The Takeover with Tim and Cindy

Cold DMs, Listicles, and the Secret to Explosive Growth with Jake Schonberger

• Tim and Cindy Dodd • Episode 104

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What if the secret to scaling a startup wasn’t raising millions, but creating an ecosystem that lets everyone win?

In this episode of The Takeover, Jake Schoenberger, the Head of Strategy and Operations for Ads at Beehive reveals how he scaled a newsletter platform into a powerhouse with unicorn potential. From his journey at Facebook partnerships to launching and selling Swapstack, Jake breaks down the strategies he used to build and monetize a thriving newsletter ecosystem.

Whether you’re a startup founder, newsletter creator, or marketer looking for new growth ideas, this episode is packed with tactical strategies and inspiring insights.

Keypoints & Chapter Markers:

00:00 – Introduction: Jake’s path from Facebook to Swapstack
01:57 – The birth of Swapstack and newsletter monetization
03:51 – Building traction: How they grew Swapstack from scratch
10:23 – Selling to Beehive and accelerating growth
22:26 – Beehive’s next-level growth strategy and partner ecosystem
33:47 – The long-term vision for Beehive as a unicorn platform
34:43 – How to connect with Jake and Beehive

Connect with Jake: Jake on LinkedIn | Jake on X

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About The Hosts:

  • Tim & Cindy Dodd are the Co-founders of PEMA.io, based out of Miami, FL. Connect with Tim and Cindy: Instagram

About PEMA.io:

  • PEMA.io is a Inc 5000 Outbound Marketing Agency specializing in Enterprise Sales & Appointment Setting. With over 7-years and 1,000+ clients served in the industry, PEMA is the leading agency for cold outreach appointments & systems. Learn more about PEMA.io here: www.pema.io/discover

00:00
I remember specifically, I spent hours  on Facebook  and I was in like newsletter operator Facebook groups,  DMing like hundreds of people that were posting in there  and basically just saying, Hey,  as broad as, Hey, I have an advertiser that wants to advertise on your newsletter.  Would you be interested? And if you are  sign up for this platform  and that's basically just hustle growth,  dangling money in front of people. And you  went out and sold it before you like, was like, Oh, we had nothing. Yeah.

00:29
I always tell people like, go sell it and then build it. So you basically just solve, put some fillers out and say, okay, there's demand here. And then you're like, oh, let me go see who wants to buy it on this. And so you had interest on both sides and that's how you kind of like, just, I'm all about the just cold, go knock on doors, go send them a message, whatever it's got to do. And so this wasn't like some perfect like mid-market enterprise, like brand, like we've got to create this whole campaign.

00:59
Like you just went out and knocked on doors.  Welcome to The Takeover with Tim and Cindy, where we show you how to dominate  every area of life  and business. Let's get with it.

01:12
Well, welcome to the show, Jake Schoenberger. It's great to have you here, Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.  Well, let's kind of get started, man. I know you've grown super fast. You're looking to build this thing to a unicorn. I think a lot of our guests are always looking for how do you, how do you fast scale? And for you to just talk about a little bit about where your company started, where you're at, and then we'll kind of say where you're wanting to go for a little bit later in the episode. Cool. Yeah, I can give quick background. So I'm at, I'm currently working at Beehive and I sold my company to Beehive.

01:42
So  different life, I was at Facebook for a while, basically like building partnerships, selling ads at Facebook, left, tried to get away from advertising, pandemic hit, started a newsletter. The newsletter that I started was called Pre-Money. It was basically connecting founders to investors.  And I actually thought I was just going to focus on that and build up that community. But then I started meeting,  this was right when the pandemic hit, right when everybody was just spending time on.

02:10
their computer and Substack was getting super hot. So I started this newsletter  and  ended up talking to a ton of other newsletter writers just to understand like, how can I grow my own?  And every newsletter writer was kind of talking about the same two problems. They wanted to grow and they also wanted to monetize.  And around that time, Pacam McCormick, who writes a newsletter called Not Boring, he was selling ads in his newsletters for like seven grand a pop and he had 10,000 subscribers. It was insane.

02:39
And a lot of publishers I was talking to were just trying to figure out how can I become the next Packey.  And yeah, 10,000 subs and it was, he could charge  7k for, for one drop. Yeah, honestly, I don't think it made any sense. It was also during the time where the venture world was at a grow at all costs mindset.  And so I think a lot of these brands that were paying that, that ticket kind of got the bad end of the stick, but at the same time, Packey's content is really good and he probably demanded it in some way.

