Local-media veteran Kyle Scott joins TJ Larkin to unpack how a tiny beach-town newsletter ballooned into a 17,000-subscriber powerhouse—and why owning your audience matters more than ever in 2025.
From his Philly sports-blog roots to mastering Beehiiv, Kyle reveals the playbook for transforming passion projects into real businesses.
He breaks down the forks in the road every publisher faces: stay hyper-local and become the town’s go-to voice, spin off a related business, or roll multiple newsletters into a regional network that attracts five- and six-figure advertisers.
You’ll hear battle-tested tactics with Facebook ads, savvy survey questions, and the surprising power of IRL events. Key takeaways include using newsletters as leverage for partnerships, why B2B niches can out-earn B2C, and practical ways AI can act as your research assistant—without dulling your original voice.
Expect a candid look at revenue models, community building, and surviving algorithm shifts.
Table of Contents
The Media Veteran’s Origin Story
Kyle Scott brings over 15 years of local media experience to the newsletter space. His journey began with Crossing Broad, a Philadelphia sports blog he founded in 2010 that grew into the largest independently owned digital media site in the Philly area.
The site’s success culminated in a profitable exit in 2020, largely driven by the online gambling boom that made sports audiences incredibly valuable to companies like DraftKings and FanDuel.
“We benefited from that, acquired some other sites, and partnered with some other sites,”
Scott explains.
“Once we kind of cracked that model and sort of sold off that whole business in 2020.”
However, the experience taught Scott a crucial lesson about audience ownership. His previous business relied heavily on social media for audience building and Google for traffic generation—a precarious position that left him vulnerable to algorithm changes.
This realization led him to explore newsletters as a way to own his audience directly.
10 Key Takeaways
Here are some key takeaways from the discussion.
- Own Your Audience Over Everything: Algorithm changes on social platforms and Google can destroy businesses overnight. Newsletters provide the antidote—direct access to your audience without intermediaries.
- The Three-Path Strategy: Local newsletter operators face three main routes: become the town celebrity (requires massive time investment), launch a complementary business, or scale into a regional network for bigger advertisers.
- Facebook Ads Still Work: Even in 2025, Facebook’s targeting remains incredibly effective for both local and B2B audiences, delivering subscribers at $2 or less when executed properly.
- The 90/5 Content Rule: Provide 90-95% pure value and only 5-10% soft promotion. The moment you become overly promotional, subscribers view you as spam rather than content.
- Surveys Create Leverage: Collecting demographic and geographic data from subscribers gives you powerful insights and bargaining chips with local businesses and even political leaders.
- B2B Beats B2C for Revenue: Business-to-business newsletters typically have easier monetization paths than consumer-focused content, with advertisers willing to pay premium rates.
- Events Are AI-Proof: In-person gatherings and real community building remain immune to artificial intelligence disruption and create the strongest revenue opportunities.
- Trust Trumps Everything: Most local service businesses (lawyers, realtors, accountants) succeed based on trust and top-of-mind awareness rather than superior products or services.
- Partnership Leverage Is Golden: A strong newsletter becomes a valuable asset for creating business partnerships, offering advertising space in exchange for referrals or services.
- AI as Assistant, Not Writer: Use artificial intelligence for research, brainstorming, and workflow optimization, but never let it write your content entirely—originality drives long-term value.
Video
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Transcript
TJ Larkin: Hey everyone, here today with Kyle Scott, who is a fantastic local newsletter operator, somebody who helped me a ton, and I really appreciate him being here. He is what I would consider an expert in this space. So this is one you definitely want to check out and listen to the whole thing. But Kyle, thanks for being here. I appreciate it.
Kyle Scott: Thanks for having me. I appreciate the expert tag. I’ll see if I can do it justice.
TJ Larkin: I’m sure you will, but why don’t you give everyone a quick background on yourself in the space of your local newsletter and then maybe just kind of the broad aspects of what you’ve done as well in the newsletter space.
Kyle Scott: Yeah. So, quick background. I’ve been in media for a long time, 15 plus years in some form of local media. So, for the entire last decade, 2010 to 2020, I built, I founded, built, and eventually sold a local sports website called Crossing Broad in Philadelphia. And we started out as just a local sports blog, which was very sort of hot in the 2010 time frame. And it grew to be the largest independently owned digital media site in the Philly area and probably one of the most notable kind of independently owned local sports blogs, you know, in the country. Right. You know, Barstool kind of started out that way, then grew into something else. And we very much stayed true to our Philly roots, you know, so I’ve been in the local media game for a long time and through trial and error have experienced every sort of business model and content type that you can. Right. I’ve sold ads, we’ve done subscriptions, we’ve done products, we’ve become an affiliate. And then I eventually sold that business in 2020. The gambling, the online gambling boom actually made our audience really valuable for a time. And so we kind of saw what was working. Companies like DraftKings and FanDuel were coming in and spending tons of money to reach sports fans. We benefited from that, acquired some other sites, and partnered with some other sites. Once we kind of cracked that model and sort of sold off that whole business in 2020, for the next couple of years, I went to the company that bought us. And since then, I’ve really been experimenting and playing a lot in the newsletter space and local media. And the reason, you know, those two things, newsletters, I think for a lot of the reasons your listeners probably know, which is don’t want to be at the whim of the social algorithms, don’t want to be at the whim of Google. Especially now with, you know, kind of the wave of AI coming. Our last business relied pretty much exclusively on both of those. We built our audience through social. We drove traffic to the website, and then we used Google to drive more traffic, which was more targeted to work as an affiliate and sell products. But, you know, one algorithm change on either of those can disrupt the whole business. So, I’ve really spent a lot of time in like, how do I own your audience? Beehiiv is building something pretty incredible. I’ve always likened it to like the Shopify, what Shopify did for e-commerce. Beehiiv is doing for kind of owning your audience. I very much believe in that. So, I spent a lot of time over the last few years kind of working on a lot of Beehiiv projects, some of which, you know, went nowhere. Where I really started to get some traction is creating a local newsletter in Ocean City, New Jersey, where I’m at now, and sort of rolled that and spun that into a regional media company here in the Philly area. And it was kind of the model for a lot of these local newsletters and websites that were kind of growing in the area. So, happy to talk about that. And now I’m working day to day on kind of a B2B newsletter, so I’ll kind of stop there. But just to give my full background of like everything local, everything digital for, you know, a long time now.
TJ Larkin: Yeah. So I think it’s clear why I said you’re an expert in the space. You just said it there. Okay. The first thing I want to say for everybody is Kyle has… What is your podcast called?
