback loop and drive product improvements.

🕺 Building the team

We're looking for a full-stack engineer or product lead to help refine Yem’s initial product, test new ideas, and join the founding team. Interest in the creator space is a huge plus! We would likely start with project-based work and a 20+ hour a week commitment. If you or someone you know is interested, shoot me a note (reid@joinyem.com). Any help is much appreciated! 🙏

That’s it for now — let us know what you think. As always, thanks for your support!

I hope everyone is having a lovely Labor Day weekend!

It's been a while since we spoke. As a reminder (and welcome to those that are new), Yem Jam is a weekly summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem. Let’s dive in!

Yem's raison d'être

During the past month, we've been working on refining Yem's story. Here's the latest:

Larger media companies can provide many benefits that are less accessible to individual creators. One benefit is a growth team — people whose job is solely focused on building an audience and increasing revenue. In response to the boom of individual creators, Jessica Lessin, CEO and founder of The Information, said part of their advantage was “sophisticated marketing around acquiring and retaining subscribers.” They recently hired Sam Rosen (former SVP of Growth at The Atlantic) to grow The Information’s subscription business and expand the marketing team.

It will be challenging for every creator to hire a growth team. Further, creators may not be well-positioned or want to manage a growth team. But it's clear these functions provide immense value for the larger media companies. And when we ask creators what their biggest challenge is, in near unison, the reply is "growth". 

We're building products that allow creators to have their cake and eat it too. The freedom to earn a living doing what they love, fueled by the support of Yem’s world-class growth engine. 

🛠 Building an MVP

In the last update, we covered the results from our first fully-automated email. Right after that, we started planning how to turn that kernel of progress into an initial product (“MVP”). 

We outlined a suite of lifecycle emails based on insights from all the growth tests we've run over the past 6 months. These emails have a few key goals:

1. Increasing engagement / reducing dormancy

2. Converting free subscribers to paid subscriptions

3. Preventing paid subs from cancelling

Here’s a high-level of view of the emails we included in the MVP:

We then mapped out a 3-phase approach to building the MVP:

• Phase 1 - 0 → 1 customer 

• Phase 2 - 2 → 10 customers

• Phase 3 - 11 → 100 customers

Each phase has a different set of features. More than anything, we used this to scope and prioritize what we're building. At this stage, there’s a strong pull towards tackling new problems and building as much as possible. Focus and patience are counter-intuitive, but it's our only real advantage.

We've fully onboarded our first customer. The MVP series of messages has been going out for the past 6 days. We're on track to lift our customer’s subscription revenue by 10% (and there’s lots of room for improvement). 

More exciting, consumers seem open to receiving these types of messages. We've seen solid open rates (35%) and click-through rates (15%). We have 0 spam reports and a low rate of folks unsubscribing from Yem notifications (0.3%). 

Looking forward, we have work to do on analyzing the results, testing, and refining the MVP. We're also planning to add our second customer, which will give us a sense of scalability. 

🌊🛶 Lost at sea

I've been lucky to be part of incredible growth teams at Hulu, Crunchyroll, and WarnerMedia. During that run, I was fortunate to help launch high-investment products (VRV, HBO Max). But those were mostly an extension of existing products, launched from a stable foundation. I've never been a part of bringing something into existence from nothing. It's been a unique challenge and an invaluable learning experience.

I've read a few books this year on long sea voyages and shipwrecks (both fiction and nonfiction). The characters describe in spooky detail the trauma of being lost at sea. The crew usually has supplies, so it's not so much about immediate survival. It's more psychological — having to deal with menacing uncertainty for a prolonged period of time, or trying to bend the will of the world when so many elements are uncontrollable. 

Searching for product / market fit can feel like being lost at sea. We've been working on Yem for 6 months and see promising signs that we may be heading towards land. But that doesn't change our current reality — nothing but the ocean surrounding us, unsure whether we're solving a real problem, that we've built a product our customers need. Time will tell. For now, we're staying focused and patient, searching for that elusive beachhead.

We moved past two big milestones this week:

• We were able to bring our customer's Substack data into our database without any human intervention.

• We sent our first notification without any human intervention.

A round of applause (👏 🙌 🙏) for our development team. The first bullet is foundational to any data-driven product we want to build. The second bullet is a proof of concept for the initial product offering we want to launch (let’s call this our “MVP”). 

The piping is set up — we now have a pathway to launch a "product" that can push us towards 50+ paid customers. Our focus now turns to scoping, testing, and building an MVP that will attract 50+ paid customers.