03:08
There's a lot of other publishers that were demanding or, or asking for the same, same price and didn't have as good of content. But yeah, the price tag was really high. But TLDR, I was talking to a ton of writers that were trying to monetize their newsletter and ended up building a platform called Swapstack, which was just a monetization layer for newsletters. So newsletter creators could come onto the platform, create a profile.

03:36
And we would match them with brands that wanted to sponsor newsletters like theirs, and they could get paid on a CPC or a flat rate  or an affiliate model. So what we did was we kind of tapped into all the different affiliate platforms, pre-approved newsletters for deals. And so if you're a newsletter writer, you have 500 subscribers, you've never monetized that thing on the internet in your life. You could create a profile on Swapstack and automatically.

04:04
You have 30 ways to monetize and make money.  And I'll get into some of the gross stuff after, but just quick background. that, that was like the platform that we built. And then we built that for about two and a half years, raised a little bit of money, but didn't know if we actually wanted to turn, turn on the jets and try to make that specific product into a unicorn. I'm going to go like the full venture route. So  my co-founder also named Jake and I.

04:31
We kind of put out, we call them the acquisition pheromones. We were just kind of talking to a couple of platforms we were working with, like Behive and Substack and MailChimp, et cetera, to see if we could develop a more quote unquote intimate partnership. And Behive was at the beginning of starting their own  ad network  and  ended up talking to a couple of other platforms, but the direction that Behive was going made a lot of sense to us. And it aligned.

04:59
very directly to kind of the vision we have for Swapstack, which was helping anybody who's a writer on the internet to make money and turn their fashion project into a business or turn their media company into a bigger business. So ended up selling Swapstack to Beehive to help build out the Beehive ad network. That was about a year and a half ago. And now  at Beehive we're paying out publishers around a million dollars a month just through the ad network. It's about 10X what we were doing at Swapstack on its own.

05:27
Was your mindset are  always like, want to be a part of a unicorn is, was that like the dream and  the goal from the get go? And so you're like, okay, I have this opportunity. I don't know if it's going to be the unicorn, but I think it could play a part in like any unicorn. And that's why you made that move or was that more of a, I see that it was like an opportunity that came up and you went down that road. it, I guess, is it premeditated or was it a, an audible you called based off of a circumstance? Yeah.

05:56
I mean, it was kind of interesting when we started Swapstack, we kind of started it by accident.  I had just finished up grad school. I had gone back to school. I was in the mindset of starting the company and I really wanted to start something. But I thought that thing was going to be pre-money, that newsletter and that like investor startup founder network. So when Swapstack started being,  becoming a thing and my co-founder and I realized we're just spending more time on this than we are anything else.

06:22
We kind of decided, Hey, we're actually sure this is, this could be a billion dollar business, but we know there's a business in here somewhere and it could be a lifestyle business. It could be something else. I think  after about two years, when we started thinking about really selling, there were the ESPs. like, Beehive, Substack, ConvertKit, they all started doing what we were doing. So they started building in more monetization features. That's when we had to think about like, Hey, what is the future of Swapstack? Like, do we actually need?

06:52
to go raise real money and try to compete directly with the ESPs who are kind of our partners.  Or do we want to try to sell it? Or do we want to put it on like, package it up and kind of make it a side project? That last option didn't really make any sense. It's very hard to go from like  putting like your entire, like all your efforts and all your time into a company to turning it into a side project.

07:17
And then honestly, we had a powwow in New York. Jake was in DC. He came up to New York. We got drunk one night. We're just talking about what do we want out of life? And do we want to spend five more years on building Swapstack specifically?  Or would we be happy with rounding out this founder story into an acquisition and selling to a company that we do think could become a unicorn? And that being like a single or a double and kind of a big W on our chests or I don't know, just like a W for us. And that sounded the most appealing.