Kyle Scott: So we have a podcast called Monetize Media. Yep. And it’s not updated as frequently as I’d like now. There are a lot of new episodes around the beginning of the year. I plan to pick it back up at some point. But a lot of the stuff there is evergreen. Lots of good media combos.
TJ Larkin: Totally. So I just want to point everybody to… I should have looked it up. Sorry. You did one, I think it was in December, where you did it by yourself. You just talked for 20 minutes about the local newsletter opportunity. And that one had a big impact on me. I think it’s an excellent episode. I think everybody here should go listen to it. You do a great job kind of giving the pros and the cons, why you should do it, why you shouldn’t, the best strategy, what won’t work. It’s a lot of the stuff I talk about, but when I talk about it, it takes hours. You do a much better job summarizing it in 20 minutes. I mostly got my ideas from you. So I appreciate that personally and I think everybody should go check that episode out. I’m sure it had “local newsletter” in the title in December. Does that sound about right?
Kyle Scott: It does, yeah.
TJ Larkin: Maybe I’ll have… we’ll put it in the show notes or something. So everybody should check that out. But okay, so tell me, let’s dig in a little bit about how you started this one in Ocean City and, you know, kind of what you were thinking, you know, why you did it essentially. And a little bit about the town too, because I think it’s smaller, right? So there are pros and cons. It’s kind of a unique place. So give us a background on starting that.
Kyle Scott: Yeah, totally. So for those who don’t know, if you’re from the Northeast, you’re probably familiar with, you know, kind of whether you’re in Boston, it’s like Cape Cod. If you’re in New York, it’s like the Hamptons or Long Island. If you’re in the Philly area, it’s the Jersey Shore. It’s a big vacation destination for people. Kind of in South Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, you know that area, one of the most densely populated beach areas in the summer months, at least in the country. So I’ve been coming here my whole life, have a place here now. And you know, it’s a town with a population of like 10 to 12,000 year-round residents, very small, you know, and you kind of define the Jersey Shore like Atlantic City to Cape May. It’s like kind of the southern third of the New Jersey coast, and Ocean City is smack dab in the middle, and there are a lot of towns like this. Ocean City is probably the largest of these local beach towns here outside of Atlantic City, which is kind of like a different ball of wax. So it’s about 10 to 12,000 year-round residents, but it swells to well over 100,000 in the summer through rentals, seasonal residents, things like that. And you know, it’s a super popular place. Like there have been shows like Mare of Easttown, like she always used to wear an Ocean City shirt. It was set in Philadelphia. So like it’s a pretty well-known place in the Northeast. And we would come down like there’s no local media here. There’s like one weekly newspaper, and there’s the Atlantic City Press which is, you know, kind of like the city-based paper. But nothing that is touching this local town where a lot of people live and work. And increasingly, you know, the real estate values being close to the ocean are outrageous, right? And if you kind of looked at these shore towns down here, just the real estate alone is like a multi-billion dollar asset class. I mean many billions. When you add up all the value of these properties, it’s outrageous. And I was like, no one is really kind of covering the news in the space or kind of like the main part of the economy, which is real estate. So I was kind of like, you know, this is after I kind of left the company that I sold my business to and was looking for, you know, what can I do to own my audience. And I’d seen some success stories with like Axios, which was very newsletter-focused. 6AM City was having some success in like those southern cities with these kind of like mid-sized local newsletters. And I was like, huh, it seems like a pretty easy model to kind of replicate in a smaller town, right? Maybe not mid-sized city, but like a true small city. And a lot of people, these, you know, kind of vacation towns, people love them like they do their colleges, right? They’re very passionate about like they love the town. They want to buy gear, they want to buy sweatshirts, they want to wear it in the winter when they’re not here. So just start running Facebook ads. You know, not atypical from probably what most of your listeners, you know, are familiar with, but the traction was immediate and obvious, and within a couple of months, we were thousands of people. Within a few months, literally someone stopped me and recognized me from that small picture in Beehiiv and like, hey, you run Walking the Boards. And I’m like, oh my God, right? This is crazy. So we got a lot of relevance in town and just kind of kept throwing money at the Facebook ads. And you know, that was two years ago. As it stands now, that individual newsletter Walking the Boards is about to bring it back for the summer season, is at like 17,000 plus subscribers, and our open rates are over 50%. So it’s just, it was a pretty obvious opportunity and sort of like almost the perfect market for this sort of local newsletter game.
TJ Larkin: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s super interesting. So you did it the traditional way that most of us talk about now. You did it via Facebook ads, right? Is that how you got to 17,000? I mean, basically just consistently doing Facebook ads?
Kyle Scott: It is, yeah. We did try some other things. I mean, I would have to check the numbers, but I would say 80 plus percent are Facebook ads. I mean, once you kind of get past like 3 to 5,000, you do get some organic, you get some shares. You know, people just naturally tell others about it. So I always take it as a good sign when you start seeing, like, in your referrals, like Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Direct, Google, Facebook, Facebook, Direct, Google. You know, it’s like, okay, now people are sharing or seeking us out. And we did some other things. Like, you know, down here on the beach, there are like banner planes with ads, and they’re relatively cheap. So we took out a banner plane. It would fly, you know, “Get news and info, visit Walking the Boards,” and it would fly down the island for the course of 40 minutes. And then I’d check, and we’d get maybe like 12 to 20 subscribers for like, you know, a $600 ad. So I was like, you know what? Facebook is just more efficient. One of my partners kind of went in on it. He’s a realtor down here as a broker. And we’ve been putting kind of QR code magnets. There are a lot of seasonal rentals down here. So as people would rent, they usually get like a welcome package to the city. So we would put a magnet with a QR code in there, and, you know, we got some trickling that way. But, yeah, largely Facebook ads.
TJ Larkin: Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. So I want to talk about how you’ve monetized that, but before I even say that, can you… You know, you have 17,000 followers in a town of technically 12,000, which, of course, we know you’re getting a lot of the people who love to visit there, but clearly you’ve got a very large percentage of people who live there, and you have a big outsized impact. Can you talk about, like, you know, people have mostly heard this story of Ryan in Annapolis and how he gets recognized a lot in town because he has a big percentage of the population? Is that something that happens to you? I mean, you mentioned it once, but like, now or maybe before, if maybe when you were more active, what kind of value have you gotten from being a part of this outside of however you’re monetizing it directly?
