Hey Hey, Ellen here, welcome back to another bonus episode of cubicle to CEO, the podcast where we ask successful entrepreneurs, the business questions you can't google.
We are officially halfway through this year. And I thought this would be a perfect time for a mid year check in to let you all know on how we're doing on our big three goals. These are the goals that we shared in bonus episode number three at the very beginning of 2023. And I thought that we were you know, due for an update, I was kind of curious myself, obviously, we're keeping track monthly, on different success metrics. But it's also nice to see the cumulative data on how we've done over the last six months on moving the needle in the goals that we said were our priorities this year.
So just as a quick recap, in case you didn't listen to bonus episode three, our big three goals this year, were one to grow our email list to 100,000 subscribers, two to reach 1 million downloads on our podcast, this show that you're listening to right now. And three, to reach YouTube monetization status. And to be eligible for monetization on YouTube, you have to meet two qualification metrics. Number one, you need 1000 subscribers to your channel. And number two, you need to accumulate 4000 watch hours over a one year or 365 day period.
So let me start with the first big three goal because this is the one that we have made the least amount of progress on, I'll be honest, and that is our newsletter growth, our subscriber growth for our email list. Now we have a pretty strong email list. And we have seen growth this year in the 1000s. But I would say that our biggest issue with this particular goal right now, there's actually a couple which I'll get to at the end of this episode, just some reflections I've had in looking at what our progress has been so far, but specific to the email list, the biggest issue we deal with is churn. So even if we're growing by 1000s of subscribers, our net growth has not been as aggressive as I would like because, you know, if you let's say bring on 2000 new subscribers to your list, and 1500 churn and unsubscribe, then your net growth is really only 500. And if you kind of waver back and forth month after month, your list size kind of just plateaus, right? It's not necessarily growing, it's not shrinking, it's just kind of staying more or less the same.
And I feel like our challenge here comes down to a couple things. Like I said, I'll get a little bit more in depth into this at the end of this episode. But I think our biggest issue is that we are not just a newsletter. What I mean by this is a lot of newsletter companies or media companies where newsletters are their primary product. They only email their subscribers, when they're sending out the newsletter, right? Whether it's a daily newsletter, weekly newsletter monthly newsletter, the only time subscribers will hear from them is when they're receiving an issue or publication of the newsletter. We're kind of in a unique situation, I think this is what contributes to our churn is we are a media company now. But we were not always a media company. I didn't start this business as a media company. I started it in services back in 2018. And then we evolved into an education company, which is really what the bulk of our time as a company has been around.
And then, most recently, as you all know, who have been listening to the show for a while, in the summer of 2022, we decided to pivot to a media business model. And the email list that we had built up to that point was an email list that was built around people who had opted in for our lead magnets, things that were directly related typically to marketing. They were customers of ours, people who had bought digital products or courses or join my coaching programs who had attended our live events. So most of the time, when I was communicating with my list, I was either sharing personal stories or communications with them, or we were emailing them about the products they bought from us, or we were sending sales and promotional emails, right. And so because we still do have the education arm of our business, it's not necessarily been the focus of what we've been doing this year. But we do have digital products and we do still have lead magnets out there that provide marketing resources to people such as our 10k month roadmap that helps service providers and coaches reverse engineer their path to their first $10,000 revenue month. We still have things like that out there, right.
So we're kind of in this unique position where our subscribers hear from us consistently once a week on Wednesdays for our newsletter. And we do have a significant amount of people coming in who are signing up because of the newsletter, like they're coming on to our list because they want to receive the newsletter. But then we also have 10s of 1000s of people who are on our list for a variety of other reasons. And they may get value and benefit from our weekly newsletters, but they're also, you know, used to receiving emails from us, because of promotions, that we're doing launches that we're doing, et cetera. So I think because we're kind of in this weird spot where we send out emails for the newsletter, but we also send out sales and promotional emails that are not as typical of a newsletter company, it creates this kind of weird, I don't know, frictions the right word, but it's just a little bit of a dilemma. Because naturally, if you're sending out sales and promotion emails, rather than only straight, you know, content based emails, value based emails, like newsletter publications, then your risk for churn is higher, because you are selling to your list more often, then a newsletter based email list would, right?