07:46
I think we did have some concern that being on our own, we wouldn't get big enough to a place where it would actually be make financial sense for us to continue. We could sell it maybe a couple million after a couple of years, but ultimately that's not an incredible outcome. And it takes a lot of time and years off your life.  But we also wanted to work with like more passionate people.  And the founding team at Beehive is incredible. Tyler and Priya and Ben and another Jake, they're just awesome.  And

08:13
the opportunity to work with somebody in a company that's moving so quickly. what is your role there now? Like what do you do with the company there now? Yeah. So title is head of strategy and operations for ads.  And I basically do  very similar work to what I was doing at Swapstack where we're building out the ad network. So we're enabling any newsletter publisher who  operates on Behive to monetize three ads. And we're building a bunch of different products that

08:43
support that. That's awesome. My title at our company is Chief Growth Officer. I'm like, that's like the coolest. And my co-founder is like chief strategist. She's like, I don't want to be a CEO and she didn't want to be COO. So we're like, cause we love the growth part. Like I think it's cool to understand like that part of the business that you just like love doing that you're super good at doing and just going all in on that. Now as far as for the next phase, like you're saying like this can be a unicorn in like a year. Yeah, I've raised $30 million in a series B.

09:13
And  we've already like grown into that valuation, the valuation for that V round. And that was over a year ago. And Tyler, Tyler's very public about like  MRR stuff like that. I do believe like in a year we could demand a billion dollar valuation. Damn. That's cool.  And so what do you think is going to be thinking about like growth wise? lot of people listening to this are going like, it seems like it was so effortless for you to kind of make.

09:42
those moves and do those moves. When you're thinking about growing, it's one thing that builds like a tool, build a software, build a platform. mean, like how many people do you know that are great, like developers, they've got a great product, but they never know how to get it to market. Before we kind of go to this next phase of what you guys are like, what it's going to look like to bring this to a billion dollar company. What did it look like to get to where you're at right now? Like, how did you get enough?

10:10
of enough eyeballs, enough interest in your product to even get to where you're at right now. Yeah.  Honestly, this was the most fun part of the building the business. I'll talk about early days of Swapstack. So again, Swapstack was like a platform for monetization for anybody writing. Newsletters or content on the internet, inherently at the two-sided marketplace. So you have one side, we called the supply, basically people writing  and sending out newsletters and the supply was basically calculated by how many newsletters you had.

10:40
How many subscribers on those newsletters and what were the open rates? So basically how many people are reading whatever the content is. And then the demand is advertisers. And because at the marketplace, you naturally have a cold start problem. So at the very beginning, when we had like a marketplace or a platform with nothing, it was kind of like a cobbled together platform. But what we did was we,  we went out and we kind of had this theory that newsletter advertising as a channel is going to grow incredibly.

11:10
quickly, partially because of the pandemic and just because so many other people were creating newsletters. And we also had a theory that advertisers had no idea how to scalably advertise. So that was just a thesis. And we went out and just found like 10 companies that had raised a bunch of money  and just peppered them until one of them talked to us. And we basically just said, Hey, if we get you into a bunch of newsletters, would you pay us for that? I don't even remember if we like.

11:37
Go find how much they would pay or whatever. They just said, yes, we'll pay for that. So then we went on. I remember specifically, I spent hours on Facebook and I was in like newsletter operator, Facebook groups, DMing, like hundreds of people that were posting in there and basically just saying, Hey, as broad as, Hey, I have an advertiser that wants to advertise on your newsletter. Would you be interested? And if you are sign up for this platform and that's basically just hustle growth.

12:07
dangling money in front of people.  And  you went out and sold it before you like, was like,  we had nothing. Yeah. I always tell people like, go sell it and then build it. So you just  solve, you put some fillers out and say, okay, there's demand here. And then you're like, Oh, let me go see who wants to buy it on this. And so you had interest on both sides and you're, and that's how you kind of like, just, I'm all, I'm all about the just cold, go knock on doors, go send them a message, whatever it's got to do.

12:37
And so this wasn't like some perfect like mid-market enterprise, like brand, like we've got to create this whole campaign. Like you just went out and knocked on doors. Yeah, exactly. And we had people sign up and basically just ask, what is your newsletter's name? What do you write about? And that was maybe it. And then we threw them into a Slack channel. And then for the ones that actually made sense for the advertiser, the first advertiser was called Main Street.

13:04
They're still around. They're basically like a tax rebate platform for startups. So anybody that made sense, just emailed introduction or emailed intro to them. The others, we kind of were just like, oh, wow, we have a lot of newsletters that are writing about sports. Let's go and find a sports advertiser. But the way that we set everything up was like the platform is free for publishers or newsletter writers. There's no reason for them to come on and leave. We promised them money.