Kyle Scott: Yeah, good question. So, you know, I love what Ryan’s done, right? I think you need a certain personality type and frankly need to be at a certain station in life to kind of embrace that. Like, hey, I’m going to use this to build my personal brand, right? And I’m going to be the most popular guy in town. And I imagine if Ryan wanted, at some point he could run for mayor of Annapolis, right? Like you have that kind of influence and reach if you’re reaching more than 50% of the town on a daily basis. And they like you. I mean, there are politicians who would be like, you know, how do you do that? Right. And I have a story about that which I’m sure we’ll get to in a bit. But you know, listen, I’m 41 now, I have two kids. To kind of go that local micro-celeb route requires a lot of nights and weekends and things like that. And I did a lot of that in my old gig running my sports website last decade when I was in my late 20s and early 30s. So I was like, you know, I’m not at a point in life right now where I can kind of go that route, right? And if I just kept it to one brand, I thought it’s going to be difficult to sell enough sponsorships for hundreds of dollars a pop to local mom-and-pop shops to really justify where I kind of need to be from an income level. So I had a couple of ideas. One was, since we covered a lot of the real estate in the area—it’s like the major part of the economy—do we spin off a separate real estate newsletter? Tried that for a little while. It was actually getting really good traction in terms of audience. But what I found was writing it was a real bear. Like I was able to do it, but it required a lot of research, reaching out to local developers. So I was looking to hire somebody and really just sort of discovered that finding someone who writes well is difficult enough, right? Then being able to kind of tackle the business side of real estate is also difficult. And then finding someone who kind of had close proximity to a town that is generally an hour away from major population centers during the other six, seven months of the year? Super difficult. So I was never really able to do that. And then last summer, someone who was building a local media company with these hyperlocal websites bought the other website in Ocean City—like the hyperlocal, more old-school website, but had a full-time reporter. It’s like the town’s reporter who writes there. And he said, hey, we really need to crack newsletters. Would you want to kind of roll yours into our company and then use Walking the Boards as a model for these other dozen websites we have in the Philly and South Jersey area? And I thought, you know, that’s probably a broader surface area for success because now we can aggregate that audience and instead of trying to sell ads to maybe the local pizza shop or the local HVAC place, we could tap into this regional economy—these regional hospital systems, advertisers. So that’s what I did. I invested in that company and kind of brought Walking the Boards under that umbrella. And we kind of used it as a model to kind of stand up some of these others. Of course, the other route is kind of like owning and operating a business, which is super—I’m sure we’ll get into it—super upside in that, but also like a whole different fork in the road if you go that route.
TJ Larkin: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. So you essentially sold it or merged with, you know, so now you have this regional one and you’re still involved in that.
Kyle Scott: Yeah, so I’m a co-owner, minority owner of the company. For about six to nine… it’s about six or seven months I worked in it day to day. I really helped to stand up the newsletter efforts. Right. So kind of like, hey, what did we learn? Here’s how you spin these Beehive-based newsletters up. Here’s the content format. We brought on a writer to sort of tackle these other areas, and we now have, I guess, like six or seven, and we’ll be adding, you know, probably up to 12 in the coming months that cover a bunch of small towns outside of Philadelphia, a few here in South Jersey, Walking the Boards included. So I’m a board member and shareholder in that company and, you know, but I don’t work in it day to day anymore. I probably spent six or seven months kind of training the team to like, hey, here’s how we do this. And so now I’m an owner of the company and like super bullish in the space.
TJ Larkin: Yeah, yeah. So from that company’s perspective, and why you’re super bullish is because you have essentially a network of newsletters, and so now you’re able to go upmarket in terms of the advertising aspect. Is that probably one of the differences between just doing an individual… exactly.
Kyle Scott: So, you know, one of the brands the company works with—we’ve worked with over the last year—is Parks Casino, which is the biggest casino in eastern Pennsylvania, certainly in Eastern PA. You know, and they’re the type of advertiser you’ll see on local TV, and they have five, six-figure ad budgets, you know, for different mediums. So we’re kind of able to tap into that because we’re able to aggregate the audience of not only the local newsletters, you know, which gets into the 50, 60, 70,000 subscriber range in a regional area instead of hyperlocal, but also, you know, the traffic to these websites, some of which have been around, have been acquired, have been around over the course of 10 years. You know, so some of them are getting a hundred thousand, you know, visitors a month, a lot through Google. You know, not all are local obviously, but you know, they’ve got local influence in these different towns they’re in, in the area. So we’re able to kind of bundle that audience together and then bring it to, you know, bring it to advertisers. And it’s more appealing than just having to go, you know, just to the local companies that typically don’t have the big ad budgets. Yeah, so I went the ad-based, you know, fork in the road, so to speak. And you know, I kind of did it this way because I was looking around saying I could either become Ryan Sneddon at Annapolis and I just, I’m not at a point in life—as fun as it looks—I can’t quite do that. I can’t own and operate a small business and again, like, just not at a point of life where I wanted to kind of take that route. Or we could kind of roll this into a regional company and give it a, you know, higher, higher probability of success by bundling it with other, you know, other, more structured other websites, things like that. There’s a sales team, there’s more editorial staff, stuff like that.
TJ Larkin: I mean, that sounds like kind of… Yeah, one of the things we want to talk about is what you had talked about in your 20-minute podcast, which is the fork in the road. The option of if you’re an entrepreneur, you know, by yourself doing it in just your one hyperlocal area, you probably need another form of revenue outside of just direct ads, which of course can be owning your own business that you market. You’re a realtor, you own an HVAC company, insurance, whatever—that’s a totally viable model. Or the other model, of course, is creating a bunch of them or partnering with other newsletters, whatever it is, having more surface area. The middle path of “I just want to do it in my town and I’m going to make a bunch of money from ads from my one town and that’s it” is probably quite a difficult path. How do you think about that?