We're going to sprint during the next 4 to 6 weeks to launch an MVP. We'll see how it goes, but we're excited. If the Yem Jam becomes a bit spotty, it's because we're laser focused on building.

Let's dive into a bit more detail on our first notification without any human intervention.

Current Growth Efforts

Below is a selection of growth tests we’ve run over the past few months. Each row represents a growth test and each section represents a customer. 

We've sent these growth tests from Substack or the customer's personal gmail account. When we run tests through Substack, we face a few challenges:

• issues with deliverability (spam filters, Promotions tab, etc.)

• difficult to target with precision

• impossible to automate anything that works

Sending from a customer’s personal gmail sidesteps deliverability issues and targeting. But it’s still impossible to automate and it’s a pain for our customers.

These challenges pushed us towards developing our own communication stack. (We recently wrote about how this also enables us to solve harder problems a bit further down the road.)

Proof of Concept

This past week, we sent our first notification without our customers or our team having to press send. There was a lot of work that went into reaching this point:

• Automate data extraction from Stripe into Snowflake

• Create logic in Snowflake that identifies the distribution list

• Set up email template in SendGrid

• Integrate with SendGrid API and schedule when to send the email

We started with the payment failure notification. The email itself requires little customization and has had a nice impact on saving paid subscribers.

We saw solid performance: we saved 22 paid subs, driving $860 in incremental cash for our customer. All the performance metrics were better than our Substack sends. 

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We had 0 recipients mark us as Spam (🥳). We also received valuable deliverability data that we otherwise wouldn’t receive. For example, one of the emails bounced because it was a work email that was no longer valid. We’re hoping this helps us clean up our email lists and improve deliverability over time.

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It’s an exciting milestone. We've laid the groundwork to automate a lot of the work we've been doing, which will let us bring on more customers. We're now able to target with more precision, allowing us to do things that were impossible before. We're positioned to build this into a machine that's always running and improving. 

That’s it for this week — let us know what you think. As always, thank you for the support!

Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend.

As we build Yem's initial product offering, we're thinking more about our ideal customer. Our mission is to help creators, many of whom are solopreneurs or manage a small team. 

It can be a lean operation, which is part of the opportunity. We want to give creators the superpowers of a 20-person team. But compared to a true B2B sales channel, there may be some challenges.

Last week, we talked about our goal of a $100,000 ARR run rate within 6 months. To reach our goal, we’ll likely need 50 to 100 paying customers. We're using today's post to explore a few types of customers that may buy our initial products.

Giving Creators Superpowers

To an increasing degree, the internet is shifting power from institutions & companies to the individual. With Yem, we want to encourage this shift. We want to empower individuals and help them build the most influential media brands of the 21st century.

From our origin story a few weeks ago, the idea of Yem emerged from a desire to help creators that we admire. These brave souls neglected more traditional careers. Instead, they built large, multi-platform media businesses online, and mostly on their own. 

These pioneers paved the way for the next wave of courageous creators. Today’s creators have the advantage of new platforms, tools, and ways to make money. Their business models have become more complex and wide-ranging. 

We’re big fans of Mario Gabriele and his vision for The Generalist. Below is a Disney-inspired map of his business model (from this tweet thread):

We're also huge fans of David Perell, who's inspired several folks to make the leap to be a creator. Below is his business model (from this tweet thread):

There’s no shortage of examples. We believe the future of media will be creators with wide distribution and several ways to monetize. Even better if those revenue streams are complementary and form a flywheel. 

Still, these are not easy businesses to operate and grow. With Crunchyroll and Rooster Teeth, we learned how hard it is to build an audience and monetize across several platforms. We want to help creators have their cake & eat it too: the autonomy & ownership of a solopreneur, with the support & resources of a company. 

But what happens if the current creator market is smaller than anticipated? Or what if creators have a lower willingness to pay for our initial product offering?

Companies as Storytellers

Outside of the Substack vortex, most people think of "newsletters" as a form of marketing (i.e. Southwest Airlines & $50 fares). But that is changing quickly. More businesses are turning to newsletters and other forms of media to tell their story. 

Mario wrote about this shift, predicting storytelling and owned media assets will become increasingly important for businesses. Mario points to a few examples of companies developing meaningful (non-core) media products:

The companies above are big enough to employ a team to work on their media efforts. But maybe there's an opportunity to work with earlier-stage businesses. Startups with similar media aspirations, but more limited resources, and not quite able to hire a team to work on non-core products. 

For Eco, we could help turn their onboarding series into a drip campaign. For MainStreet, Ramp, and Pipe, we could help turn testimonials into a newsletter for prospective customers, or onboarding for new customers. 