13:34
or like opportunities to make money. So they came on board, we had some info on them. And then we knew we had flexibility and time to figure out if we had 100. supply, made it, you got a lot of supply because you just made it free for them. Exactly. Yeah. And they're not going to churn because we're not, there's no reason for them to churn. That was one thing we did at the very beginning. The other, which  we still do, we do at Beehive too. We tried really hard because we didn't have a lot of money.

14:02
tried really hard to figure out what are like good product-like growth strategies, but then also what are ways that we could just  use our own customers to do marketing for us. Actually back to the beginning, like that there's two problems that all publishers have are growth and monetization. What we started doing was creating a lot of listicles, like Buzzfeed style listicles. We made hundreds of them. So we would say like, feel like fantasy sports. We had like five fantasy sports listicles.

14:32
So we had a listicle that was like niche fantasy sport listicle or like top. Let me pause you for a second. You know, I know what listicles are of course. Just for all of those people out there that don't know what that is, let us in on it. I don't know what they are. Okay, cool. I realize I'm like talking very tactically, but so listicle is basically top 10 places you should go if you love like hanging out on the beach. And then there's an article that has like top like 10 vacation spots. When you Google anything.

15:01
Things to do in Miami, things to do in Mallorca, Madrid. Those are listicles when there's like the top 10 list. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So what we started doing was we would choose, we identified all the newsletters that we add on our platform  and just figured out like what categories, what are they writing about? And so we wrote listicles. We kind of just like generated listicles that said,

15:28
Here are the top 10 newsletters about sports or top 10 newsletters about  surfing, whatever it was. And we posted those on our site, but the way that it actually worked, the reason why the growth mechanism worked is we went to those publishers that were on that list of top 10 newsletters. And we specifically said like, congratulations, you made this top 10 list. They have no idea that they're like one of 10 other newsletters that we're working with.

15:56
They probably think there's like thousands of publications and they're like really well regarded, but we congratulated them and they felt like they received an award. So they started sharing the listicle on like Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook. Well, that's brilliant. I love that. That's brilliant. Yeah. Yeah. So it served both sides of the market because as an advertiser who wants to advertise to people that like surfing, they go on and do exactly what you just said. They said they'll search like, what are the top 10 newsletters I should advertise?

16:26
If I'm a surfing company or top 10 surfing,  surfing newsletters. And then our listicle pops up and that drives them to a place where they connect with me. We get on a call and then I sell a bunch of advertising to the 10 newsletters that are on that list. And those are all your advertisers.  Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.  I love smart marketing brains. Like that's just, that's brilliant. That's great.  And so how did it grow from there? What did it look like from there?

16:54
If you're loving what you're hearing, subscribing is the best way to ensure you never miss an episode.  You can also follow us on all our social media channels  at Tim and Cindy dot to get the latest updates on new and upcoming episodes.  Yeah. So those are kind of like two tactics. We did the hustle growth thing, like DMing people for a long time. And then  we built a lot of other types of content. just kind of like thought leadership.

17:24
deep dives and how does newsletter advertising work?  And  we never did any paid growth, but I would say the majority of our growth came from content marketing. So we hired an SEO consultant. That was probably the best investment we made and they helped us figure out what keywords, what articles we should write to get in front of both newsletters  and  advertisers. Ultimately.

17:52
It was very easy to grow the supply side. So newsletters just started hearing about us because we would post in groups and talk about monetization and become like a thought leader in the monetization world. On the advertiser side, it was mainly content marketing.  do you feel about where SEO is going with, with, ever with AI and all that stuff? I mean, do you still see the same type of results come? Like, how do you feel as, as strategically like continuing to do the content marketing, the SEO marketing?

18:21
think it still works. It's  much more difficult. My day-to-day is much more removed from the SEO side of the business than I was before. So I don't have a super educated reaction to how AI is affecting or AI is like having an impact on the effectiveness of SEO. But I know like, you know, a Gentic search is very easily going to recognize just crappy content. Like those listicles I just mentioned,  that strategy might not work now.

18:49
It'll work in the sense that it'll also excite people to be on a list, but it might not work from an SEO perspective as well. I used to, mean, I went to brand an SEO company back in like 2008. Are you like, would just, we just had an automation tool that would go out and create like junk articles on like literally thousands and thousands of websites. And then they would all point to mine and all of a sudden like.

