Audience Bridge [Insights]

Co-Reg Isn’t Dead — You’re Just Doing It Wrong (w/ Tim Bourquin)

• Chris Miquel • Season 1 • Episode 14

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0:00 | 59:55

Co-reg has a bad reputation in the newsletter world—but most people are doing it wrong.

In this episode of Audience Bridge Insights, Chris Miquel sits down with Tim Bourquin (Co-Founder of AfterOffers) to break down what actually works in co-registration today, how to scale list growth without destroying deliverability, and why activation—not CPL—is the metric that matters most.

What You’ll Learn:


— What Is After Offers & How Co-Reg Works
— SMS Co-Reg: TCPA, Compliance & Double Opt-In
— Tim's Origin Story: From LAPD to After Offers
— Co-Reg Pricing: CPL Then vs. Now (Email & SMS)
— Expanding Beyond FinPub & Why Topic Matching Is Everything
— Building Both Sides of the Network (The Chicken-and-Egg Problem)
— When to Use Co-Reg (and When NOT To)
— Email Frequency, Nurture Strategy & Activation Tips
— Tracking Performance & What Traffic Sources Are Converting Best
— Offer Count, Compliance & the 4-Layer Email Validation Stack
— Ramping Co-Reg Slowly & Welcome Email Best Practices
— The Future of Co-Reg: SMS, AI Matching & Identity Graphs
— The Future of Newsletters: Deliverability, Personal Branding & AI
— Mindset, Habits, Book Recs & Where to Find Tim

About Tim Bourquin

Tim Bourquin is the Co-Founder of AfterOffers, a co-registration platform working with 350+ publishers and 80–100 advertisers across multiple verticals including finance, health, and tech.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timbourquin/

X: https://x.com/TimBourquin

After Offers: https://www.afteroffers.com/

About Chris Miquel

Chris Miquel is the Co-Founder of Audience Bridge, helping newsletter publishers improve deliverability, optimize list growth, and scale revenue through smarter data and segmentation strategies.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter: https://links.audiencebridge.io/subscribe-v2

Follow Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismiquel/

Follow Chris on X: https://x.com/miqchris

Intro Teaser

SPEAKER_01

The big problem out there right now is bots. You don't want them on your list. There's no human behind it. It'll hurt your deliverability. How do you balance getting the advertisers and the publishers? How many publishers need to fill the out how many advertisers need to fill the publishers? Like how do you manage that whole thing? Getting set up with SMS is a lot tougher than it is with email.

SPEAKER_00

Restrictions are a lot higher, so you gotta be real careful.

SPEAKER_01

If someone submits an email and an SMS at the same time, you're only showing advertisers that can collect both, or check it.

SPEAKER_00

After the end of the 30 day, how are we doing? What's our open rate? What's our click rate? Okay, now we can go to 75 a day or 100 a day and slowly ramp it up.

SPEAKER_01

What does a good quality publisher look like to you?

SPEAKER_00

But for people who have a paid product, it's never the right place to start. Do a bunch of meta ads, do Google ads. Quality of the lead starts with the quality of the publisher they're coming from.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome back to another episode of Audience Ridge Insights. Today I have Tim Berkwin, co-founder of After Offers. And I would explain to you what they do, but I'd rather him explain it so I don't butcher it or make it sound not what it really is. So Tim, how you doing? Good. Thanks, Chris.

SPEAKER_00

Appreciate it. Um After Offers is essentially a recommendation engine, right? So you've probably seen things like Spark Loop or Beehive recommendations, similar thing, only we're we're very topic-specific. So after somebody joins a newsletter in our network, we ask them if they want a couple of other three other newsletters in the same genre. Um, and that's as simple as that. So we started out with just email, but in the last year we've done a lot of uh more SMS too. So if you got an SMS list, same kind of thing. You join one list and you're asked if you want these others as well. So that's the essence of it. You talked about SMS there.

SMS Co-Reg: TCPA, Compliance & Double Opt-In

SPEAKER_01

I just want to touch that because a lot of the stuff we'll be talking about is more on the email front, just because I'm more on the email deliberability side and things like that and list growth. But on the SMS side, what is there, is there any pushback or what are the legalities behind that with DCPA and all that, all those things, making sure that you have the right disclaimers or whatever? Is there any any pushback on that or or how's that done?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so uh we have for the way we opt in people, we have language that's come up with by the attorneys that says this is what you're doing. It's very clear that you could get text messages, you could get automated phone calls, that sort of thing. Getting set up with SMS is a lot tougher than it is with email. Um, and the restrictions are a lot higher. So you got to be real careful because there are a lot of you know TCPA lawsuits out there if you don't do it right. So most people are doing a double opt-in kind of thing where you send them that first text message, they click yes that they want it, otherwise, they don't get added to the list. Um, it's kind of where, you know, that argument about double opt-in, the same as it is for email, goes for SMS too, but that seems to be the best practice now. So, but there are a lot of people that are, you know, much better informed about all the rules than I am. I just know that you got to be really careful about it explicitly letting somebody know they're opting in for an SMS list, uh, more so than you would with email.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Uh a few years back, probably four years now, we were doing a lot of work with uh Mass Legal Tort company. We build a bunch of landing pages and we're doing a lot of lead acquisition for them. And then we were capturing obviously SMS as well, emails, but you know, the disclaimer's just like, yeah, you know, this data could be provided to up to three attorneys or whatever. Yeah. And that was enough to, you know, allow it to be used for everyone to send messages to them, you know, basically. Yeah.

Tim's Origin Story: From LAPD to After Offers

SPEAKER_00

There's a lot of people doing lead sharing in email, which I don't love, right? I don't think it's a great user experience where they're not specifically opting in for your list, but when somebody buys it, they're sharing it to another list. And I some people may have success with it. You don't want to do that with SMS for sure, because that's gonna get you in big trouble. Uh, yeah, yeah. And I think I think slowly that will start to die in email as well. I just don't think it's like best practices, but uh, you know, so people seem to have still have success with it.

SPEAKER_01

Let's kind of talk about your journey, your background. So, where did you come from? What did you do before you you launched App for offers? I think I did see that you did some type of online conference or education thing back in the day. What what got you to in the kind of online space and then pushing you into app for offers and I believe launching this with your brother?

SPEAKER_00

Well, in about 10 seconds, so I was a police officer for LAPD for about 20 years.

SPEAKER_01

You look like a damn cop.