Even if working with businesses proves viable, it's not exactly a perfect fit with our creator-centric mission. Still, it might make sense. Working with businesses would likely help us build better products for creators. Also, if we don't find initial traction, we're DOA anyway, and won't be of much use to anyone. 

While our hearts want to support creators, we need to keep an open mind and find the most effective way to gain traction.

Thank you for all the responses last week! Your support and feedback are much appreciated. Keep it coming. :)

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Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. 🌞 🍉

As some of our long-time readers know, our team spends quite a bit of time doing the following each week:

• downloading data from a few different sources

• cleaning and molding the data to make it useful

• preparing weekly performance notes

• creating and executing growth tests

We're making progress on automating the work above, especially the first two bullets. To an increasing degree, data is flowing into a structured database without much human effort. 

This is a big step forward. As a data-driven growth engine, a functioning database is foundational to all we want to do. 

The database will allow us to turn the services we currently provide into a more scalable product. This will allow us to better serve our 9 current customers, and to bring on more customers.

In this week’s Yem Jam, let's explore our near-term goals and how they are guiding our product development.

Goals

Within the next 6 months, we’re aiming to reach $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). A bit intimidating? Of course, but we’re excited by the opportunity and, if we execute well, confident we'll meet the challenge.

With that goal in mind, we can fill in the other puzzle pieces — how many customers do we need, and how much do we need to charge? The table below shows various routes to a run rate of $100k ARR.

On one end, we could solve specific problems for a smaller group and charge a higher price. On the other end, we could solve general problems for a larger group and charge a lower price. 

We prefer to lean towards the latter. We believe there's a large & growing group of creators who want the services we provide. We want to help as many creators as possible build a livelihood online. We also believe more customers will push us to solve more problems and to build more compelling products. 

As we develop and launch products, we'll need to be nimble and see how the market reacts. As a starting point, we think a good flag in the sand is to aim for a per-customer average of $200 in revenue per month. Assuming we can convert most of our current customers, we would need to grow by at least 5x to reach 50 customers and hit the $100k ARR goal.

Yem’s Product Offering

Ok, nice idea, Reid — good to see you can do some math. How do we actually develop a viable $200/month product that can support 50 customers at the same time?

Below is a first draft of how we may structure and price Yem's product:

Most of what’s listed above are services we provide for our customers today. With our current growth efforts, we've lifted our customer’s monthly earnings by at least 5%. To justify a $200/month payment for a 5% lift in earnings, a creator would need to be making at least $4,000 per month (~$50k ARR). This feels like a reasonable threshold, even next to the target of reaching 50 customers. We’re also confident that, over time, we’ll be able to have a much larger impact than a 5% lift in earnings.

Early on, the core product will likely be the "Growth Starter Pack" (trademark pending). Until we prove creators will pay for an analytics-only product, the “Insights” tier is mostly a customer acquisition tool. On the other hand, the “Growth Team in Your Pocket” tier is mostly products our customers have asked for, but may take some time to work towards.

That’s it for this week — eager to hear what you think! As always, thank you for the support and for following along.

PS - A special thank you to John Aylor for editing.

Perfection 🤗 | Good 😌 | Meh 😐 | Bad 😒 | Awful 🤮

Hope everyone is enjoying the long summer days. 🌞

To kick things off, a few updates across our key work streams:

• Providing benchmarking and insights. Over the last month or so, with heightened summer travel, we've seen downward pressure on new user traffic, signups, and engagement. These headwinds are present across most mediums (i.e. newsletters, Twitter, YouTube). Our customers seem to value this type of context, even at a small scale.

• Working with first ConvertKit customer. Substack and ConvertKit are quite different in functionality and how each define key metrics. We want to create a data model that allows for reliable comparisons across platforms. This allows us to provide benchmarking for all creators, not just those on a particular platform. We also want to make it easy for creators to choose which platform is best for them over time. If they switch tools, we can help reduce any change in reporting or their ongoing growth efforts.

• Running growth tests. We've been able to repeat a few winners over time and for different newsletters. We've had a tangible impact on engagement and revenue. The hard part will be removing ourselves from the process.

Building a Communication Stack

One thing we want to avoid with Yem is having to convince creators to switch platforms to use our products. It's important we're complementary to products our customers are already using and enjoying.

The tradeoff is we have to work within the constraints of those tools. For example, with Substack, it’s difficult to automate recurring lifecycle efforts. With ConvertKit, segmenting the audience can be a bit of a challenge.