So I think balancing that is something we're still trying to figure out because I really believe strongly in our education arm of the business too. And ultimately, if someone doesn't find enough value in our newsletter, in our free resources that we provide them on a weekly basis, like our newsletter and our podcast, and they're not able to withstand also receiving the occasional sales email or promotional email in tandem with the free value they're receiving, if that's not worth it, for them to stay on our list. And ultimately, they're not our ideal subscriber or community member anyways. So it's no big deal if they filter themselves out and unsubscribe. But we have to figure out how we're going to overcome that churn, such that our subscriber growth actually increases steadily throughout the year rather than plateauing. So that's kind of the update on that specific piece of our big three goals.
Now, let's move on to our podcast, which overall has been our biggest winner so far this year in terms of getting closer to achieving our big three goals. So the goal is 1 million downloads by the end of this year. And we are currently at 662,000 downloads. It's actually technically 666,000. Because at the beginning of our show, we hosted on a different platform. And we had about 4000 downloads from that platform that didn't transfer over when we moved to our new hosting platform back in 2020. And so you know, there's those remnant couple 1000 downloads that technically should be part of this full number. But even if you exclude that, 662,000 definitely puts us on track to hit 1 million by the end of this year. I've talked extensively about what exactly we've done to hyper grow our show this year. In fact, I think I recorded a bonus episode detailing how we reached 70,000 downloads a month. And so if you haven't listened to that bonus episode, and you're a podcaster, and you're more curious about the strategy behind this, I'll link that in the show notes so that you can catch up on the strategy side of things. But on the outcomes or results side of things. We're doing good, we're on track. So I'm very proud to report that back to you all. And so I don't think we're going to really shift or change anything drastically for the rest of the year in terms of our podcast approach, because it's working. And I'm very confident that we're going to be able to fulfill this particular goal by the end of the year.
And then our third big three goal, the YouTube monetization, I am also very excited to report we've made a lot of progress in this area, we're still not quite where we need to be. If nothing changes, and we continue on our current path, we're going to be able to hit one of the criteria of being monetization eligible, which is the 1000 subscriber mark. So we're at 900 for subscribers on YouTube. And we are consistently growing each month there Albia, it is slow, right. But I am very confident that we will get to that 1000 subscriber mark in the next six months. So that part is much easier, I think, than the other piece of criteria, which is you need 4000 watch hours in a 365 day window. So currently, in the rolling 365 day window, we're at 1100 watch hours, which is higher than we've ever had in our channel history. It's actually a 351% increase from the previous 365 day window. So again, I'm very, very proud of us for the significant growth that we've seen comparatively to ourselves. Now on a you know on a macro scale, if you're just looking objectively, it's not you know, anything to write home about per se, but for us for where we started, it's actually a significant increase. So I'm proud of that. And we're a fourth of the way there, right 1000 hours is a fourth of the way to the 4000 hour mark.
But the watch time really is the lagging area here. And I think it's because most of our growth this year on YouTube has been due to shorts, and our podcast clips that we put up, which is great, because that is bringing in consistent new subscribers to our channel. But obviously, with shorts being short form content, typically lasting 60 seconds long, you're not getting the significant watch time that you would if you were uploading, you know, 20, 30, 45 minute videos and people were watching all the way through. Now to be clear, we are uploading our full length interviews on YouTube. And we are getting views on those videos, but they're not significant enough to be really making the dent that we need towards that 4k, watch our goal. So the good news here is that we just wrapped up a YouTube intensive a strategy session that I think is going to really help us in this area, once we start implementing the strategies. The challenge now is finding the time to implement the strategy because YouTube is a very time intensive content channel, I believe it has the best returns of any content channel in terms of the amount you invest will come you know, it will last you for years to come. So I do think there is a lot of value to spending the time. But you know, when you're trying to juggle other things in your business as well, it's not something that can necessarily be implemented overnight without making adjustments elsewhere. So that's kind of where I'm at with that piece.
And now that you know kind of where we're at in the mid year mark on these big three goals, I want to wrap up with my three observations or reflections that I'm having, as I'm looking at this data with you and processing this with you. So I think our biggest three challenges as to why and I don't want to say that it's not possible for us to hit all three goals by the end of the year. But I'm going to say based on what I know to be true about our capacity and our resources. Currently, without making additional hires or drastically doing something different in our business, I don't think it's realistic for us to hit our email list goal for sure. That's probably the least likely to happen. Like I already said, I do think our podcast goal will be met, which is great, I count that as a huge win. And YouTube monetization could happen. I'm not sure yet the probability is higher than the email list. I'll tell you that much. But as for our challenges for why don't think all three are realistic to happen in the next six months, it really comes down to this because we are in a new business model.