19:15
You know, our clients are number one bankruptcy lawyer in Kansas City in like 30 days. So it's like  the game does change pretty fast, but you think the traffic is the eyeballs are still there. Despite people starting to  more like go to chat, GBT or perplexity for answers. You still think there's a lot of traffic happening in the major search engines. Yeah, for sure. And this is my ignorance on how exactly, how  the AI models are really trained, but having more content that is good.

19:44
about your company or about like the calling out case studies of successful. In our case, publishers or advertisers, just customers in general, they're going to pick that up. That is going to be helpful, but generating just like mass quantities of data or mass quantities of articles is probably not going to help. used to work. used to work a long time ago, a long time ago. There total, there were total garbage. you like total garbage. I was laughing.

20:11
Cause I used to apply in undergrad, I used to apply to jobs and they used to have those like very simple  word scanners for resumes.  And I used to copy like the keywords in the job listing  and just like copy and paste them a million times and put it into, put it on like white font all over my like PDF to resume and then put the actual resume above that. So when it went through that scanner, it would show.

20:40
like hundreds of the keyword for that job. And I would get so many interviews. It was amazing. It's like Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. He says, I remember when I, early on as an entrepreneur, read his book and he said, you got to be willing to play in those gray areas. You're not like breaking laws. You're not doing illegal stuff, but you got to be willing to play in those areas that most people aren't willing to play in. like, you know, it's

21:09
He said, you can't grow, you can't fast grow a company. Like you can't dominate a marketplace without being willing to play in gray areas. And I think too many people, want to go down the exact traditional route that everybody's doing. And if, but if you're trying to do the exact same thing that everybody else is doing and you're trying to see what like the enterprise strategies are and try to replicate that, like you're going to struggle. Like you have to be willing to knock the doors, the DMs, stuff a landing page with a thousand keywords, create a

21:37
thousand junk articles, if it works.  And those are those, you got to find those little advantages that can get you ahead. And then once you're established enough,  you can start creating the more traditional type marketing approach that's,  you know, cost more money or maybe you get the capital raise and you can throw a little bit more money on it. But I love that hustle mentality that it took that brought you to where you're at. I'd love to shift gears and talk about, okay, so that hustle mentality, cool. got you where you're going.

22:06
Where are you guys thinking about as a company  to get from  where you're at now to unicorn? I mean, that's going to take some hustle mentality, but that's going to, that's going to take some new ways of thinking about things. Like, so what is that looking like and how are you guys feeling about that strategically to make that move? Beehive has grown, so I'll talk about like more beehive and then  the different parts of the company. So beehive  folks listening don't know it's a, it's an ESP. So

22:34
email service provider essentially very similar.  If you're a newsletter writer, you can write your newsletter on Beehive very similar in the way that you would write your newsletter on Substack or MailChimp.  And technically like Google and Yahoo and stuff's in ESP, right? So Google has their own, I don't know what Yahoo does, but we use SendGrid. So SendGrid actually sends the emails, but we're like a platform that sits on top of a SendGrid  and  we make it easier for people to actually like

23:04
build out newsletters. SendGrid like powers a lot of emails that you would receive and a couple of those. That's basically like the Twilio of emails. So Twilio's, you got to be a developer to play with it. Exactly. Yeah. Right now, Beehive, we have about 40,000 publications that operate their newsletter on the platform. And we're at a point where we're starting to become  big enough and feature rich enough where Time Magazine, for example, they run all their newsletters with us.

23:33
we're starting to become really attractive to these like big enterprise customers. So as we continue to go down that route, that is where that takes us from being a platform that like tens of thousands of smaller creators use and a, like a big handful of big publications used to the place where we're the default for any enterprise, like proper media company that has an email newsletter. They'll be running with us over the next one, two years.

24:00
So that's like just enabling us to really capture the existing newsletter market. Where we expand, we just launched the ability for you to launch a podcast on your newsletter. So that enabled us to support multi-modal creators. So a creator that has a podcast like this one and a newsletter, you can run both and operate both on Beehive. We also,  about a year ago-  like monetize, like be able to monetize. If you have a podcast, you have a certain amount of traffic.