Kyle Scott: Totally. I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but it is very difficult because, you know, and I think maybe Ryan Sneddon or certainly Michael Kaufman with Catskill Crew, like you know, he’s doing something truly unique which we can get into as well. But you know, unless you’re willing to kind of just… this is my entire life, right? I’m out, I’m pounding pavement, I’m with the people because ultimately it’s about community, right? And if you’re just going to have an ad-supported newsletter, maybe you can get lucky in a few towns and you can find a local realtor or something, some sort of broker or insurance company or lawyer who’s got a big ad budget and will spend tens of thousands of dollars, you know, per year with you. And you could put two or three of those together, get a nice solid self-employment income, run it as a one or two-person company and you know, do that. It’s doable, it’s a lot of work. I think more likely you’re going to have to kind of piece together $500 to $2,500 individual ad deals with a dozen, dozens of advertisers. And then that’s where it’s like, you know, the overhead of just managing all that is very difficult. And I say this out of experience. I lived this for three, four years when I started my sports website, you know, 12, 15 years ago, you know, that was my business. I had $800 advertisers and I had to go host trivia twice a month at their bar because ultimately local advertisers, a lot of restaurants and entertainment venues will spend but they want to see butts in the seats. So I would work with sports bars. It was a sports website but they’re like, you got to bring people out. Like everyone knows we exist. We need to see people in our establishment, preferably Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday in February when no one’s, you know, no one’s here otherwise. So you know, I’ve kind of lived that life of like you know, ground, you know, ground pound type game, you know, and it could work for a while, but ultimately a good media business, you want to be able to have something that’s like the 80/20 rule, right? You could spend 20% of your time on sales, but it throws off 80% of the revenue. And I think some of these local, you know, the hyperlocal ones where people run into trouble is you find you’re spending like 80% of your time for 20% of the revenue and then that’s where it just becomes like over time, difficult to sustain, but again, not impossible. You have a big enough town, big enough audience, a couple of really premium advertisers who believe in you, then maybe so. You know, there are exceptions, I’m sure.
TJ Larkin: Totally.
Kyle Scott: Yeah.
TJ Larkin: I think that really is the point – that it is possible. It’s just a ton of work. There are so many different angles to this, so many things you need to do. And knowing that, yeah, maybe when you get big enough you can get these local businesses to pay you. But they’re just so hard to get ahold of and to keep up with. They’ll come to you and say, “I’m interested,” and then they don’t follow up. I mean, this is what I’m dealing with right now. There are tons who are interested, and even when I talk to them, they’re interested, and then they just don’t follow up. And oh, let me… It just takes so much time. On top of creating the newsletter and getting out there and meeting people and going to city council meetings and, you know, doing social media, which I think is a key part of where this is all going. It’s just really, really involved, and people need to understand that. If you think you’re going to half-ass it in one town, I mean, you might get a little traction, but don’t. And for some people, they may not care about the money. It’s like, “I just want to be a leader in town.” I still remember someone told me the story of some guy in some town of 20,000, and he just wanted to be the local guy, like the go-to guy in the town. And if that’s all you want, then it’s great for that, right?
Kyle Scott: Yeah, I mean, you know, and I think it’s a great split. You can look at it as a business or you can look at it as a hobby, right? If you like doing this—I mean, a lot of these are weekly newsletters. You could spend three, four hours a week putting it together. Not a ton of money to build it. And you could be the most popular person in your town, get a whole bunch of freebies, a little bit of side income. I mean, it’s a great side business too. So it really depends on where you want to take it. But I think, you know, that route is certainly interesting. And there’s no shortage of hobby media. Again, I came from sports, right, in 2010, and I’m still there. You know, maybe now it takes the form of YouTube or social media accounts, but there was no shortage of people doing it for fun, right? They had a sports blog because it was fun. And, you know, maybe they got 500 bucks a month from AdSense and they were thrilled about it, but it wasn’t a business, so—and that’s fine too. But yeah, it does become a lot of work if you’re trying to turn it into a sustainable business.
And to add to your example about dealing with advertisers, one of my favorites is back with my sports website. You know, 10-plus years ago, we were having a Super Bowl party. We had a big audience—I mean, hundreds of thousands of local readers, not newsletter subscribers, website. A little bit different, but a big audience. We were having a Super Bowl party at McFadden’s, which was a huge bar attached to Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, where the Phillies play. So this is like one of the main sports bars in a top-five metro area. And we were throwing a Super Bowl party there. The Eagles weren’t playing—it was a different team. And we had a steal. It was like dollar beers. We got them to give a really good special. We brought like 200 people out to the bar. It was packed. Beers were super cheap. At the end of the night, I think they owed us—I forget, it was only like $1,000 or $2,000, but at the time it was like, “Hey, this is good money for us.” The bar manager hands us just a stack of cash, right? That’s our payment. And it was all there, whatever it was. But he’s like, “Listen, you know, we were giving you guys lots of cheap beers. Your people really took advantage of it.” I’m like, “Took advantage of it? You gave us a special, right?” But he’s like, “As such, you know, the bartenders didn’t get a big enough tip. You guys should really tip the bartenders above and beyond.” And I’m like, “Well, you know, okay, but we’re your—you’re sponsoring us.” But, you know, separate point, we wound up giving like a quarter of the ad deal to the bartenders because we felt bad and it was like, you know, this is working with, on a local basis, one of these large local businesses that was perfect for our audience. And even still, that was like a cash payment with half of it extorted back to them. It’s like, “Okay, I gotta find a different mousetrap if this is going to work long term.”
TJ Larkin: Yeah, no, that’s super interesting. So tell me, because again, one of the things that I’m working on is helping these local business owners do this, again, as a side project, right? Like we’re talking about. Tell me more of your thoughts on this concept. Why this, you know, if you think so, is a good strategy, you know, given 2025 where we’re at, where I think we all know local media is probably going to continue to grow and whether, you know, newsletter-focused, but maybe in other ways, because it died so fast, so significantly, it’s going to come back in different forms. Why local small business owners could be the best people to do this?