We’re exploring how we could test the benefits of building a complementary communications stack. In addition to helping automate some of our growth efforts, it could provide longer-term value as well:

• Enable multi-channel communication (SMS, WhatsApp)

• Allow creators to move platforms without losing important growth features (i.e. for a newsletter, user onboarding and re-engagement campaigns)

• Opportunity to provide better personalization for audience

I think the last point is pretty exciting. A few examples to bring it to life.

We're working with a few newsletters that publish 5 times per week. There's a sizable group of subs that open every email. But there's at least a few folks who may prefer a once-a-week email, where there's a summary of the week's 5 articles. The reader can choose their own journey. The creator benefits as well, in the form of better health metrics (i.e. open rates) and deliverability.

The other end of the spectrum is where it gets fun: the super fan. As I've mentioned before, I'm a huge Tim Urban / WaitButWhy fan. I want all the notifications. What podcasts or YouTube videos was Tim on last week? What was he saying on Twitter? What new WBW merch launched? What's going on in the WBW community? What’s coming soon (live events, upcoming posts, new projects)?

In a similar vein, Ben Thompson wrote about Passport, an open-source project that provides "enterprise software for creators". Part of the functionality allows users to select how they receive content from Stratechery.

It's easy to imagine how this could expand to include more creator products: job boards, cohort-based classes, rolling funds, and so on. Data will become essential in reducing the noise for the audience. There will be a big opportunity to help creators tailor comms and products towards different audience segments.

To those that reached out in the absence of last week's Yem Jam, thank you for checking in! :) 

I was visiting friends & family in the Carolinas, and then spent a handful of days in a vibrant NYC. I ran into some travel issues and writing this after spending the night in the Denver airport. Forgive any sluggish prose! 😬

As always, I appreciate your support. Talk next week!

Hope everyone had a lovely 4th! 🇺🇸 🎇 🇺🇸

And welcome to this week’s Yem Jam. 

I’ve been searching for the right one-liner to describe Yem. One of my friends called us a "customer data platform, owned by creators". And one of our customers called Yem a "growth team in your pocket". 

I like both these taglines. The first hits on how hard it's been in the past for creators to access and use important data (let alone "own" the data). The latter hits on building products that have a tangible impact on helping creators grow their audience and make more money. 

This week, we cover a few stories on bringing different data sources together, and growth products that could emerge from that data. 

Striking Gold on Twitter

One of our customers had a Substack post that, within the first 12 hours, had a few more shares and likes than normal. They knew this intuitively — the numbers were small, and there were no alerts or easy comparisons. 

They took the Substack post and turned it into a tweet thread. The tweet caught fire, receiving over 130k likes and 35k retweets. The thread ended with a call-to-action to subscribe to the newsletter. The viral tweet led to a huge influx of new subscribers: +5,000 subscribers, a large portion of subs at the time.

A few important realizations. First, the importance of a multi-platform view when looking at performance. The Twitter engagement and wave of new subs came in over a few days. The newsletter is daily and had two new posts during that time. Only looking at Substack data, the two new posts looked amazing, while the post that went viral on Twitter underperformed. Having Substack and Twitter data together reduces the likelihood of being misled. 

Next up, trying to productize aspects of the scenario above. To start, helping identify posts that are a bit more shareable than normal. For new posts, we could create velocity checks that trigger an alert if something is being viewed or shared more than average. We could also automatically transform the post (text, links, images) into a tweet thread. Whereas it may have taken 10 minutes to turn a post into a tweet thread before, maybe we can reduce the time to 1 minute.

Know Thy Audience

We've been running surveys to help creators understand their audience, and how it's changing over time. Here’s an example survey in Typeform with the questions below. (We mark all questions as optional and the results are anonymous.)

The responses help prioritize ways to make the product better and expand audience. Guest posts from a more diverse set of voices or perspectives to bring in new readers. Or better allocating time across platforms, and maybe even launching on new platforms or creating new types of content.

We've just started tracking survey responses over time. This helps us measure efforts aimed to improving the product and expanding audience. Here’s an example with dummy data.

Data-driven Approach to Building Community

More than a few creators have launched communities, to engage with their audience, but also for the audience to connect with each other. Some offer it as a benefit for paid-subs-only, which seems to be working in at least a few cases.

Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan

Things happening in our subscriber-only Slack community: 1. People finding great new jobs 2. Members hosting workshops (e.g. "building with no-code") 3. Tons of new 1:1 connections 4. Virtual meet-and-greets w/ @icebreakervideo 5. Close to 100% of people's questions answered ❤️

Mohammed Rafy @rafyasarmatta

Some of the best newsletters are also building communities around ideas, possibility, and navigating the future of the industry. @lennysan is building a private community for paid subscribers. https://t.co/oAeV4OVX9Z

5:51 PM ∙ Jul 15, 2020

137Likes7Retweets

Casey Newton @CaseyNewton

I wrote about Sidechannel, the new Discord server I’m launching with some of my favorite people in media. It’s for anyone who pays for any of our publications. And we have some big plans. platformer.news/p/announcing-s…

12:30 AM ∙ Apr 13, 2021

165Likes11Retweets

There's more tools than ever to create and manage these communities. But online communities are super hard to cultivate. Even if there's value with early members, it's tricky to maintain as the community grows. 

We’re exploring whether there’s a way to take a more data-driven approach to building community. 

We helped a newsletter launch a Telegram chat group in a very directed way. We aimed for 300 people to start: enough to support vibrant conversation and live events. But not too many where it becomes hard to manage or we lose the intimacy.

We made assumptions on email open rate & open-to-join rate. We used this to back into the number of emails we needed to send. We then reached out to the most engaged, longest-tenure subs. We felt this group would give us the best shot at setting the tone with the community. And from that foundation, perhaps we could add more folks in gradually over time.

To help launch the chat, we ran a live AMA with the creator. We even took a bit of a data-driven approach to evaluating how it went:

• 16% of the chat was online during the event

• 31 total questions (10 before it started, 21 during the hour)

  • signs of power users: ~5 people asked half the questions (potential moderators?)

• 12 responses → 40% response rate (opportunity to improve)

The chat launch and AMA were awesome learning experiences. It's fun to test out a data-driven approach in an area where it's mostly intuition.

Past Experience + Customer Feedback

Along with the above — expanding the reporting, running user surveys, and helping launch communities — we’re in more of a rhythm running growth tests. These ideas and tests have emerged through our experience working with creators. But also from building the growth function at Hulu, Crunchyroll, and HBO Max. 

In my head, I can see all the teams that helped grow those businesses. And the millions of things we did right to nudge us in the right direction. All that stuff took a ton of effort, investment, and hiring the right team to execute.

I'm hoping Yem can make this growth function much more accessible to creators.

Let me know what you think! And please share with anyone you think would enjoy it. As always, we appreciate your support.

We're continuing to see some exciting signals from our experiments. But we've definitely swung and missed as well. Below is an update on our learnings and progress so far. Let us know what you think, and please share with anyone you think may enjoy it!

Reducing churn for paying subscribers

There's two main flavors of paid cancels: voluntary and involuntary. Involuntary is usually due to payment issues. Voluntary is when the sub chooses to cancel their auto-renewal (for a variety of reasons).

It takes different tactics to fight voluntary vs. involuntary cancels. And it's definitely hard to have an impact. But the value can be huge — in both cases, we're saving a longer-term subscriber, not just one transaction.

Involuntary (Payment-related) Cancels

Payment-related cancels were a major problem at Hulu & Crunchyroll (and for any digital subscription biz). We learned that it's most effective to simply ask the sub to update their payment info. Spotify does this incredibly well, messaging over email & within their apps:

We put together a test email to send to subs that had experienced a payment failure (like the image below). 

Of the test group, 14% of subs updated their payment info, leading to $240 in incremental cash. (Again, the value extends well beyond the immediate cash gains.) An encouraging start and awesome to have a direct impact on creator's earnings. 

Fighting payment-related cancels is a problem any creator with recurring revenue will face. And it’s an ongoing challenge, not a one-off problem. It may not be a feature with high defensibility (all platforms will build tools to fight this problem). But it could be a great way to add instant value for newsletters.

Reducing Voluntary Cancels

Spoiler alert — this was us trying to reduce voluntary churn:

We emailed paying subs that had chosen to cancel, but hadn't lapsed yet. The email reminded subs of the value they were receiving and, for some, their special discounted pricing. 

The save rate was 3.5%, driving an incremental $160 in cash. We had higher hopes for this one. But hey, it’s better than 0%, and we got some great learnings and have ideas on how to improve.

Re-engaging Dormant Subs

We continue to iterate on the re-engagement tests we mentioned in Volume 4. So far, these tests have attempted to winback subs that have never opened an email or viewed a post on the web. Quick update on results:

• Sent from personal gmail: up to 27% re-engagement → incredibly exciting, but we need to make it much easier to send these emails

• Sent from Substack: 4% to 8% re-engagement → not bad, but deliverability issues persist

• For subs that do open, 20% continue reading new posts → encouraging and in-line with our ultimate goal — to win back full-time readers

• Less than 1.0% unsubscribe

It’s also become clear that the length of dormancy is a key factor. The longer someone's been dormant, the less likely we are to win them back. This presses the importance of properly onboarding folks and reducing dormancy early on.