SPEAKER_00

I still got the still got the haircut, I guess. But in my off-duty hours, I was starting the day trade back when that was just starting out, back in 1998, 1999, when you know e-trade and merit schwab, these guys are all they were all platforms that nobody had bought these online platforms yet. And so I started doing meetup groups with other traders. Those meetups turned into like 500 people in a ballroom. I would start to bring in speakers. One day a guy comes in and goes, Hey, can I set up a table in the back? I'm like, Yeah, sure. Give me a thousand bucks. And then that table turned into five tables, turned into a whole trade show that we were doing three or four trade shows a year all over the country. The online trading expo is what it was called back then. I sold it to the money show years later, did some consulting with them. Then I started a paid podcast back before that was even a thing called Trader Interviews. And I would just get on once a week with an interview and do a podcast and even trying to explain what a podcast back then was was hard. Um, and we we figured out a way to do payments and we got membership and we did that. And then I thought, okay, I've got this email list because we were growing a list. Maybe 5% of my list was converting to becoming paid members. So 95% of my list never bought anything from me. So I thought, okay, after somebody signs up for my email list, I'm gonna offer them other subscribers' lists. And I thought this was gold, this was the brand new idea. Nobody's ever thought of this. And uh one Google search, I'm like, oh, okay, there's like 50 companies doing this already. It's called co-registration. This is a thing. My brother Emil, who is a software engineer, he was programming stuff to connect with USB back then. We started looking at white labeling one of the could existing systems, and we just couldn't find something that really worked the way we wanted it to. So I convinced Emil to quit his job, come join me, and build trader interviews, really, and this system on the back end that would help do co-registration on the platform, on the pl on our platform. And so then a couple of buddies said, Hey, I like what you're doing there. Can I use that system too? And then pretty quickly I realized, okay, the business is not the paid podcast. I was starting to make more revenue from this co-registration system we were just using for ourselves. And I had all these contacts in the financial space already from the trade show business. So I just started calling them and said, Hey, would you want to advertise on this site? I just guessed at pricing and we kind of built it from there. And then pretty soon we sold the paid podcast, focused strictly on the coverage platform, called it after offers, which most people at the beginning called it after hours. And uh, so you know, if I had to go back and change the name, maybe I would. But after I by the way, I tried to buy after hours.com. It turned out it was by it was a defunct website for a tuxedo company that was sold to men's warehouse. That didn't work out. So if you go to after hours, I think.

SPEAKER_01

That was gonna be an escort service or something.

Co-Reg Pricing: CPL Then vs. Now (Email & SMS)

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I don't maybe. I don't know. Yeah, right now I think if you go to it, it goes to men's warehouse. But um, so that was it. So that's what we've been doing since about 2016. Um, just doing both sides of the platform, right? We have the the publishers, we have about 350 publishers, and we have you know 80 to 100 advertisers any given time that are pausing and activating in budgets during the day, and that's what we do. We we were kind of uh one of the first ones to do it in Finpub. That's kind of been our basis for a long time. We're just now starting to branch out into other verticals. But Sparkloot came along and they do a great job of marketing, a much better job of marketing than we did. So they helped us sell the idea of Co-Redge, which is actually a good thing. Um, and we've got some competitors in the space as well. So that's uh that's that's what we do. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, we're gonna kind of go down uh the rabbit hole here before we start getting into some of that stuff. Back when you first started in comparison to now, what did a lead cost back then? And where has it gone to now? Like on average, I know it can vary based on advertisers and demand and what they're willing to pay and stuff like that, probably. But what does that look like?

SPEAKER_00

So it's really vertical dependent. My background was in FinPub, and so that's where we started. And I I think I guessed at like a dollar. I just like give me a dollar for an email address back then. And we've slowly over the years, it's kind of gone up and we're kind of settled in the area of about 250,$2.50 for a valid subscriber. One of the things we do really carefully, and you gotta do it with co-registration, is you gotta do really hard validation on the backside. We can get into that later, but 250 is kind of where it started. We come down to like 225 for advertisers that kind of had unlimited budgets with us. We've got a few, some of the bigger publishers that do that. But 250 is kind of where we're at. And so at the end of the day, it's a math game, right? If you're making 250, hopefully the people that are doing it really well, we're helping them offset their meta costs, their Google ad costs for ad-based websites. It's another revenue source for them, but that's kind of where we're at. 225 to 250, 275. And then phone number for the SMS offers are doing about eight bucks, is where it lands. Yeah, it's more expensive. Well, the SMS is kind of where email was 10 years ago, right? The open rates are really good. Um, you know, most people are opening most of these texts. So as it stands now, you know, it's working really well.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. Well, SMS is making it rain, especially for Matt Polston.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, Matt does a great job on both email and you know, but you know, a lot of people don't know about Matt, he's an incredible software guy, too. So he's really got their system down now in terms of knowing when people are in their inbox, sending additional emails, sending the right emails to them. So it's not just about volume. You know, a lot of people think it's just Matt, you know, spends a ton of money and he does, but he's got a ton of secret sauce and you know, underneath that that really helps what he does.

Expanding Beyond FinPub & Why Topic Matching Is Everything

SPEAKER_01

You mentioned uh obviously FinPub is your is your your primary niche, so you're kind of dabbling here and there and some other ones possibly. I think we talked at the last trade show uh some examples, but what what other niches are you trying to branch out to?

Building Both Sides of the Network (The Chicken-and-Egg Problem)

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so a couple of health, health and wellness is one that we're doing. And you know, the cost per lead in that area is lower, right? You're looking at about$1.50,$1.25,$1.50. We're doing kind of an AI tech since that's a you know, a lot of people are doing newsletters there, so that's another vertical. And then travel. We're starting to do some travel stuff too. But that kind of brings us into one of the things about co-ridge to do it right, is you've really got to match the newsletter the person just signed up for and the topic of the newsletters you're offering to them. That has to really match tightly. And it even if you deviate a little from that, co-raid starts to fall apart. So um, one of the things we we were very specific about is if you're in join, if you join, if you just join an investing newsletter, you're gonna see investing newsletters on the next page. You're not gonna see AI tech, you're not gonna see travel, you're not gonna see wellness. It just doesn't work. We we've tried it and tried it and tried it. Even if the demographic is the right demographic, if they're not in that mode of signing up for that type of list at that moment, it doesn't work. So that's why we know we tightly bind those two things so carefully.

SPEAKER_01

So the whole book came first, chicken or the egg, like, and it's always in any network, it's always like this. It's like, is it how do you balance getting the advertisers and the publishers? How many publishers you need to fulfill the advertising, how many advertisers need to fill the publishers? Like, how do you manage that whole thing, especially now that you're launching, uh, I don't know if you say launching, but you're kind of branching out in other verticals, like you know, when you launch travel, like how is how how many publishers you need to get for travel and advertisers, like actually launch that that side of the business.

SPEAKER_00

So, you know, we we just brute force it. We go out and we email a lot of travel publishers, we email a lot of travel advertisers, and I really only need three or four on each side to really get it going. And so usually they're they we start with new vertical with smaller budgets, right? Even if they're doing$100 or$150 a day on the advertiser side, the publishers are usually smaller, right? We're not gonna go out and get Expedia right away. So the publishers are smaller blockers, so they don't have a ton of traffic. And our system handles it elegantly in that if we run out of budget or our offers just don't show, the user is passed directly through to the the publisher's thank you page without seeing the after offers. So to them, nothing's changed, nothing's wrong. But that's what you do, right? It's just like starting anything. You've got to start somewhere. So we try to get three and three or four and four and just go with it. And then we slowly add to on top of that.