Kyle Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for all the reasons we just discussed. If you’re doing it purely as a media company and as a business, not a hobby, you know, you’re going to have to find probably something that is other than just sort of local advertising. And then you’re gonna either have to go into some sort of, you know, business you operate, you know, create a business off the backs of it or roll it up into something larger and the content. Because these are becoming more and more popular. I’d say it’s been really easy so far. ‘Cause a lot of these, you could just aggregate like local events. You know, there are still places like the Patch, you know, every town’s got like some local reporter from some, you know, you know, legacy outlets. You can kind of like repackage some of their stuff. But the reality is it’s getting a bit more competitive and people are picking up on like this opportunity. And so to be good at it from a media business, not only from a business model standpoint, you probably need to start getting creative, but you’ll also need to start like being a true reporter. Right. And breaking stories and, to your point, attending city council meetings, calling businesses. And it’s very easy, right? It’s very easy to become the local reporter in a town that doesn’t have one. Everyone will talk to you and you will break stories. But I think a lot of the people in this first wave of building these, especially on Beehiiv, are probably not like, you know, probably don’t come from a journalism background, they probably come from like a digital marketing background and they see an opportunity and it’s kind of like a hot opportunity, but like they’re not journalists and wouldn’t be comfortable kind of putting on a journalist hat, right? Never mind that’s a full-time job to appropriately cover a decent-sized town. So the reason I think a business owner could benefit is you can get away with aggregating local events, maybe putting, you know, a little bit of exclusive stuff in there, putting some commentary, right? Just some op-ed stuff which people really enjoy. And you already have the mousetrap, which is whatever your business is. So whether you’re a local florist or a local lawyer or mortgage broker, you know, if you could do this once a week, bring genuine value to people, get people to open at a 50 or 60% rate, you know, now you’re, you know, you’re the, you know, like you were saying earlier, the most popular guy in town and you’re only spending three, four days, three, four hours a week on it. And then you could just soft-sell your business the whole time. And for you, it doesn’t have to turn into a whole new business. You don’t have to generate, you know, six figures a year, you know, whatever you need for income. You know, if it gives you a 10% lift in your business, then it’s just good marketing dollars for you, right? And over time it builds trust. And I think there’s a lot of these businesses, I don’t want to call them commodities, but like, you know, trust is like 90% of the name of the game, right? And I would say like an accountant, there are, there are certainly better and worse lawyers, accountants, brokers, but you know, generally speaking, you know, most people don’t need an accountant that often. It’s once a year, right? Most people don’t need a mortgage that often at all, right? So they just go to someone who’s reputable. You may need a will, you know, you may need legal services on a one-off basis, right? A lot of these things are things people only are in the market for when they need them. And, and it’s usually just like, hey, who do I trust? Who’s the local brand name in town? Who’s the insurance broker who, you know, everyone uses and is an honest broker, you know, no pun intended. And it’s like those are the types of businesses where if they’re putting this out there every week and people like them and there’s just sort of like just a soft-sell reminder of their services in that email. That’s where I think they’re gonna build lots of like, you know, brand equity with people in their town over time. What I would caution is every business person I ever met, especially in those professional services, you know, they can’t help but fight the urge to be overly promotional. Right. If you’re a realtor or a lawyer, like every email leads with need. Need a mortgage, you know, need. Were you in an accident? Right? It’s like no. Like the minute you start doing that, now people don’t view you as content, they view you as spam, right? So you really gotta like a 90, 95% content and, and just the exclusive sponsor of your newsletter is you. Right? Like that, that’s a different way to do it. But you need to treat it like a genuine content-based newsletter and not don’t treat it as your email list. I’ve fought this at our local company. A lot of times people look at a list of emails and treat it like an email list. And I say a newsletter list is way different than your old email list. And you should definitely separate those two things. You should not be compelled to take every person who subscribed to your newsletter and spam them with marketing messages because you just, it’ll work for three months and then over time it’ll just kill your long-term value.
TJ Larkin: I 100% agree. Actually, I think what you’re saying is true not just in newsletters. I think it’s also true for businesses. Should you take the same advice, which is to provide value first.
Kyle Scott: Right.
TJ Larkin: I feel like so many, like you said, business owners or just businesses in general, it’s like, oh, I have my email list, I send them offers so that they want to buy stuff from me and like that’s all they think. When really what this whole model is, if you’re a local business owner, like we’re talking about, is you’re still, if your end goal is still to sell your product, you just do it in an indirect way instead of a direct way. Right? You provide value first. Then you happen to be selling something so that they’re aware of it. You don’t push it super hard. But the more trust you build, the more likely somebody is gonna want to buy it from you.
Kyle Scott: Right.
TJ Larkin: Like you said, if you’re a mortgage broker. Yeah, I didn’t need a mortgage broker for the first two years of reading your newsletter. Now I do need one in town and I don’t know one. Am I gonna go with the guy who’s provided me value for two years in this newsletter? Am I gonna go to Google to find a mortgage broker? I’m probably gonna go to the guy that I know from this newsletter who seems like a cool dude who’s provided value for two years. That’s how you do it. You don’t throw it in their face over and over. So I think you’re spot on there and it’s amazing how many people don’t recognize that.
Kyle Scott: And you know, look, I mean that’s why Geico and State Farm—everybody knows Jake from State Farm, right? There’s a reason why these companies have avatars and mascots because, at the end of the day, none of us want to think about insurance. I’ve bought and sold a few houses in the last couple of years, a business—I’ve had lots of these big transactions in my life, and I’ve had to deal with more lawyers and accountants and insurance than I probably ever will have in a three-year window in my life ever again. There is nothing I understand or hate less than anything related to insurance. Because every insurance person you talk to, to them, everything is jargon that they only understand because they deal with it every day. And most people don’t think about this other than once every couple of years. There’s a reason those companies spend on these brand campaigns because you’re like, “I’m just gonna call Geico. I trust that they have somebody who knows what they’re doing over there.” It’s the same idea, just localizing it to whatever your business is. There are very few businesses that can get away with just selling you stuff because they have great products. I think a lot of lifestyle brands could do that. You go on Instagram, and whatever age you are, you see a certain set of advertisers who sell—guys like us get probably the same T-shirt ads, probably the same melon hat ads. I could tell the dads when I go to kids’ soccer games get the same Instagram ads as me. Those companies could just sell you products because every week they send you a new product that they released, and it’s a $50 impulse purchase. But these bigger things that are one-off purchases, it’s just about building trust. And if you think of them and they’re top of mind when it’s time to make that purchase, then they’ve won. And the local newsletter, I think, is a great vehicle for that versus them spending to be number one in Google or taking out $15,000 in billboards every month.
TJ Larkin: I couldn’t agree more. And I think that’s another way that you can position this for local business owners: when you spend money on Facebook or Google or billboards or whatever, that’s just a cost. You get, you know, hopefully you get clients, but other than that, that money’s gone, right? You just rented. It’s like renting an apartment, right? When you move out, you’ve got nothing. Whereas doing a newsletter is owning—like, you own the home. Yes, the costs are a little bit higher, yes, it’s more maintenance, but you actually own something that can be more valuable than what you put in at some point, if not incredibly more valuable. So I do think that’s how these small business owners should be thinking: why don’t I own? Get an owned audience. Yeah, it’s going to cost me more. But once you have the owned audience, you have access to say what you want to them. I also think there’s a big angle here of leveraging the newsletter for partnerships, right? So, for example, by the way, speaking of insurance, I was in the insurance business, so I know exactly what you’re talking about. Hence why I’m not in it anymore, because I hate talking about it.
Kyle Scott: I chose the wrong example then.