I mean, as a media startup, right, like we were only about a year into the process. And I would say we didn't really fully jump like feet first into this model until I would say about January of this year. So even though we made the decision to pivot last summer, I would say it was a very slow ramp up to what we're currently doing. So really, it's only been a couple of months under this new business model. And so balancing growth and monetization is definitely a challenge for us right now. Because as a media business, your greatest asset is your audience. Right? So when I was a service provider, or even when I was an educator, primarily an educator and coach primarily, I should say, while audience size always benefits you in for sure. Never is a detractor, I would say to your efforts to sell more programs or to work with more clients, right. Having a larger audience certainly helps. It's not the priority success metric by any means. Like especially when I was a service provider, I truly couldn't care less about what our audience size was because it really had almost no impact on our ability to achieve the client outcomes that we wanted or the client enrollments that we wanted. So with those different types of business models, audience growth has never been at the forefront of our strategy or our priorities.
But with a media company it is because the primary way that most media companies make money is through sponsorships and brand partnerships. And so obviously, the larger your audience is, the more value you present to a potential sponsor, right, the more eyeballs they get in front of when they're investing in advertising on your channels. And so the audience growth piece is essential. To your success as a media business, the issue with that, as any of you know, who have been in business for any amount of time is that audience growth, it certainly isn't instantaneous. And it's not always immediately monetizable. Either, when you have limited resources, you kind of have to decide like am I going to dedicate all of my time and energy to growing my audience like creating really quality content and really nurturing these relationships to build my audience and forego, in the meantime, trying to monetize that right? Or am I going to try to simultaneously keep money coming in through the door, while also trying to grow my audience.
And I feel like we've been kind of more in the latter camp, because we do still have overhead, right that we have to account for. And while my business has built a healthy savings over the last five and a half years, it's not at a place where we could just completely stop any sort of monetization efforts and just be able to coast for, you know, a year or two years. So we do have that fine balance of, we need to keep money coming in to cover our, you know, our bills that we need just to break even. But we also simultaneously need to reinvest a lot into our audience growth. So these things are kind of like competing in a way for attention, time, energy, money, labor, from myself, and my team all of these things in so that's kind of I feel like the biggest challenge in making all three possible is that if we wanted to go all in on growth, I would play like a large role in that right now based on our current team structure.
And so that would take away my time from business development, from pitching from having calls with brand partners from delivery to that's a big piece of time is when we sell a sponsorship or any sort of campaign, it's not just, oh, you know, someone has purchased, like a pre recorded course that everything's automated on the delivery side, right? It's not like that anymore. It's like if we are engaging a brand in some sort of partnership, there's a lot of active work that happens after the sale, all of the content, deliverables, all of the brand communication, all the activations, like everything that we're doing for that brand, there's so much work on the delivery side. And so, you know, you're limited by what you can sell, because you have to make sure that whatever sponsorships you sell, you can actually fulfill on right, so there's that piece. And then if you're spending a significant chunk of time, in the business development and the business fulfillment side, then it's like, what of the time and energy and money that you have left over? Can you now allocate to the growth side? So again, competing priorities? And I still haven't quite figured out the nuances of this yet. Like, is it better for us to forego all monetization growth in favor of audience growth? Or should we continue in the realm that we're in right now where we are monetizing steadily and actually having a really profitable business model, but our audience growth is much more marginal than it could be if we gave it our 100% focus? You know what I'm saying? So that's kind of, you know, reflection number one challenge number one, if you will.