SPEAKER_01

And then on the publisher side, what what does a good quality publisher look like to you? Or like what size, what volume, like what where who are you targeting?

SPEAKER_00

In the FitPub space, we're looking for just quality. And actually, any of the verticals, we're looking for just quality. We don't have minimums on the publisher side because all we care about is does this publisher have good opt-ins? So they have are they building a good list for themselves that they want to use long term? And if they're getting five signups a day for that list because they've just started, but they're good five signups, they can use after offers, right? We don't care. We're looking for the quality. So we've got we do have publishers like Market Beat that have thousands and thousands of opt-ins every day. And then we've got this really long tail of smaller publishers that are great publishers, but they don't have a lot of volume, but that's okay. They've got the right quality. So I'm really looking for the quality of the signups they're getting for. And if they're optimizing for building their own long-term high-quality list, then we want to work with them. It's the when people start to optimize for after-offers revenue only, things start to fall apart because they start to get anybody they can through the funnel and hope that they choose offers on the other side. And so that's what you don't want. You want somebody building a long-term list who's in it for the long term, and as long as they're focusing on that and building a good quality list for themselves, the after-offers revenue is going to be there for them to help them do that.

SPEAKER_01

So, and I'm, you know, this is obviously happens in all types of networks. How how often or what percentage of your advertisers and publishers are on both sides? They're buying these from people and they're providing these to people.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I'd say probably 30%, 35% of them do both sides. They buy subscribers from us and they also show the offers on their in their pathway, in the signup pathway. Um, and then we have people that do just advertising and people that do just monetization. So it's fine with us. We we we've got enough flow volume and flow on either side, they can do other side, but I love it when they do both too. And then obviously we exclude their own ad from their own page so people aren't signing up or seeing their own ad in their own flow. But though I think the way to do it right is is only show a certain amount of offers on the thank you page, right? You don't want to show 15. Uh, I'm kind of getting into a different side of what you're asking, but we want that we want it to be a good user experience for all the sides. We want it to be a good user experience for the publisher. They don't feel like they're they're introducing people to 15 other newsletters at the same time. And for the advertiser, we want to make sure they're getting the right audience.

SPEAKER_01

And and then the on the uh on the advertiser side, are they provide providing a suppression file for you or something? So not getting sanitary have or yep.

When to Use Co-Reg (and When NOT To)

SPEAKER_00

So one of the things we kind of decided early on is that uh we never wanted anybody to pay for a duplicate that's already on their list. So there's a couple of ways we do that. Yes, they can send a suppression file. We actually encourage people to do that so we uh don't show the offer to somebody who's already on their list. But the secondarily, if you know, when we when somebody comes in and they they pick an offer, we ping the ESP with their API to say, hey, do you already have this person? And if the person is already a subscriber, we never charge them for that. So it's just one of the things we decided early on. We have people like like uh uh we talk about Matt, let's use him as another example. You know, he can he'll can run 40% duplicate, right? That because he's his list is so large. We don't, you know, we don't charge for any duplicates like that. So we're it's important to us that you know that you're only paying for new leads.

SPEAKER_01

Now we're gonna dig into even more of a kind of the co-reg industry, um, what you're seeing, how it works, things like that. How would you say co-reg traffic performs compared to other sources of traffic?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So coverage is great for traffic where if you've got a paid product on your site and you're just trying, your funnel has been dialed in, you've been testing for a long time, you just need more people in the top of that funnel. Co-Ridge is great for that. I never recommend people start with co-registration when they're just starting out, they're building the list for the first time and they don't know what their the lifetime value of their customers are, they don't know what their conversion rate is. Don't use co-reg. That's not the place to start. Like I tell people all the time who are just starting a beehive newsletter for the first time. If it's ad supported, maybe, right? Because they're just they need as many people on the list as possible just to make their ads, you know, shown to as many people as possible. But for people who have a paid product, it's never the right place to start. I would rather somebody do a bunch of meta ads, do a bunch of Google ads, get their conversion, get their funnel dialed in, their autoresponders all in a row that they know are working for them, they know that it works, and then add co-reg on top of that because that's a great way to test little tweaks, right? By putting more co-reg volume into the top of the funnel. But it's not good for just starting out because the opt-in or the excuse me, the open rate and the click rate will be less than organic traffic. It's a very light touch point to start with, right? They've just joined somebody a list on a landing page, they see three other newsletters they can join, and it's just a it's a one-sentence headline, your company name, and a one-sentence description. It's a really light touch point. So co-reg needs leads do need to be nurtured more than others. So I get asked all the time like, what's the open rate for co-reg? Co-reg does not have its own open rate, it depends entirely on what the open rate is for what you're doing already. So if your open rate is 50%, just throwing that out there, your co-reg open rate will probably be around 30%, right? It's usually 25 to 30% lower. I don't I don't know if that math maths up, but that's generally it is. So the idea is that co-reg leads are cheaper. So you have the open rate and click will be less, but over time the ROI will be there. But especially if you're doing co-reg, you've got to clean your list frequently, right? So to get those people out that don't engage with you, get rid of them at least every couple of weeks, is what I recommend if you if you're doing co-reg. So it it can work, it just you've got to really have your funnels dialed in if you have got a paid product because it's gonna be less than what you would normally do on other organic or paid traffic.

Email Frequency, Nurture Strategy & Activation Tips

SPEAKER_01

Got it. Yeah, I mean, I I agree with you as much as like never start with co-reg. You gotta you gotta build your your base just for deliverability purposes, right? You want you want as much high engagement or whatever, which in turn will help your co-rage, your co-reg numbers actually go up to even your open break for those will go up, everything will go up just because more stuff will be landing in the inbox, hopefully. And then, you know, I even go as far as depending on co-reg performance versus other sources, you know, a lot of times we'll we'll we'll have a different uh activation window for co-reg, you know, or a normal call it first party direct sign up on your site, might give them 15 days, you know, co-reg, you might do like 10 just to get them to open or you know, do some type of activity to fall into what I call the base sending segment to keep sending to them. Um, but I tell everyone you gotta man, you know, you gotta monitor all your sources separately to you so you know what the engagement rate is, what's the activation rate, what the open rate. So you can monitor that if you're not, you just look at it as a whole. That's when you can get in the in the you know kiddie pool.