TJ Larkin: No, no, it’s true. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. But, you know, as you know, let’s just say insurance plus real estate—everything in that is kind of all intertwined. You know, as insurance agents, one of the best things you could do is make partners with a mortgage broker. Whenever they get a client, they have to get them insurance before they buy the home. So it’s like if you make friends with the mortgage broker and they send you their leads, that’s huge for you as an insurance person. Well, how do you do that? If you’re not already friends with these people, which you’re probably not, how do you win them over to send their leads to you? Every insurance person in town is going to them. Where’s your leverage? Maybe you buy them donuts twice a week instead of once a week or, you know, whatever silly little thing you do. What if you offered them, “Hey, I’ll advertise for you in the newsletter for free just so that, you know, let’s help each other. I’m going to advertise for you, and you just give me your clients,” which costs you nothing. So nobody’s spending any money. And now you’ve beat out all the other insurance people because you’re the only one who has something valuable to offer them.
Kyle Scott: I mean, that leverage piece, I think, is so important for these because a lot of businesses that might advertise don’t always have the budget to try a $5,000 monthly ad, right? But they generally are willing to do stuff in trade, right? And if you show up and say, “I got 15,000 email addresses and people open 50% of my emails,” most business owners are going to think you’re lying because that rate sounds outrageous, right? But once you show them that it’s real, you know, that leverage is the partnership aspect, then it becomes easy, to your point, right? Because you have now differentiated yourself from everybody else in the stack. Everybody else is selling a commodity. But I have 15,000 people in this town of 32,000 people who open my emails. That’s where, you know, again, when you’re using it as a marketing platform for a business or to acquire business or something like that, it makes much more sense because it gives you—it opens every door that most other business owners and service providers are just not going to be able to open.
TJ Larkin: Yeah.
Kyle Scott: It speaks to people.
TJ Larkin: It really does. Yeah. And another—did you do much of this? Walking the Boards is on Beehive, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you do—what did you do with surveys? Did you do surveys, and did you ever leverage them in any way?
Kyle Scott: Yeah, I wish we had done more with them, or will do more, I suspect. But so, yeah, we survey people when they come in. So Ocean City’s a weird town. It’s an island about seven miles long, relatively thin. So the town is broken up into neighborhoods like any other city. So people come in, we get their name, age, gender, stuff like that. Favorite thing to do in town, get a recreational profile on them. Then what part of town do you live in? The north end, the south end, so on and so forth. Well, I was never really sure exactly what to do with it. And then last summer I got an email from someone who works with the mayor. Again, small town, and the mayor wanted to meet with us. And, you know, I can go more into it if you want, but generally they were blown away when I was able to show them—again, we have 15,000 people at that time in a town of 12,000 year-round residents. Only 30 or 40% of those residents vote. So you’re talking about a town where three or four thousand people vote for the mayor, vote for city council. And our distribution list was like four or five times that number. And we probably had roughly half of the voters in town on our email list. So I was able to say to them, “Hey guys, we have this, and oh, by the way, the way we kind of broke down the areas of the city in our survey loosely aligns with the voting wards. So I have a block of 2,000 people who are in the 1st Ward who vote for this city council person.” And I will tell you, you want to talk about—I don’t want to say leverage. We weren’t really trying to get anything out of it. It was more a conversation. But, you know, that opened—I saw eyeballs get wide like, “Oh my God.” To my point earlier about Ryan, if these people wanted to help pick the next mayor, they’ve got really good free reach now. It doesn’t cost us—it’s a nominal cost every time we send an email, and it’s basically zero. They could reach half our voters for free whenever they want. Oh my God. So yeah, that’s one. If you’re into local politics, which I am not, that is an interesting route for these newsletters.
TJ Larkin: Yeah.
Kyle Scott: So they were interested in partnering with us and how to get the message out. You know, it never really went anywhere because I think it would have been a large ethical breach on our side, even if I kind of agree with them on a lot of the local hot-button issues. But yeah, it was interesting. Interesting uses.
TJ Larkin: That’s what comes with influence, right? Like leverage maybe is one way of how you’re going to leverage it, but just influence, you don’t have to do anything to it. You just have influence. When you have that big of a list and that many people paying attention to what you’re doing in such a small area.
Kyle Scott: Right? Yeah. Yeah. You find yourself in a boardroom with the mayor and some city council members, like a year in, it’s like, oh, wow, okay, we’ve got some influence. Yeah, you’re exactly right. Now, now what do you do with it? Like, that’s part two, but exactly.
TJ Larkin: That’s where having another business comes in, right? Which you basically didn’t at the time, right? You didn’t have that type of small business in the community, right?
Kyle Scott: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
TJ Larkin: Well, tell me a little bit more. Maybe stepping back a little bit about the newsletter space, what you’re doing now, what your focus is, and is the newsletter still a big part of it and maybe what else? If that’s not only it, like, what else is a part of it? I guess just speaking more to the future of newsletters, you know, maybe hit AI if you have any thoughts there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kyle Scott: So, I mean, yes, I’m super bullish on newsletters, and I think at the end of the day, media goes in cycles. I was listening to a podcast the other day about someone who mentioned it was Simon Owens, a media operator, I think, and he was talking about how what’s hot now was the same thing. It was just like blogs of 20 years ago. I think that was the analogy they used. He had actually got the guy’s book back here, the guy from Content Inc. I’m drawing a blank on his name. His book’s on my shelf. But they were talking about how media just goes in cycles. I’ve now kind of been through a couple of these cycles. The newsletters are really just, at the end of the day, about owning your audience, right? Email has kind of gone away and then come back. But there’s only really like four or five different general formats of media over the last 2,000 years, right? Have you ever been to Disney World and you’ve gone to Spaceship Earth in Epcot, where they take you through the history of communication, right? And they wind you back and they show you, like, the old printing press, right? At the end of the day, media and information follow like these same tracks. It’s like, what is the format upon which people are consuming and how do you reach those people? And whether that’s a printing press or TikTok or newsletters, a lot of the same principles apply. So I think with newsletters, it’s just a way of, you know, really being able to own the distribution to your audience, right? And, you know, you can go super deep here and not like, I’ve read some stuff about, like, hey, like, you know, the Roman Catholic Church became the dominant religion because it kind of owned a lot of the printing presses and it was able to kind of keep its message and only its message out there, right? That’s just a way of owning your audience, right, and being able to push to your audience. Not exactly one-to-one to email, but they weren’t running their audience like someone renting their audience today might be on TikTok. Right? They weren’t. So I think the point about newsletters is it gives you a way that you’re in control of that audience. I think ultimately it will sort of dovetail into communities. Right. And whether those are in-person communities, I’m