It's been exciting to have a tangible impact on our customer's business. Further, these problems seem to be universal. It's not clear the degree to which we can templatize the solutions or scale them to several newsletters. We'll see... 

Even if we can figure some of that out, I'm not sure these continue to be compelling use cases over time. Most platforms will try to replicate these basic functionalities (if they don't already exist). But they appear to add immediate value for our customers, and that's enough for now. :)

Let me know what you think! And please share with anyone you think would enjoy.

A bit of a digression this week — an origin story of sorts. I was catching up with a friend and we ended up talking about our early exposure to the "creator economy". And how that led to Yem and trying to use our experience to help creators grow their businesses. 

Starting as a Fan

At some point, I remember trying to pay a bit more attention to my inbox and what I was reading. Less news, more focus on learning. These newsletters became early obsessions:

• Farnam Street - mental models for days

• Brain Pickings - helped me with all the hand-written letters over the years

• Stratechery - a business strategy masterclass

But nothing had as much of an impact on me as Tim Urban's WaitButWhy.

Urban continues to stretch what’s possible for a “blog”. He’s been writing an online book (The Story of Us) for several years. What’s been most awesome to watch is how Urban engages with his community. For example, having 6,000 readers fill out a Myers-Briggs survey, and organizing in-person meet-ups (WaitButHi). 

All of the newsletters & sites above are effectively solo-operated media businesses. But there was something special about them. People really cared about the creator and their brand. 

Down The Rabbit Hole

Around the time I was becoming a major WaitButWhy fan, we were laser focused on growing Crunchyroll and launching new products. We started searching for ways to work with creators. Often, our pitch was "what have you wanted to do that you've never had the resources to do?" From there, we would try to make it happen.

Early on, we noticed a group of "edutainment" creators we really wanted to work with. It was a special group for a variety of reasons. First, they were all friends with each other and already collaborating in a bunch of different ways.

And they all had super passionate fans. At Crunchyroll, we had this thing called the "t-shirt test". Some fans would wear the (bright orange) Crunchyroll t-shirt as a form of self-expression. When they saw someone rocking the Crunchyroll logo, there was an immediate connection. 

These creators passed the t-shirt test with flying colors. 

And those fans were willing to directly support the creators. At the time, a large portion of creator earnings came from sponsorships or ad revenue. Patreon was the first time I saw creators paid directly by their fans and supporters. Many of the top creators on Patreon were part of the “edutainment” world.

We were lucky to have an idea for a show pitched to us (called Paradigms) by some of the most talented YouTube creators: Henry from MinutePhysics, the MinuteEarth team, and Derek from Veritasium. Compared to their YouTube content, this would be a series with episodes and a narrative arc. The episodes would be longer than what usually worked well on YouTube. I love Derek’s video talking about the idea of the show. 

Paradigms was my first exploration into the creator world — I've been hooked ever since. 

I'm a believer in the creator economy and its potential to empower individuals. More and more, creators will become the most influential media brands of the 21st century. 

We're in the early stages of proving we can apply our learnings and a data-driven approach to help creators grow their businesses. I'm excited for Yem to play even a small part in helping the creator economy continue to blossom.

I'm curious to hear what you think! And hope this digression wasn't too boring. 😬

Welcome to all the folks that recently signed up! For those coming over for the first time, if you enjoy this post, please consider subscribing:

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This week, we'll cover some growth experiments we're running with our newsletter customers. Let's dive in...

🧪 Tests & Learnings 🧪

Early on, we noticed newsletters share a common, sizable challenge. A large group of subscribers are dormant. These are folks that have not engaged with any content (emails, web posts) for a long time, say at least 30 days. Some have never engaged with any content since signing up: the most deeply dormant subs & hardest to win back. 😴

It's valuable for newsletters of all types to chip away at this problem. For ad-supported newsletters, email opens (and clicks and other actions) are important for revenue. For paid newsletters, engagement is closely correlated with retention. In other words, dormancy is a strong leading indicator that a paid subscriber will cancel.

So how do we reduce dormancy? 🚫😴🚫

Test 1: For Gmail subs, 'Promotions' to ‘Primary’

For the newsletters we work with, Gmail domains account for 60% of emails. Gmail has a tendency to bump newsletters to the pesky 'Promotions' tab, where they're often buried alive. 