SPEAKER_00

I usually tell people too, just with co-reg, you usually send more mail. You can tell me what you think about this. More mail than not, maybe even a separate funnel with two emails a day if you're only doing one email a day. Because most people who are signing up for any newsletter these days, they're not giving you their primary work email, right? They are they are giving you their secondary email that they check a couple of times a day, but are not in there all day, every day. That's rare. So you have to think of that it they're those inboxes as a river of water. And the user is stepping up to the the side of the river, and they're only gonna see your email if it's coming by while they're standing next to the river. If they're not and they step away, they're not in their inbox. Your email that comes in is gonna be 30 or 40 or you know, two pages away in their Gmail or Yahoo account. So that's why it's important, I think, to send more email. You get a chance for them for your email to come by as they're standing next to the river. That's kind of the best, you know, metaphor that I have.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't I don't disagree with that, but I I I still cautiously how many times you send to them. Because the last thing I would do is send 20 emails in 10 days and they not open one of them.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And that kind of goes back to two, the what I hear from publishers when they first say, Look, I, you know, I hear I should be doing all kinds of different lead gen, I hear I should be doing co-reg and and showing co-reg leads in my pathway. So showing after offers after somebody joins my list, but I don't want to distract my readers, right? They've just joined my newsletter on the landing page. Why would I show them three other newsletters they can join on the in my pathway? I don't want to distract them. And I say, I hate to tell you, but they're already distracted, right? If your open, if your subject lines are good and your open rate is good, that's not going to change. Just, you know, having showing other newsletters is not going to change that because they're already signed up for 25 different newsletters in your industry. We know this because we watch individuals come through our network, we'll see the same email address come through seven different publishers in three weeks. So they are joining other lists, whether or not you help introduce them to it. So I think that, you know, they don't have to worry about distracting it. Everybody's distracted already. You've just got to find the subject lines and ways to get, you know, deliverability that's gonna work for you. And coverage is not gonna change that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. So and another tip we can add on to that is like when when people are doing co-reg uh in general, I also say like, don't put them through some type of automation series. If you want to send them one like hello email, great, but just start sending them your best content, your newsletter, because you want them to activate. They're gonna most likely activate on a nice piece of quality content or market news or or or anything like that that you're sending daily. Then when they open or click on that, then yeah, go ahead, throw them in your your your monetization funnel to squeeze whatever you can out of them, but don't do it to every single email that comes in. Usually see a backfire more than go the positive direction.

Tracking Performance & What Traffic Sources Are Converting Best

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And I tell them, you know, you know, send them your best stuff right away. Don't hold it off. Don't wait for it. If you are trying to get people into a webinar immediately, it's not gonna work with Co-Redge. People aren't at that level of commitment yet. You know, we've tried it where somebody will send immediately a go-to webinar invite as at the first email, and the show up rate will be abysmal because they're just not ready yet. They don't trust you, they don't know who you are. They're not gonna spend an hour online of their time until they've seen kind of some of the stuff you do. So you gotta do, you have to, again, back to nurturing, you gotta nurture them a bit more before you get that ask for the sale.

SPEAKER_01

This is kind of a two-pronged question on this one. Do the advertisers care where the subscribers are coming from? And have you seen it, or and is there a different monetization based on co-reg source? Or I don't know if it's either the the the publisher that's providing the leads or the traffic type. You know, it's an email generated lead that's coming in from like a another newsletter or you know, email campaign versus social lead versus a I don't know, whatever other types of leads you coming from.

SPEAKER_00

They do, and we track that pretty closely. So we know which lead came from which publisher, and so for us, somebody can. Come in and say, you know, after about a month, go, look, I've gotten some great sales and great engagement from Publisher 95. I love them. Let's try to focus a little bit more there. Uh, I'm I'm getting nothing from Publisher 12. Let's remove our ad from Publisher 12 and they can kind of optimize backwards because we're a blind network, right? We don't actually give out the list of all of the names. You'll go through, you know, your travels of email and see who's using us, obviously. So you know some of the sites, but we don't give out the whole list. We identify them by number because we work really hard to develop those relationships. We've got competitors in the space too that we're, you know, we're trying to wrangle publishers from each other, but we can we can determine by number where they come from, and they can come back and say, look, this this publisher's not working for us, let's remove it. Um, in terms of social, it's a good thing. You know, some people are getting great stuff from meta, some people aren't, right? So what we don't really try truly track on the publisher side whether it's a socially that came in of a meta ad that that drew that uh that drove that. But publisher could come in and look through UTM tags and see, okay, I can tell on my side, these UTMs are giving me the best revenue or giving me the best earnings. So I'm gonna try to focus more on those sources. So for the advertiser, it's about which publishers are working for them. On the publisher side, it's about which sources for them are uh people are people are choosing more after offers offers and making them more money. We show that all on that in a dashboard to them. And then what are you actually actually Chris? What are you finding in terms of like social signups versus Google ads? What's working best right now?

SPEAKER_01

So the number one is still email traffic, obviously converting the best. Um dedicated email that you bought, dedicated emails, native ads, and then email email traffic because usually it's coming, especially if you can get a clicked opt-in, click from the the email gone because then you know it's the email address that actually got clicked on that came through versus what they put in. Uh, but email is still usually the highest with the highest LTV, although it's obviously the the the hardest one to scale, right? There's only so many emails that you can't just turn on an ad and just keeps on running constantly, like other media by networks, i.e. Facebook, Google, obviously the volume.

SPEAKER_00

Are you asking? Yeah, are you doing where it's click to opt in? So somebody sends an email on your behalf and they click it and they're automatically opted in, then go to your page, or do you like to see them click it, go to a landing page, fill it in, and then go?

SPEAKER_01

They usually just go to a page. Um, you know, that there'll be like a little disclaimer. I think Sparkloop has it. Yeah. Some other ones, it's like the magic link or something, and it'll say, like, you know, click here to subscribe, and you'll be subscribed to whatever, you click there, and then it basically takes you like the thank you page. Thanks for signing up, or whatever. So that's like a click to opt-in. And some of them I see and they go there, then they go to a mid-path where they might have opt-offers or something else. They keep on trying to monetize. But just email traffic in general, whatever the you know, even if they put in their email, that's still fine. That one's just like, did they really put the email in that it came from? Or, like you said, is it a secondary, third email? But email is always the top. It used to be Google was number was number two, uh, GDN, especially, uh, when it came from you know, lead acquisition to activation. But now I've been seeing that shift to Facebook. Facebook usually used to be not as good uh years back, but within the last two or three years, Facebook has done a great job as far as like optimizing the the users or who's coming in or whatever it is, and quality of those has actually gone up. Now, this is across, you know, I deal with a bunch of different industries and niches. I can't tell you specific. I I know email's still the best for FinPub2 as well in general, but I don't know what they say between Google and Facebook, and you know that that I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I think in Finpub specifically, I think that you're right, it's still the dedicated email, it still seems to be king. And people will do that too. They'll show after offers to to offset some of those costs instead of going directly to the thank you page, they'll go to after offers first. We have people that do uh to to to monetize their existing list. If they have a a new blog post or a new article or a new PDF two-page report, they'll send an email out to their list with a link to it, describe what it is. Put the link in the email. When they click on the link before they go to the PDF, they'll hit an after office page or a Sparklo page or whatever, right? Uh and to kind of you know get a get a boost of revenue even for their existing subscribers. So you can kind of put after the only thing we don't allow, we don't allow after offers to be shown on just a web page, right? So somebody goes to read a news article, they see after offers there, it just messes up our stats and it just doesn't work. People just aren't aren't they aren't in signup mode at that point, they're in research mode. So they're not shooting.