24:30
You can share your metrics based off of your metrics, your attention, all that stuff. You can then monetize through the podcast. that what you're talking about? Yeah, right now you can't monetize the podcast, but we will enable podcast monetization as a company. Beehive is a SaaS platform. So publishers pay to use. We also  have a website builder. We had bought a company called dream builder about a year ago  and they were like a framer web flow type business.

25:00
And so now if you're  a full-fledged media company, you want to have a beautiful website. You want to manage your website, your newsletter, your monetization all in the same place. You can do that on Beehive. So now we're able to enter the market and say, Hey, we're the one-stop shop.  actually running a media company, not just an email newsletter. And that includes analytics, monetization,  writing your newsletter, sending it out.

25:26
All these things that if you ran on Substack or ConvertKit or Mailchimp, you would have to use 10 other platforms and probably license out a bunch of work for other people to do where we just provide it to you up out of the box. So folks coming over from Substack or ConvertKit or Mailchimp, they're first saving a ton of money, but they're a lot cheaper. And then also they have to do a lot less work because we do so much for them. So is a lot of the growth happening in just like...

25:54
the technology and like adding like services and like attracting people over, or is there like a,  we built this thing. We've acquired these, these other, these companies now, like, let's just aggressively hit every one of their,  competitors, customers, and tell them to come over here because we're cheaper, better, stronger, and,  all that stuff. Yeah. Combination of all that. So  because we're cheaper, better, stronger, we can develop tons of case studies. So that's actually back to the content bit I was talking about earlier.

26:22
We have tons of case studies that show the publishers that were on  Substack or another platform come to Beehive. see higher open rates, better performance. They make a lot more money.  That helps us bring over folks from Substack or from our competitors. And then we do a lot of general like product-led growth. We have a big partner program. So  we offer, so if you suggest Beehive to a publication and they move over to Beehive.

26:50
We pay out about 60 % of whatever that platform fee is to that referrer for a year. Hundreds of companies have these platform or these partner programs. We decided to invest very heavily into it and make our commissions really high because we know... How does that compare to partner programs in your industry? Is it like normally 20 % or 10 %? What does it normally look like? Yeah, it's normally about 20 % on a subscription fee.

27:19
And usually it's paid 20 % every month for about six months. We do about 60 % every month for 12 months. So you guys are just like, wait, we're not even trying to make money on this. We just want to steal everybody's customers. We know that we're going to pay ourselves back within like eight months of that, like reduced fee. And we're also confident that our churn is low enough and our LTV is high enough that it doesn't matter. Like six months, we can stomach. That's awesome, man. And I think a lot of times people.

27:47
They're not willing to do that. It's like, they're almost like too proud. Like, well, I can't be paying out somebody that much money or that much commission. mean, geez, like we're doing all the work, but I mean, you're, you're thinking this out, like, oh, like if we can break even on this thing and have it pay for itself. And then in six months we own the marketplace. And I think that's the kind of mindset you have to have to grow fast. And I think a lot of people, they get stuck in their growth, even though they might have a great product.

28:17
They might have great potential, but they're not willing to like, man, like I live in this like really beautiful, like I could see the ocean or a math. There's all these skyscrapers and others. They're Brickle. I'm in Brickle, Miami. Like they're just like tearing down all the old buildings, putting up new ones. And I'm like, it's like, there's this one building over here. They've been working on it forever and they just like stripped it down. They're trying to redo it and build it. But like all the super nice buildings are like, let's just tear this thing down and build like a

28:44
And like an 80 story skyscraper. I think a lot of times people aren't willing to make those kinds of investments. Like, yeah, like we're going to be doing all this growth and making almost no profit on it for a certain amount of time because the long-term is to build something big and great. think too many people try to like, just do that incremental growth. Let's try to make a little bit more money, a little bit more profit over and over. And so what I'd love to hear for you on that, you're in this world.

29:12
is how do you guys see that? Like, hey, we're willing to like not make much money in six months. What's your mindset behind that? What's your thinking behind that long-term? I mean, it's actually very similar to the, the listicle example I brought up earlier. The connection between those two strategies  is the perspective of empowering an ecosystem to basically do some work for you. So in the listicle example, you're empowering

29:41
the newsletters that are on that list to kind of share on your behalf because you've given them  something that's so valuable. You've given them like this credibility. They can go and show their audience, hey, I'm on this top 10 list. In the partner program, it's a little bit more, I guess it's a little bit more involved, but taking that six month hit of less revenue to enable a...