Challenge number two is, since we retired our main revenue generator last summer, which was my 12 month mentorship program, and that was sold through an evergreen webinar funnel. Since then, we still have, you know, a few low ticket digital resources, like our perfect podcast pitch template, which we sell for $27 and still get, you know, sales for every single week, even though we've done like nothing to market it, which is actually pretty impressive. I'm pleasantly surprised. But I think there's a big need for our business to re integrate evergreen products into our business and set up a foundation of several different pathways for people to come into our world. Because right now, because we've been so focused on brand partnerships and trying to get that leg of our business off the ground, since it's the newest thing outside of our pay to create challenges, which we also cut back on this year. Like, for example, in 2022. I think we did maybe four or five cohorts. It was a lot. I mean, it was like at least once a quarter. This year, we're only planning to do two we did one in May and then we're going to do another one in October and that's it. So outside of those small cash injections, and then outside of brand partnerships, which now accounts for a majority of our revenue. We don't have a whole lot of evergreen revenue coming in. We do have our affiliate streams, which is great, but you know, I don't like to rely based solely on affiliate income, for, you know, Evergreen income.
And so I do have a couple products that I think I actually talked about this in my 2023 vision cast, which was another bonus episode. So anyways, all these bonus episodes I've referenced, I will link below in the show notes. So you can go back and listen to catch up to speed. But we have several opportunities to create some evergreen products. But those funnels take a lot of, again, time to set up. And so with the already waging priorities of monetization and audience growth, when you add in this third layer now of okay, like perfect podcast pitch, for example, that template, like I said, is selling new copies on a weekly basis, which is great, because again, we've put like, no effort into marketing that. And I know that that is producing great results for the people who are buying it. So I'm like, okay, that product has a lot of potential to be rebuilt into like a Tiny Offer Funnel, similar to what we had with hashtag hacks back in 2020, and 2021. And I think that could be a really successful funnel for bringing in a lot of new customers into our ecosystem, and we can automate it with ads. But the amount of time up front to get it set up is kind of a barrier right now. So just trying to figure out, you know, where are we going to fit that in?
Or are there certain things like, last week, in our newsletter I mentioned to those of you who are subscribers, if you're not, by the way, make sure you get yourself added to our free newsletter, there's a lot of amazing content that is exclusive to the newsletter that you'll you won't see anywhere else you won't see on our social on our website or hear it on the podcast. So make sure you are subscribed there. And we'll again link that in the show notes below if you aren't on our list. But anyways, last week, I mentioned in our newsletter, that we're sitting on this vault of four and a half years of recorded coaching calls from the mentorship program that we retired last summer. And I want to be able to extend the life of that content, because there's so much advice and wisdom shared in those years of coaching that I provided our mentees in that program that I know could do a lot of good for people who will never have the chance to join that program. Again, since you know, we've retired it. And I want to make sure that we are able to still use that information and that content for good, and to provide it at an accessible level.
And so I was thinking of cherry picking through, you know, again, four and a half years of content and finding the very best questions that our students have asked over the years and pulling them into a private podcast that people could pay a one time fee for and get access, essentially, to a library of potentially, you know, 100 plus questions where they can kind of scroll through the podcast feed. And if they see a question that is applicable to them, that is top of mind for them, they can just click play. And then you know, these are like little mini episodes of two to five minutes where it's like one question, and I'm answering the question and you know, you can just get what you need at the moment that you need it. So it's like in your pocket coaching, right? Great idea. We got some positive feedback from our newsletter readers, saying, you know, some people volunteer to beta test, this private podcast. And this would be a great addition to our evergreen library of digital products. But again, it's carving out the time and finding when are we going to do that? And how do we prioritize all the potential product ideas? Where do we put this on the list? Right? So that's kind of challenge number two is figuring that piece out. But I do know that evergreen products are a necessity for us, actually to view our audience growth because believe it or not, the majority of our audience growth has actually come from paid products, not from free options or free content.
So most of our list was originally built through buyers, which is actually an amazing, I wouldn't even say problem to have. It's just an it's an amazing byproduct, I guess, of having grown in education company before we switch to media is that with most media companies, a lot of the people who are part of your ecosystem may have never actually directly or indirectly purchased from you like they've never directly purchased a product by your company. Or they may have never purchased another company's product by your recommendation, right. So a lot of them are kind of sitting in that zone of not quite your customer like they're a customer of your free product, but they've never actually transacted with you. Which as you all know, as business owners, when someone actually buys from you when they transact with you and pay you even $1 it completely changes the level of the relationship that you have with that customer. It very much deepens the trust extends the lifetime loyalty, assuming you provide quality products of course and a quality experience. But these are all important things.