SPEAKER_01

Well, they gotta you gotta pass through the email anyway somehow, don't you?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, some people do it where uh yeah, exactly. That's why it doesn't work that well where because they're they're not pre-filled, right? They're not, they have to put in their information. There's not in sign-up mode in that point. We call it sign-up mode, right? When you hit a landing page, you've signed up for that newsletter, you're still in signup mode and just going to read an article. It just doesn't work.

Offer Count, Compliance & the 4-Layer Email Validation Stack

SPEAKER_01

And then this next question, you know, we might be on on two separate uh sides of the coin on this one. Um, what's your feeling? Do you do you actually think when people are are signing up on a co-registration, they really know what they're signing up for? They remember signing up for that. Yeah. Or they're kind of like it's a good question.

SPEAKER_00

Here's here's what we found. We call it rememberability, meaning I've just signed up for somebody a newsletter on somebody's landing page. I go to the next page, which is the co-reg after office page, I see three other newsletters there. We've should we've tested this. We've shown four, we've shown five, we've shown six, we've shown ten. I got I can't stomach it for too long when we show ten because what we find is once you show more than five things on the page, even if people just chose one of them, they forgot that they signed up for it, that they don't know where it came from. So we're really careful about that. We always identify the company name, they check the box, they click subscribe, and the rememberability really jumps up when you do five or less. We normally show three, sometimes four, sometimes five, but never more than five on the page, just because that rememberability isn't there and it's just not good for the advertiser. It's not a good user experience either for that user that comes through. So some of our advertisers allow pre-check, and that's when usually they're like super experienced, dialed in funnels. They did they just know their numbers cold, they'll allow that. I never recommend that, obviously, for anybody new. Make sure you're not pre-checked, they have to actually physically check the box, click the subscribe button. Um, and that keeps us in, you know, with GDPR too, in compliance with that. So you really with those things in you know, in combination, really boost that rememberability. So you gotta be careful. I mean, co-ridge used to be this terrible thing where you'd go to USA Today's website, you'd sign up. By the way, USA Today, I was just there this morning. It's unusable. Have you been to that site? These the ads, oh my god, it's just everywhere. You can't even see the article. Anyway, Co-Ridge, some people have this old idea where sign up for a USA Today newsletter, they'd show 25 different things you could sign up for. It was travel, it was technology, it was automotive, whatever, right? And it's just garbage because, again, it's too many things they're showing. They're not matching the newsletter that they signed up for exactly with the topics that you're seeing on the next page. So you've really got, you know, there is a specific way. Co-reg does work, but you've got to do it in a very specific way to make it work for it. And then even when somebody joins, somebody says, okay, I want that newsletter on our page. We run it through a gauntlet of quality scoring validation. We use four different services. They all have to agree it's a good email. It's overkill for anybody doing a single newsletter, but for a network, you really have to do it. We use emailoversight.com, kickbox.com, zero bounce, and e hawk. All four of them have to say it's a good email address. It's not a spam trap, it's not uh, you know, 15 letters, symbol, symbols, numbers at hotmail.com, right? That may be technically deliverable, but is obviously nobody's primary or secondary email. So if you do these things, every step has to be just right for it to work well for people.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. The um was I gonna mention there was so like uh on my side, so I'm just thinking, like, I mean, well, first of all, I used to like go to like for HGTV, they'd have like the dream home or like the or like the e-home, and you think you that's like you're talking about you sign up for that, but then they got like 30 different advertisers and lists that you want to sign up for, all the freaking different things, and it's like yeah, yeah. Like 25 of them at least.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, yeah. The kiosk at the mall with the car, you know, sign the postcard, God help you. You're gonna get on every list under the sun. It's gonna be, you know, you're gonna get spammed. I think I my wife signed up on uh one of those, what, a petition outside of a grocery store, like one of those, you know, in California, we happen all the time. We to get propositions on the ballot, and she got added to a bunch of lists just from that. So, you know, you never know what you're signing up for, and that that's part of the problem, right? It just dilutes everything.

SPEAKER_01

And and Torrid used to be that way. Yeah, and I mean, so in general, I just then it's still like in my in my mind, it's like they signed up for for the main thing they went there for, right? So the the primary uh sign-up and then the additional ones they sign up for, where there might be some recollection to people who are checking it off. I get that, and obviously you you know from your history and your stats and all the analysis you guys have been doing. That's why you've condensed them out of ones, you know, recommended them that's be pre-checked. That obviously definitely helps if it's pre-checked. It would a lot of them might just go and not even realize they signed up for it. But I still in my head is and and and I've seen some other tests on my own, which and these are tied more to like doing like funnel things for activation versus sending them the newsletter or whatever daily. I always I'm I'm whenever I do it, I'm just like I I just send daily newsletters until they activate, and then I'll I'll get into it. I don't know if it's the best way, not the best way. I know it works. Uh, I don't know if it could be better trying to go a different route.

Ramping Co-Reg Slowly & Welcome Email Best Practices

SPEAKER_00

When somebody starts with us, I recommend too. We know we're not gonna start doing you a thousand subscribers a day for you. We can, right? Okay, we could do a thousand subscribers in a couple of hours. I never recommend that. Start very slow, warm it up. We do 25 subscribers a day, 50 subscribers a day over a 30-day period. Check it after the end of the third day. How are we doing? What's our open rate? What's our click rate? Okay, now we can go to 75 a day or 100 a day and slowly ramp it up. You just gotta make sure, right, that the numbers are working. Again, a math math equation at the end of the day, it's gotta be making money for you. So you just gotta do it slowly, warm it up, and and see how it works.

SPEAKER_01

And then and then when people, when the when the advertiser are getting this data, uh, I guess two things. One, are you guys throttling the delivery of that data to give a little buffer between the initial sign up of the primary uh publisher versus get into the advertiser so they can make sure their email gets in first? Or are you just telling the advertiser to um you know, best practice to wait a little? Like what do you tell them there as far as like cadence of sign up to delivering?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. We don't. We we don't wait, right? If if somebody chooses an offer, they've got the time between when they went from the landing page to our page, right? Maybe 30 seconds or something like that. We always recommend they assign an email immediately. And I recommend anybody who's doing email marketing, send that email immediately. And but you got to test it. But if you're not sending a welcome email and you don't send the first email, even 24 hours later, they're gonna forget that they signed up that for your stuff. So, especially with co-registration, I think it's important to sign it, to send that welcome email right away, explain who you are, maybe even explain where they came from. Thanks for choosing us after you signed up for another newsletter, whatever it may be, just to be to explain that and and I think that's the best practice for it. You if you wait too long, then they're just gonna forget.

