Joe Benjamin

Sequoia (@sequoia) Partner @JulienBek tells us why the next $1Trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm: "Ultimately, if you look at the TAM today, for every dollar that you spend on software, $6 are spent on services". "If you sell the tools, the models are getting better and better and so you're at risk... whereas, if you sell the services, you're actually delivering outcomes." "Until now, we could really just go after the $1, but now with services first and human at the centre, we think you can capture the six".

Incredible read: 60 New Yorkers on how much they made last year. Midtown coffee cart guy made as much as a NYT Bestselling Author with 800k IG followers. Both made 1/3 as much as a server at a midtown power lunch spot & less than a traveling lice lady. archive.is/ezKAu

I can't stop thinking about local newsletters. A guy in Annapolis, Maryland started a free email newsletter about local events. No journalism background. He's an engineer. 23,000 subscribers. In a city of 40,000 people. ~$300,000 in revenue last year. From a newsletter about things to do in Annapolis. A 23-year-old in Winnipeg did $60,000 in his first two months of monetizing. @MikeyPesto , a guy in the Catskills did $32,100 last month. The model is stupid simple. Curate local events, restaurant openings, things to do. No politics. No crime. Just fun stuff for families. Send it once a week. Businesses pay to advertise because the open rates are 50-70%. The industry average is <20%. Subscriber acquisition cost? $0.50 to $1.00. Revenue per subscriber? $10-$12 per year. That's a 10-20x return. I don't know where else that ROI exists. Now here's why I'm stoked on this: I'm building a roofing company. Marketing in roofing is brutal. You're bidding against national brands on Google Ads with bottomless budgets. You're posting on social media where you don't own the audience and the algorithm can tank your reach overnight. So I'm going to start a local newsletter for my market. Build the audience. Build the trust. Then Rally Roofing advertises in its own newsletter. For free. To people who actually open the email. My marketing spend doesn't go to zero, it goes NEGATIVE. Other businesses pay me to run ads alongside mine. I wrote the whole breakdown in this week's issue of The Rally. [Link in first reply]