And if given the choice, right, if it's like, would you rather build a list of 100,000 buyers or 100,000, consumers of free content, I would hands down any day of the week, obviously, choose to build a list of buyers. And so I really feel that because we've already proven that in our past history, that we tend to see better results, building our list with buyers, I think the addition of evergreen products has to be a necessity for us to be able to achieve that. So that's a big, kind of like looming project or challenge that I'm really thinking about in the latter half of this year.
And there are a final challenge or observation that I've noticed and reflecting on our mid year check in is. And this is probably evident just based on what I've shared so far with, you know, competing priorities and trying to figure out what is the best use of our time and money in this exact moment. And that's just focus, right now. And I realized this, as I'm reflecting back on our big three, I think we were too... I don't know if ambitious is the right word. But I think we just overreached, in deciding our big three goals. Because all three of our big three goals are tied to anchor content platforms. Like, right now we have we have three primary, long form content platforms. So we have a blog, we have our podcasts, and we have our newsletter. And we have YouTube, too, right. So I mean, the big three are the podcasts, the newsletter, YouTube, that's those are the platforms directly tied to our big three goals. But on top of that, we also have our blog.
And the thing about these content platforms is each of these is a beast in and of itself, like unlike social media, where it may not be unrealistic, for example, to have both a twitter and instagram presence and Facebook presence and maybe even LinkedIn presence. Now, of course, every social content or social platform has its own native content that performs well, too. So it is hard to optimize across multiple platforms, no matter the type of platform it is. But I will say for social, it's a different lift than for these long form native content channels like a podcast newsletter blog, that you are creating outside of social, right, these are things that typically can take a huge lift just to build even one of these channels. And so I think we got a little bit too, ahead of ourselves in trying to spread our focus across three prime or really four, like I said, primary anchor channels.
And this is evident in the results that we've seen so far this year, because most of our strategy or investment this year has really gone to our podcast. And that has reflected in the results, right? It's the one of our big three goals that is most likely to actually achieve the outcome we hoped for, which is a million downloads by the end of the year. And it's because we've dedicated a lot of time and strategy and money to making sure that that happens. And so I think if we led with the same amount of focus for the other content channels, we would actually see similar results. Like if this entire year had been focused on building our newsletter to 100,000 subscribers, I actually do think we would be on track for that right now, I have no doubt because it's not that it's lacking the strategy. I know exactly how to get there. But we just haven't had the capacity being pulled in all these different directions and trying to balance monetization and audience growth at the same time with this new business model.
And so I think that's my third biggest challenge is learning that for next year. Instead of doing a big three, I think we are just going to focus on one primary goal, like if all else didn't work out this year, but we achieved this one thing, what would be the one thing that we would hang our hat on and be like this was a successful year, right? So next year, I'm going to go in with way more focus and figure out what is the exact one thing that we really want to not just double down on but I guess in this case, triple down on and then from there, also kind of reevaluating, because we're limited in our resources right now in our time right now. And our staffing and everything really deciding out of all these long form content channels, again, blog, YouTube newsletter, podcast, where are we really going to focus our attention in time in this season?
The podcast has obviously been the big one for 2023. And that's not going to go away. But if we're thinking about a secondary one, like YouTube versus the blog versus the newsletter, like which one are we really going to pay attention to next. And what makes the most sense to support our longer term goals? These are questions that I don't have answers for right now. But I'm reflecting in real time to kind of walk you guys through how I'm looking at my mid year check in. And even if our goals are completely different, because I assume the majority of you listening to the show probably don't operate media businesses. I think a lot of the lessons can still apply.
I would really challenge you this week to do a mid year check in yourself and look at what were some of my big goals that I set at the beginning of the year, even if you didn't call them your big three or publicly announced them like I did? What were some of those goals and look at the data in terms of how you've actually progressed in those areas so far? And how do you need to adjust or change your strategy for the remaining six months to make sure that by the end of the year, your most important goal has actually been met? That's my challenge to you all today. That's your homework.
So if you want to share what that goal is or what you're going to do differently, moving forward for the rest of the year, I'd love to hear from you. Please send me a DM on Instagram at Miss Ellen Yin. You can also reach our team anytime at cubicle to CEO on Instagram as well. And I love hearing from you so seriously, please send me a DM I really enjoy getting to stay in the loop with your businesses as well. All right, thank you all for being on this adventure with us. I can't wait to do another check in with you all at the end of the year to see how we're doing on the big three. When we wrapped 2023 I will talk to you all in the next episode.
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