The Future of Co-Reg: SMS, AI Matching & Identity Graphs

SPEAKER_01

Cool. And then because of the you know, the the past, what's the word, uh picture of what Co Reg was, you know, the negative outlook on on Co Reg to where it's gotten, obviously, I think more mainstream, and obviously these businesses, Beehive, Sparkloop have kind of made it a normal thing, like yeah, anything else. I mean, I think you guys obviously are more advanced than most of these other people. I was gonna ask about that later down as far as like what are your guardrails, what are your safeguards of this data that's coming in to make sure you're getting the highest quality, which you kind of explained, all those different checks you guys are doing with your verification partners. Where do you think Co-Reg has to evolve, or or is it just gonna kind of be stuck in this model that hasn't changed much, I guess, over the years?

SPEAKER_00

A couple things we're doing. Yeah, SMS is a big one for us. Uh we've kind of touched on it. That that in the past year, the the number of offers that we have of people that are doing SMS, so they're doing email and SMS in combination. I think that's the best way to do it. There's they've got their funnels and they've got their stuff they're sending on email, but they're also sending stuff out on SMS text. And so for us, a lot, I'd say almost half of our advertisers now are also requesting phone number to do the SMS because the response rate, the open rates, the engagement on that is so high right now. Will it always be that way? Probably not, right? We're in this era where, like email was 10, 15 years ago, you've got this window where it's really good and the engagement is really good until it gets ruined, like things always do. And we're already starting to see that with the iPhone almost doing folders now, right? Like primary inbox and you've got secondary inbox for unknown numbers and that sort of thing. So it's already starting to shift, but there's this window right now where it's really working well. So I think Co-reg with SMS is a great way to do it right now. So people should really look into that. But also, we're using AI to now start to determine not just if it's a stock offer, we're gonna show them stock newsletters, but even more granularly than that, if if you've signed up for, because we've got a lot of data on people and what they've signed up for over the past five, six years. If you've signed up for an options newsletter, we're gonna start to show you other options newsletters as well. And so we we know what you kind of gather this data and we may even enhance the data where we say, okay, we've got this email address. We know they are in Connecticut, okay, they're on the East Coast, what's their age? We could actually pile on with different services now what income is, right? So we can kind of build a profile of that user and then really get good at showing them other newsletters that we think they're gonna like as well. So we're not just shotgunning out there a bunch of stuff that we're not sure about, even though we're trying, we're doing that pretty well with matching topics now, but I think there's a lot of room to to build a profile from an email address or a phone number and actually really show them stuff that they're gonna be interesting to them and not stuff that they don't want.

SPEAKER_01

That's interesting. I mean, it's basically you guys are building your own your own identity graph. Yeah. We're doing with our with our click activity. So I mean that sounds amazing.

SPEAKER_00

It's it's you know, we gotta be careful with that too, right? People can opt out uh from from enhanced data and things like that. But you know, it's not we're not tracking them around the internet. We're just trying to show them what we think are the best newsletters that they would like or the best list. It's a better user for them and for the publisher and advertiser and all around.

SPEAKER_01

And then with all the changes that have been happening, especially the last two years and and the complexity of email deliverability, getting emails in the inbox and all that stuff that's going. Uh, what what else do you think can be done uh to enhance co-reg to get the best chance of improving on that and not not negatively impacting that as obviously it's gonna be getting more and more tighter as far as like the engagement, that you're not you know, any any lack of engagement or any drop in engagement can really set you back.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I think I think just be really careful about what you're showing and how many things you're showing to them, right? You gotta be really good. And we have people that do that use us and two competitors and they're all in a row, right? So you've got three pages of co-reg until you get to the final thank you page. And some people have this idea, well, I'm just gonna keep showing as long as they keep choosing something on those pages, I'm just gonna keep showing them stuff. I I don't love that. I I think you should probably work with one one co-reg system and just try to optimize that and work with somebody who, like after offers, right, does all of the things right and tries to match that to your content, but you want it to be a good user experience as well. Email's tough these days, right? The the it's really hard to get engagement in um hard to get clicks, and it's only getting harder because everything's getting diluted. So I think pile, you know, adding on to that with an SMS list that has a much higher engagement, that those two things work together. You've got the email that you're sending out that has the content, you've got your SMS you're sending out. Ideally, somebody who's getting both of those things at the exact same time. They're getting an email in their inbox and they're getting a text from you. I think that's working really well right now. So until more people realize that, that you've got this golden window right here where you can really do things well. Now, texting costs more, right? It's gonna cost you money and it's more expensive to buy. Even with us, it's it's more expensive to buy a phone number because that's harder to get from the user. But it's uh, I think that the payoff that people are really seeing it now. So, you know, where does go co-rage go? I think email will always be a part of it. I think SMS is even more of it. Um, but those are the two things that you're buying an audience right now. Everybody else you're renting an audience. If you've got Twitter followers or Facebook followers or Instagram followers, it's all great and it works well, but still the only two owned audiences are email and phone.

SPEAKER_01

You were touching on or talking about how you're doing both email and SMS kind of together. How does that look on the flow? Like if someone submits an email and an SMS at the same time, you're only showing advertisers I can collect both, or yeah, no, it's it most a lot of the people are collecting phone number on their landing page right now, too.

SPEAKER_00

So they're collecting email and phone, they pass that to the After Offers page. We show it in the field, right? So that they can change it if they wanted to, but uh the email is pre-filled, but then the phone is too, but we show the phone field for compliance purposes and just to make it a little bit easier. Um, so not everybody does though. If if they've if if we have an email-only newsletter that's come to After Offers and they check a box that's a phone offer, the phone field will pop up there and they have to decide whether they want to fill it out and then click, you know, subscribe. So we love it when they pre-fill it. I think it's easier for the user that they don't have to pre to retype it. Um that's best practice, but doesn't always happen that way.

SPEAKER_01

But do you get the I guess if you have say four four offers on there, only only one of the offers only accepts email, but they have email and phone submitted, you just sell the email to them and the phone doesn't matter. Uh explain what you mean. Uh so you have four offers, three of them are or will take email and phone number. One only takes email, they don't want the phone number for whatever reason. They select that offer, so you're only gonna monetize that email because they don't want the SMS, right?

SPEAKER_00

Right, right. Yeah, we could drop it off. I like the idea. We haven't done that yet. Whereas if we're past phone number and email, we only show phone number and email offers. It's an interesting idea. We're not doing that yet, right? What we're we're still showing whatever offers are in that topic. It doesn't matter. So we'll kind of randomly grab three from the database that fit the iPhone geo-target and the topic. But yeah, if they don't choose one of the phone offers, but we've been past the phone number, the phone number gets dropped on the floor, right? We don't use it. So it's an interesting idea that we should only show phone offers when we're past the phone number off. Got to talk to Emil about that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, I don't know. I was just thinking about it. Like I was thinking screen, I didn't know if like at first it was like you got the email sign-up and then they go to the next step, which is like, oh, do you want to get SMSs? Like it's kind of separated, or if it was just kind of like you're saying, they're both in the same thing. So it's one page and they're just selecting what they want to do.