super bullish on kind of like the interactive part of newsletters. If you use them on a local basis to hold IRL events. Right. Huge deal, huge differentiator. I think if they’re more national and spread out and more niche-focused, then you can kind of use that community to, you know, whether it’s have a conference, whether it’s just have a chat group amongst peers, whether it’s 42-year-old dads who like fishing and want to be able to interact. I think what Michael Kaufman has done with the local newsletter club where he took a bunch of people building this in all different parts of the country who are willing to share trade secrets because everybody’s in their own different pocket anyway. They’re not stepping on anybody’s toes. That’s a way you can kind of take newsletters to the next level. So I’m bullish on that. And so what I’m doing now, you know, I think intellectually I was in local media again, it was sports, but it was the same thing for 10-plus years. What I found is I was writing a lot of the local newsletters for Walking the Boards. I found over time, like for me it became a little rote only because it’s something I had been doing for a decade, right. Every day I was getting up writing about local sports, you know, or the local sports teams. And that is a grind. I wanted to do something I think more on a day-to-day basis to kind of scratch that intellectual itch, you know, more in a B2B because I think for all the reasons we discussed about selling local ads, B2C business-to-consumer media can be very difficult. It’s easier when it’s self-contained in a geography. But it can still be very difficult because ultimately you’re dealing with businesses selling to consumers which can be fickle and a little bit less targeted. So I wanted to get into B2B media. I had a background in sports and I saw this huge market in youth sports of all things. It’s like a $50 to $70 billion market, depending on which estimate you believe. There’s just tons of consolidation in the space now. There’s lots of conversation as to whether that’s good or bad for kids. At the end of the day, we have lots of private equity money coming in and rounding up this hugely fragmented space. Right? You have all these local rec leagues and local baseball facilities that are, you know, kind of mom-and-pop local businesses. There’s tons of investment here. It touches, you know, a large chunk of society at some point in, you know, your life, either as a kid or as a parent. Now private equity money, pro sports leagues, pro sports owners are investing to consolidate all this. I thought it was a really fascinating space. So I created a newsletter called Buying Sandlot to cover that space. There was not a single beat writer dedicated to this massive tens of billions of dollars market. Some sports business publications would touch on it occasionally, but not the day-to-day. I’ve been doing that for about two months now. Not even. The momentum has been outrageous and the signs have been very good. I’ve had advertisers coming to me out of the gate, so it tells me I’ve picked the right niche. From that standpoint, you know, I would probably roll that eventually into a community where I can connect people who own a soccer facility in New Jersey with a soccer facility in California. It’s very similar to local newsletters in that way that you have people in different pockets that really want to come together and kind of share what they’ve learned in their area and maybe learn something from somebody else in another area because they’re not really stepping on each other’s toes, all the while you have billions of dollars of private equity money coming in and buying all this stuff up. So it’s an interesting time. So that’s what I’m spending my day-to-day on. But it leads with newsletters, as I think most media outlets should these days.
TJ Larkin: That’s awesome. How are you? So I actually am a big believer in this as well. I think, if you don’t already realize this, that B2B is a much better space for newsletters because advertisers want to get in touch with those people more, especially if you can go more niche. Right? There are plenty of AI newsletters, plenty of tech newsletters, but if you can come up with one in some niche that you know that maybe other people don’t, or that’s small enough that it doesn’t get a lot of attention, that’s a huge place. So I think you found a unique one. I would have never, you know, most people would never have thought of that. That’s huge and great. But I’m curious. One of the harder parts, because everything is flipped right in local, is that it’s very easy to get people to subscribe, because who do you target on Facebook? You just say, if they live within 10 miles of here, that’s it. It’s super easy. That’s why it’s cheap, etc. Obviously, finding people interested in the space you’re covering sounds difficult. So how do you get subscribers for that?
Kyle Scott: So I’m gonna give a huge shout out here too, and I hope it’s right. Newsletter growth, guys, I think it’s Manny Reyes on X, okay? He’s got bolted-on growth. There are a few of these kind of like, you know, there’s the Matthew McGarry. There’s Gunner. I forget his last name. And then Manny. I think it’s Manny Reyes. And I was like, I had the same question. I’m like, I know if I can get these people, if I can get people who work in the business of sports, not parents and volunteer coaches like that. That was my primary concern. If I run Facebook ads, I’m going to get a bunch of volunteer parents. And that’s great. I’m a volunteer. I coach two of my son’s teams, right? But I’m not in the… You know, I wasn’t. I wasn’t in the business, right? Most of these people are not in the business of youth sports. I want to get people who own facilities. I want to get investors. I want to get these companies that run these huge travel tournaments and high school sports tournaments. I want to get school athletic directors in high schools and colleges, right? And I’m like, how the heck do I reach these people? So I thought LinkedIn. Like, at least LinkedIn. I know the companies you can kind of… LinkedIn sucks for newsletter ads, right? So I reached out to Manny, and he’s like, we got it, right? And so he’s been running our growth for the last two and a half months. And he’s like, just trust the Facebook algorithm, right? And I was highly skeptical because I thought, here we’re gonna run ads targeting people in the business that use sports, and then I’m gonna wind up mostly with, like, parents and volunteer coaches in my audience, which is great. But again, they’re not in the business. And, boy, was I wrong. So we’re getting subscribers for $2 or less for a targeted B2B subscriber, running Facebook ads, working with Manny and his team, and you know, the first couple, we’re up to like 3,500 people now in again under two months. And I would say, you know, we’re getting more direct and we’re getting referrals now. But the first 1,200 to 1,500 were like all paid and it seeded the ground. And because there’s no one covering the space, you know, as I said before, I’m starting to see direct Google, LinkedIn, right? Email, like I’m now seeing people sharing and telling people about it. Hitting that word of mouth. But huge credit to Manny because they ran ads and I’m surveying the heck out of people when they come in to make sure. And sure enough, like, you know, a guy who owns a basketball facility in Iowa, you know, a guy who runs… And we got people from Nike, from Dick’s Sporting Goods, from some of these PE-backed, you know, companies. Ripken Baseball is a big one. If you have kids who play baseball like they, the algos are good at finding these people. So I would say if you’re worried about that with B2B for now, trust, you know, what is… I keep shouting at Michael Kaufman because I’ve learned so much from him. But like trust Zuck, right? Just throw… Once you find it, throw money into the Zuck machine because it’s super efficient. And when I’ve told, I’ve talked to people who’ve been in like trades and B2B media, you know, maybe a decade plus ago and you know, because they thought it was interesting. And I said I’m getting some like targeted subscribers for $2 or less. And like their head was like, they’re like, how, how is that possible? Like these can’t be real people. I’m like, you know, they’re real and they’re spectacular. Right. So, yeah, it’s been, it’s been interesting. It’s been really, really interesting. See all different, like ways you can go with it with a newsletter.