Our first test was to send an email from a personal Gmail account to dormant Gmail subscribers. The call-to-action was to move the newsletter to the 'Primary' tab. 

We timed the send right after a newsletter post went out. That not only made it easier to drag us to Primary, but gave us insight into how many people opened the post. 

We saw 7.7% of the cohort open the Substack newsletter post. And again, these were subs that had never opened an email before. So if this group had 1,000 subscribers, we feel pretty confident the test drove 77 incremental views. A promising start...

There was also a small group that opened up the next post, which serves our ultimate goal: encouraging subs to more consistently engage. 

Test 2 - 4: Re-engagement Campaigns Sent From Substack

Next up, we sent 3 re-engagement emails from Substack. One highlighted tops posts, another audio versions of top posts, and the last one was simply a personal note. 

We knew going in open rate would be tough. Again, these were subs that had never opened an email or engaged in any way. The open rate was 3.5%, below normal posts (35%), but not too shabby considering the test group's track record. 

For those that did open, the majority (60%) clicked on a link to an article or audio post! The overall re-engagement rate was 2.1% - an exciting starting point. 

While we have a lot of work to do, it's encouraging to see the positive impact and opportunities to add more value. We learned a lot with the first wave of tests and have a bunch of follow-up ideas to boost performance. We'll also be keeping an eye on the degree to which re-engaged subs remain engaged (or fall dormant again).

That’s it for this week - let me know what you think! I would love to hear from you. And if you’re not already, please consider subscribing below:

Subscribe now

As always, thank you for your support. 🙏

You may notice a new look & feel this week! We've migrated from Ghost to Substack, which is great for newsletters with no intention of monetizing.

A quick bit of housekeeping: Yem Jam is at least 10x more enjoyable when it’s easy to find in your inbox. Please move us to your Primary tab or out of your spam folder. 🙏

The Updates

The image below is a high-level view of what we’re working on:

We’re making progress on setting up the database and are pulling data from Stripe via an API. We're starting to see glimmers of hope with pulling data from Substack in a manageable way. All helpful as we keep an eye towards automating a lot of the reporting & forecasting. And more important, to support testing various growth efforts that help newsletters grow.

On that note, we're launching some exciting experiments this week. Mostly aimed at re-engaging dormant subs (i.e. haven't opened an email in the past 30+ days) and preventing paid cancels. Hope to report back with some learnings soon.

The Magic of Teams

Every week is a rollercoaster ride. Some weeks, it feels like the wind is at our backs and we have unstoppable momentum. Other weeks (okay, most weeks), it feels like swimming in quicksand. 

The amount of times we hear "no" is laughable. And it can be subtle. Being ghosted by potential customers, even folks you thought you had a good relationship with. Family telling you it's time to get a real job. Crickets from folks you’re excited to work with.

I don't mention this for sympathy - I wouldn't trade the experience for anything (at least for now!). But it has made me realize one thing: the magic of teams.

In any situation where there's a high degree of uncertainty, it's so helpful to have a team. I was lucky to be part of amazing teams at Hulu and Crunchyroll. It was fun to share in the celebrations with friends. More so, it was important to pick each other up during the lows. I learned a ton from my teammates - they helped me become a much better person. (And there was, and still is, a lot of room for improvement!)

Part of what I'm most excited about is finding the right people to go on this adventure with. 

That’s it for this week. Please share any thoughts on the above, would love to hear from you. And as always, thank you for your support.

Welcome to volume 2 of Yem Jam - a weekly summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem. We hope everyone is enjoying MDW. 🇺🇸 🌭 🏖

The Only Thing That Matters

We're now working with 5 newsletters. Even with a small group, we're getting great feedback and learnings.

The only thing that matters at this point is creating something customers want. We're searching for the "killer use case". A point at which customers would pay for Yem, or maybe even miss us if we weren't around.

A dashboard-only product doesn't seem to be that killer use case. It's helpful, as is the benchmarking and insights, and we've received encouraging feedback on the forecast model. But it doesn't seem to be compelling enough...

Analytics can be helpful in identifying areas of opportunity. For creators and "solopreneurs", this can almost be painful. It leaves them more aware they could be growing faster, but with limited bandwidth to see it through.

So it seems Yem must go further. We need to help creators test into areas of opportunity and realize tangible growth. A challenge we're excited to work on.

Snowflakes & Shared Challenges

Another finding - it's been surprising to see the uniqueness of each newsletter.