SPEAKER_00

Right. We have some competitors that show the fields for each offer below that offer. We don't. We have one form that shares is shared for all of the offers that they choose. So um uh we haven't tested it whether or not it's best to do that. We think it is, but we we gotta test it hard to find out.

SPEAKER_01

And then there's no, there's no, obviously, I guess you already said that they're you're not doing it, so there's no terms or whatever that that you guys have in place that say they can't have multiple co-reg services running on the same funnel.

SPEAKER_00

We don't disallow it. It's not like we have to be exclusive. I would prefer that our publishers are exclusive, um, but a lot of people are doing it so that they're not, and I understand why. So um it's not my favorite thing. But if they are using multiple coverage services, we hope we're first. Uh, and we hope we do hope we're exclusive with us, but I don't we don't require it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I just feel like that's like I mean, talking about diluting the quality.

SPEAKER_00

There is a diminishing returns too. And if you're building a list for yourself that you want long-term that's high quality, you want the user experience of that sign-up to be good. And I I I think one page is is is there. I don't know that two or three pages makes it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, I mean the the biggest issue to me is is is really the media buyers gaming the system where they're just driving cheap traffic to wherever and optimizing for those people that are going to be submitting more than one place, and then they might be getting cheap places low quality, but they're submitting because they're whatever. Maybe they're the freebie people or the whatever people, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00

And then what will happen is eventually advertiser will start to exclude them, right? They'll say, I'm not getting anything from this publisher, exclude it. We'll get down, there'll be less and less offers available, and I'll finally have to reach out to them. Okay, I got nothing to show to your audience anymore. You burned through everybody, all the advertisers have have excluded your page. They're not running anymore. I don't have any offers to show on your page, and so they will burn it out, and it happens pretty quickly. Um, within a month or two, advertisers will start to exclude that publisher, and you know, they'll eventually just go away. But we're pretty careful about it too. I we we vet all the publishers to make sure they're high quality. If I I know almost all of the owners in our network that's starting to change as we grow beyond my own network, but we'll join their email newsletter for a while, see what they send out, what kind of stuff they put in their list and what their flow is like. And we turn down a lot of people too. There's a lot of crap out there. So um the the quality of a lead starts with the quality of the publisher they're coming from. So we got to be careful about that.

SPEAKER_01

I'm gonna re-bring this one up. You already touched on it earlier, but I just want to talk about those safeguards again that you guys have to improve the quality. Uh just so people don't don't understand what it is. You know, you brought up, I would you say email oversight, or the other ones?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so the the big the big problem out there right now is bots. There's a lot of bots out there. You don't want them on your list. There's no human behind it, it'll hurt your deliverability. Bots are a game of whack-a-mole. Anybody that says they can eliminate all bots, 100% of bots all the time is lying because there's new ones that pop up every day. Ehawk is the one service that we use for that. It's e-hawk.net, maybe ehawk, ehawk.net. But they do a really good job of eliminating bots. They also do a good job of saying, okay, this person is in India, but they're on a VPN saying that they're on a US-based IP address, those get thrown out. So you've got to be really careful about that. If it's a spam trap, zero bounce will help find zero complainers, people that click on spam. Although zero bounce can be really heavy handed with that. We put in our own emails into zero bounce, which I've never called an email a spam, I think, and they immediately call it a complainer email. So the problem is that all these. Services have about 5% of their own bad emails that they'll throw out. So anytime you add another service on top, you're gonna throw out another five percent of emails. So four, we you know, even though we use four in line, email oversight, kickbox, zero bounce, uh, ehawk, that, you know, if we added one more on top of that, we'd lose another five percent. We'd add one more on top of that, another five percent. So again, I think there's diminishing returns there, but you've got to be you've got we use it like kind of industrial, we can think of it as industrial strength validation and quality scoring. Kickbox will quality score it in in in addition to saying whether or not it's a valid email address. Because just because something's deliverable doesn't mean it's really a good email. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01

What percentage of traffic are you guys seeing uh via e hop that is bot related or yeah, good question.

SPEAKER_00

I haven't checked it recently. I'd have to ask to a meal uh email, but maybe five to ten percent daily, right, gets thrown out because of some reason that it's not liked. It's either it's either it it it looks like incentivized traffic or it's it's there, it's on a VPN or it's anonymized traffic, but those get thrown out as well. So all of those things you never know for sure. It could be someone who's just traveling in Europe and is on a VPN to get back to a USIP address, but it there's just something about it that's not quite right. So we throw it out in the interest of just being careful, right? Um, so yeah, you've ehawk is probably the most expensive part of our chain. They're not a cheap service, but if you're a network and and it really if you're really serious about the quality of your list, you'll want to use something like that to get rid of bots and spam traps and all that.

SPEAKER_01

And then as far as the publishers and the quality of the of the data, did you say that that does that take in account the pricing of the leads for people or yeah?

SPEAKER_00

So when we we pay out 70% of whatever we've negotiated with the advertiser to the publisher, and then we you know we have costs involved in those validation and quality scoring and server costs and all that. We just eat that as part of the cost of doing business. So 70% gets paid out to the publisher. We've got our our costs of doing business, and then you know, we we as a middleman, we keep the pre we keep the difference as the profit.

SPEAKER_01

And then what what niches obviously outside of FinPublish is your main one, which we know that there's a lot of demand right now. What's what out of those other ones you mentioned, which one has the the strongest demand right now or is kind of starting to grow some legs?

SPEAKER_00

Health and wellness is looking great. There's a lot of people in that space, um, a lot of people doing content in that space. I'm seeing some great stuff there. I I love the technology newsletters too, so I'm kind of really focusing on those two things, the health and wellness and and the technology kind of AI newsletters. There's a ton of them out there right now. Um, a lot of them are using Co-Reg already, right? If they're using like a Spark Loop kind of thing, our pitch to them is that you know, Spark Loop is great, but we don't, as a publisher, we don't have engagement minimums, right? They don't have to click four times for you to get paid. Um, as long as it passes our validation, quality scoring, and all that, you're gonna get paid. Um, and and I think, you know, as a from a user experience with Spark Loop, you'll see other topics. When you join a an entrepreneur newsletter, you'll see AI, you'll see tech, you'll see you may even see, you know, new general news. And um, you know, we we just really feel strongly that matching the topics closely is better for everybody.

SPEAKER_01

The um any any insights on where you think the the newsletter space is going in the next two to three years from where we're at now?