30:07
say a person that is going out and selling Beehive on our behalf because they want that 60%. In six months from now, they just made say like $4,000 a month because they brought over to Beehive 10 solid sized newsletters. What that enables them to do  is then realize, hey, I could actually do this as a side business or in some places in the world, they could just do that as their full-time job. And then they start posting about it and they start talking about it and they start saying like,

30:34
Hey, I just made $4,000 a month and I'm doing that every month because I'm just talking about Beehive and I'm talking to people about this cool platform. And so that creates an entire ecosystem  of  other affiliates that realize, Hey, I can actually make a good business, make a good living by talking about this awesome platform. And it creates an ecosystem that we then support and we support it by just building an awesome piece of software. It's basically the long-term vision of a really powerful partner program.

31:03
or really powerful marketing that enables us to kind of create a paradigm that allows people that are not our employees to go and sell Beehive. And they're inherently incentivized to talk about Beehive over our competitors because they'll get paid more to do it. And then again, it's the same concept that, know,  Jeff Bezos created around Amazon. Like we're going to create this opportunity, like tons of income opportunity for a lot of different people. So, mean, so much  of the way it's...

31:31
that he built it around wasn't like, wasn't trying to make, well, let me try to make the most amount of money on every transaction. He's like, let me try to create the most amount of opportunity for the most amount of people. And so you essentially are doing some similar, you're creating the most amount of opportunity for the most amount of people. And in so doing, now you have essentially a, potentially a lot of people that are kind of doing this as like micro businesses, like freelancers that are like, this is their hustle.

31:58
They're creating that kind of income on that, or at least as a side hustle. I love that. That's super smart, man. And you think that is that your big like, let's just throw fuel on that fire and as much as we can and see how big we can grow it. Or is there other avenues and strategies that you guys were thinking about to continue to explode the growth? Yeah, I think for the next, for the next bit, we're definitely focused on like the creator world. So newsletters, podcasts, et cetera. Those with websites are like proper media companies.

32:28
but probably focused in that world for the next year or so. And then on the ad side of the business, kind of taking a chip or a tool kit, tool out of the like Fang toolkit, where like Google- Toolbox, Toolbox, yeah. out of the toolbox.  So like Facebook, Google, they both created marketing partner programs.  So they created like open APIs and-

32:56
That created massive ecosystems. So like all these digital agencies and digital platforms that you can buy ads through, those are built on top of the Facebook ad buying platform, Google ad buying platform, et cetera. What that did was like it removed Google's need to go out and sell advertisers. They still have a sales team, but now there's like all the ecosystem of the agencies that go and sell advertising for Google and spend on Google.  On the ad side of the business, that's where we'll go to. We're not there.

33:25
yet we'll probably get there in a year or two, but again, kind of empowering the ecosystem by building platforms. Literally you can like just plug into people's companies that are like, I have a friend that's in that world and he built a whole company that just, he saw, understand that world where you're just like, literally people are just running bidding like they would do on like a, like a Facebook or a Google ad. Like they can plug in their platforms, their technology connects years and it's bidding real time on.

33:53
on different advertising potentials. Is that kind of the concept in the future? Yeah. I could see if we have an API that taps into our ad network, then somebody can come on and build a technology that has the unique value proposition for newsletter marketing. And if they do that really well, they can sell access to it.  And we benefit because we get more advertisers on the platform.  That's the platform play. And that's the dream.  That's awesome.

34:16
Well, Jake, this has been super awesome to have you on here. I'm excited to follow up with you in just a year from now and be like, man, I remember when I Jake on the podcast. Don't forget me, man. When you're, when you're cruising your huge yacht over here. can't forget that beard. That's the main question I've had. wave, man. You don't have to your helicopter over to me, but you can at least like wave, you know, or sit in a jet ski or something. Will do for sure.

34:40
Dude, definitely want people to get connected with you. What's the best way for our audience to connect with you or connect with what Beehive's doing? Yeah. You can DM me on  X or  LinkedIn. If you look up Jacob Schoenberger or Jake Schoenberger on either, you'll find me. Okay, cool. And I'll go ahead and I'll throw that in the show notes. listening, that'll be in the show notes. And  Jake, was great having you on the show today, brother. And just remember, domination's not a destination. It's a way of life.  Stay with me.