TJ Larkin: Yeah, well, I love that. Are you planning on doing anything else with it in the short term? Like, I guess the big question is: can people see your content without being on the newsletter? Do you have a website, or do you plan on…
Kyle Scott: Yeah, yeah. If they go to buying.sandlot like the movie.com, so most of the content. Yeah. So super fun to write. I’m learning a lot. It’s keeping me kind of intellectually stimulated. And I feel like from a business model perspective, I sense there will be a little bit less banging my head against the wall that I’ve experienced, you know, maybe with local media, maybe with B2C media. So I’m looking at three ways. One, I’ve already had good B2B sponsors come to us, which is amazing, right? So that’s one avenue. We’re just… Today I’m rolling out a survey for people who own facilities, and we’ll probably put the results of that behind a paywall and form a premium arm. And I’m trying to collect data that I can justify a premium price. I really don’t want to charge people just for words. I want to give them value reports, insights. And I think now I have the audience to begin gleaning some of those insights in aggregate. And where I think there’s a lot of potential is events. Right. And that could be from small groups of regional facility owners. Right. Bringing them together up to, you know, my end goal in a year’s time is to do the business of youth sports conference, right? Where you get a thousand plus attendees and you have, you know, facility owners, investors, you know, people who make tech. You know, there are tons of apps that manage scheduling and things like that. That to me is how this becomes a home run. And again, it’s kind of all those principles. Again, it’s the same like I said before, like media ultimately is just the same format over and over again. It’s the same thing as local. You know, you could do ads, it’s tougher to get premium subs on a local level. Or, you know, you could do events and businesses. And I look at the events and business side of this as hosting a conference. You know, that becomes my business then – conferences – and my newsletter becomes the marketing for those conferences. Yeah, again, you know, pie in the sky. But it’s doable. You know, I could see the early signs of it being doable.
TJ Larkin: Well, I think you totally can, especially since there’s probably nothing like it currently. So it makes sense that a space that big should have a conference if you’re, you know, dealing with billions and billions of dollars.
Kyle Scott: So.
TJ Larkin: So that makes sense.
Kyle Scott: Yes.
TJ Larkin: Well, this has been awesome, Kyle. I really appreciate it. Is there anything you want to leave people with or where they should find you, or any last thoughts?
Kyle Scott: No, you can find me on X. Kyle Scott L. All one word altogether. My podcast, which gets infrequently updated, but it has good media insights hopefully when it does, is Monetize Media. You could just search it anywhere, and then my new thing is buying sandlot.com. Yeah, I don’t know, I mean from anything else to touch on, I don’t know. I think my one future-looking thing would be as it relates to AI and things like that. AI, obviously, if you’re in the written word, AI is coming for you in some way, shape, or form. I’m not so naive as to say don’t write your newsletter with AI, right. I use, I don’t write with it, but I keep it open. And when I used to write, I would keep Google open, and every three sentences I would Google something. Right. A data point, a reference, frankly sometimes just how to spell stuff. Right. I’ll just keep ChatGPT open. And as I’m writing, I use it as like my research assistant. And occasionally I’m like, hey, I thought through this thing, I have these three bullets. Is there anything else maybe I’m missing here? Right. That’s where AI is really good. It can maybe just help you fill in the blanks and brainstorm. I never copy anything as text and put it in the newsletter. I think you just kill your value. And especially with a local newsletter, AI is never going to be able to put out any copyable text other than maybe helping you reword event descriptions and stuff like that. That’s going to be truly compelling content. So I would use it as a research assistant, use it for workflow, and by all means use it, but if you’re in the content business, you need to be putting out unique content. And at the end of the day so far, and I’d say for the foreseeable future, AI is ultimately sort of aggregating and outputting stuff from what it’s already ingested. Right. So if you’re putting out truly unique content, the AI is not going to be able to do that because at the end of the day it’s just sort of repackaging other ideas that are out there, and it’s really good at it, and there’s value in that. But I would keep going that route. And then again, super bullish on events and communities because I think that’s where it’s AI proof. Right. If you get like-minded people together, especially in person, you might have some robots there serving you drinks, but you’re still gonna be at an event in person.
TJ Larkin: Yeah, I mean, that’s where you’re right. And you know, there is so much risk to local space and local newsletters because of AI. But there’s also, you know, I think we’re gonna have this fragmentation of people. So many things are gonna end up just being almost completely AI, but then there’s gonna be other things where people are like, I want this to be hyperlocal, in person. I need to know for sure this is real. Because you’re not going to know in that middle zone. And so by us doing local, you’re providing that space again. Events are such a key part. But even Instagram and making video content where people can know for a fact that this is real. Right? I think that’s… So there’s a big advantage if you build it right to where local can get value from that instead of being wiped out where I think other things will be because there’s so much fake stuff everywhere, even video. But it’s going to be wild. So people are going to want to see face to face. So to your point of the bench.
Kyle Scott: And I would say, you know, it’s not all bad. I mean, there are, if you use it right, I mean, there’s a lot of good you could do with it as part of your workflow, right? And there are probably certain types of content, like event descriptions, right? If you’re putting events in your newsletter, like it’s really good at that, you know. So I wouldn’t even say don’t ever use it. But, like, I see so many boost requests on Beehive, and like I would say 8 out of 10 of them are from newsletters that I just look at once and I’m like, no, no human has ever looked at this, right? And it’s like, what’s even the end game? Like you’re not, you know, this isn’t going to be a successful long-term thing if there’s not a person involved in making sure that the quality of content… and so many people overlook the quality of content being the single most important thing. And you don’t need to be a journalist to have good content, but you need to keep people’s attention and your influence. And business models only happen if you have people’s attention, and you get that influence by putting out stellar content on whatever your topic is. And AI just, you know, is never going to be great to do all that with AI.
TJ Larkin: Exactly. And that’s why I’m pushing this model of local entrepreneurs or business owners doing this in their towns, as opposed to these AI newsletters that you probably know about. There are a couple of them already where they’re just 100% AI in every town. And that’s not going to work for the reasons you just said. So that’s where you can come in as a local business owner and actually be the true human face and human voice and be the alternative to all this AI nonsense.
Kyle Scott: Put your face on it. Put your face, your business. Let them know there’s a person. Yep, totally. I totally agree.
TJ Larkin: Yeah. 100%. Awesome. Well, this has been great, Kyle. Really appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll have you back at some point.
Kyle Scott: Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.
TJ Larkin: Yep.