But while each is unique, there's shared challenges faced by all. One area that's especially exciting is data-driven user communication. This was a huge part of what we did at Hulu & Crunchyroll, relying heavily on email. For newsletters, where email is the core product, this could have a material impact. Some areas we're excited to test into:

• New user onboarding

• Re-engaging dormant subscribers

• Upselling free subscribers to paid subscriptions

• Preventing at-risk paid subs from cancelling

To help with the above, we may have found a way to access user-level event data for Substack newsletters. Where "events" are common behaviors, like opening an email, clicking a link, or viewing a web page. This helps us understand which users have read a particular article, and when they did it. User-level event data opens up a world of opportunity in personalization and discovery.

For example, let's imagine a food-related newsletter called Gjelina's Truffle. When someone signs up, Gjelina surfaces three top articles from the past month. Each article comes from a different category or theme: one on how to make pasta, one on cocktails, and the last on cupcakes. If the user chooses to read the cocktails post, we could use that info to guide their onboarding series. On day 3, they receive our best post on how to make bourbon drinks. Day 6, martinis. And so on. This removes a ton of friction for the user as they don't have to scour the archives for relevant content.

And how great is this for Gjelina! It takes the Gjelina team a ton of effort to produce high-quality content. Often, most of the value (engagement, new subs, etc.) happens within a few days of publishing. But with capabilities like the above, they're able to resurface older content at the right time, for the right person.

That's it for this week - let us know what you think of any of the above!

Thank you for signing up to receive updates on Yem. And for those of you who didn’t sign up, I’m stretching our friendship and assuming you won't mind the spam too much. 🙏

Welcome to Yem Jam - a weekly summary of progress, learnings, and ideas as we build Yem.

Why do this?

We’re inspired by the creators and businesses that are building in public. Especially in the "creator economy". Folks like Lenny Rachitsky and Packy McCormick. Perhaps most of all, Li Jin, who brought a much needed vernacular to a fascinating corner of the internet.

Lenny, Packy, Li, and many other pioneers gave me the encouragement needed to take a leap of faith and start Yem. Even if Yem blows up in smoke, hopefully it shows the worst case scenario isn't all that bad. And maybe that will lead to folks overcoming any hesitations to build things that bring value and joy to others.

One other reason for Yem Jam is to encourage serendipity and collaboration. We're hoping to share ideas, meet new people, and collectively chip away at the future we want. So please provide feedback, and please share this with anyone you think may benefit from it.

Oh, and on a more personal note, I want to create a way to try to explain what we're doing to my parents. (Hey mom, hey dad!) They thought I was crazy when I moved across the country to work at a startup called Hulu. They thought I had lost it when I moved to San Francisco to join Crunchyroll. They now think I'm totally bonkers for starting Yem. Hopefully the occasional update helps them sleep a little better at night.

Now onto the updates.

What’s going on?

Our mission with Yem is to help creators unlock data-driven growth. To start, we worked with Anthony Pompliano (aka Pomp) on growth efforts for The Pomp Letter:

• Created reporting and subscriber forecast to measure experiments

• Conducted user surveys to develop personas

• Ran paid ads on Facebook

• Tested different landing pages

• Experimented with free-to-paid upsell emails

• Tested windowing paid-only posts to everyone

We’ve gathered some great learnings. But one thing keeps surprising us: how tedious and timing-consuming it is to bring the data together and measure our efforts. Our initial focus is on building a reporting platform tailored to newsletters. We hope a solid analytical foundation helps newsletters experiment, learn, and grow.

We've built a prototype and are working with 5 newsletters in private beta. The plan is to stay in private beta through at least the end of June. During this time, we're aiming to keep customers to under 10 newsletters. By the end of private beta, our goal is to have 80% of customers buy our product.

We've received some great feedback from our current customers. One takeaway is the reporting is helpful, but there may be room to add more value. Our customers want us to provide more insight on what they should do with the data. And some customers want us to go a step further by actually doing the thing that will help them grow.

What’s the plan?

Nearly all our effort revolves around building the product and talking to customers.

We're looking to accelerate our ability to build, experiment, and sharpen the product. To that end, we're searching for a technical partner. A resourceful problem solver that can help form and build early versions of the product. We’re flexible, but this is likely at least a 20-40 hour a week commitment to start. If you're interested, or know of anyone that may be a good fit, please send us a note by replying to this email!

We're also hoping to gradually onboard new customers. If you're a newsletter operator and would like to join our private beta, please let us know!

I’ve gone way longer than intended... but hey, it’s the first one! Please let us know what you think. And thank you for your early support - we’ll talk to you next week.

PS - thank you to Arlen Marmel for editing and his continuous wisdom.

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