Bonus 26

Ellen Yin32min

Ellen Yin

00:00

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.

Ellen Yin

00:15

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.

Ellen Yin

00:51

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.

Ellen Yin

01:35

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.

Ellen Yin

02:51

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.

Ellen Yin

03:53

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.

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