The Future of Newsletters: Deliverability, Personal Branding & AI

SPEAKER_00

There's there's a lot out there, right? There's a lot of newsletters out there. Deliverability is tough. I think you gotta, you gotta most people don't know even when they're deliverable. They just know that they're their their open rates are dropping, they're click rates, they have no idea why. So I think you've got to work with somebody like yourself, right? That that is an expert in that, that knows that area and can help you do that. Because it's tough. You you've gotta really use other things, not just a newsletter to engage your audience, right? So it is the you social and Instagram and X and that sort of thing, and building a reputation there. I think people are don't want to follow nameless websites, especially in Finpub, right? They want to know who is behind this, who's the person. So that's uncomfortable for some people. They don't want to be the face of it because they're worried either that they won't be able to sell it down the road or they're worried about their privacy and anonymity. But that's really what people want. They want to follow a people, they want to follow a human. So um, I know people are trying to use AI to write all their stuff now, and I think that that can work to some extent. It can certainly be a help, but I I don't know that somebody wants to follow just an AI only, right? Uh I could be wrong. Well, time will tell, but yeah, people want to follow a human being.

SPEAKER_01

It keeps on getting better and better, soon you won't really be able to tell the difference.

SPEAKER_00

Will you be able to know, right? Am I an AI now and you don't even know, right?

SPEAKER_01

I'm the uh And I'm we're AIs talking to each other, right? Yeah, I always have that joke with my business partner Justin. It's like he's like, Well, I can have everyone's got fucking 14 note takers on these on these Zoom calls. Like, eventually, like people aren't even gonna go to the meetings, it's gonna be their their AI note takers, and AI is just communicating back and forth, and then you're gonna get the the sum we got at the end of the meeting.

SPEAKER_00

Yep. There's a movie. What's the what's that Val Kilmer movie where the the kids go into college and he's the people are leaving tape recorders in the lecture hall, and eventually it's just the tape recorders of the students and the tape recorder of the professor talking to each other.

SPEAKER_01

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00

That's I mean I thought it would be interesting to have a podcast where you get four AIs and you give them each a personality and they debate and they talk in a podcast, almost like the all-in, but AI personalities. Yeah, they go. I couldn't quite figure it out.

SPEAKER_01

They have the uh they set up that that uh uh open claw community for like the AIs to have their own social network. Yeah. And they're like I don't know about that.

SPEAKER_00

I think a lot of that is is BS. I mean, I think there are people in there putting in comments that are actually human just to stir the pot. But that's coming, man. I mean, the the uh the all-in equivalent that are LAIs, that's that's coming, and that's gonna be interesting.

SPEAKER_01

What's uh what's something happening in the space that most people aren't paying attention to yet? And it can be SMS, because obviously that's been the new hot thing here in the last definitely last year.

SPEAKER_00

What are they not paying attention to? I think I think people are or what are they sleeping on, you know? Yeah, good question. Trying to think about what that would be. For me, it is SMS because not a lot of people are doing it yet. Um, it seems like it's the hot topic, but people are I think that the hurdle to get it, to get it your own phone number and everything is is a little high. There it's starting to get easier to do that.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, the thing, so here's here's my point. Like SMS is obviously working great for it. It works great for obviously FinPub is doing great. It's it th it's very good for lead generation. It's I've seen it harder for for actual transactional e-commerce type stuff. Don't know how it plays into general news. People have like media brands that are trying to use it to like it's just so it's so cost heavy without getting like you you can't really make it on an ad arbitrage uh type of game, driving traffic to an article and this and that. That that that's that's where I think it needs to be solved unless prices dramatically drop, which probably won't happen because taxes are just gonna keep on going up on that stuff.

SPEAKER_00

Well, here's one I think that I did see because of the cost of SMS, and because it's much easier now to have to make your own app in like a lovable or a replit and an AI. I think I'm starting to see people make their own apps, get the push notification uh permission, and then sending push notifications in the same way they're they people are sending SMS. Uh, you don't need permission, you don't need your own phone number to do it. You do have to get people to agree to the push notifications when you're onboarding them with the app, but the app used to be the big thing that was expensive. You'd have to spend$100,000 to get a good one. Now you can go into Level Bull or Replit, do your own app, put it up into the app stores and and get push notifications with basically the same kind of messaging that SMS has.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, I just I just already I wonder how how how much adoption that'll actually get downloading an app for I mean a better better price, some other served purpose besides you saying put you know push notifications.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the the ones that I've seen do it are doing it just for that reason. Now, you probably have to have you know content in the app itself, but if you're already doing that for your newsletters, no reason you why you can't just duplicate that in the app. Um, it doesn't have to be some super high speed thing, right? It an app these days can be pretty low-key stuff, and you can do it yourself on Lovable or Replit. So I think it's a low-cost way to kind of fake the SMS thing. I don't know if that's a trend or not, but it's a couple things I'm just kind of seeing early on.

Mindset, Habits, Book Recs & Where to Find Tim

SPEAKER_01

And to kind of wrap things up here, we're just gonna go a little off off off business and just off the industry and just go into some other other stuff here. So what's something that changed you've changed your mind about uh in the last few years?

SPEAKER_00

Uh I think that the idea that I I've been through points where I thought Co-Reg is dead and then email is dead. And if you talk to my brother, my co-founder, Emil, I I've gone through those stage a couple of times where I'm like, this is just not working anymore. Within two years, Co-Reg is gonna be dead, and email's you know, not gonna be working anymore. It's gonna be too diluted. And every single time I'm proven wrong by that, it just has lots of staying power. So I I think there's there's always in everything, there's always this thing like the like email is too uh saturated, podcasts are too saturated. Good content will always shine through if you stick with it. So most people just don't stick with it. It's too hard to do a two years worth of a podcast and get very little and all of a sudden they blow up. And same thing with email. So it it email's not dead, it's the only audience-owned audience thing. Until our mothers and grandmothers have Discord channels, right? Or something like that, it's gonna be the thing. So it's not going anywhere. I think it just became it's you have to be it has to be done as good as as as it's got you got to be great at it still, and you just have to stick with it. Keep doing it because it's too easy to give up. So don't give up. So I guess that you know the whole the email is dead. We've heard it time and time again for the last 20 years. It's not it's not going to be sticking around.

SPEAKER_01

It keeps on growing. The amount of the amount of bottom of emails going out just is it infinitely grows every year. Yeah. Um what what's the uh the biggest risk you've ever taken?

SPEAKER_00

Oh, biggest risk I've ever taken.

SPEAKER_01

You go climb climb Mount Everest or something? K2?

SPEAKER_00

Uh well, uh, you know, I was a police officer, so there was some risk in there, you know, a couple of times. Uh been shot at a couple of times. So I guess if we're talking about a real risk, that was probably it. I mean, I I I loved being a cop. I really enjoyed it. It was a hard decision for me to quit when my business was taken off. I actually became a reserve officer. So in in California, but all over the country, you could be I was full-time for eight years, but then you become a reserve officer, almost like a volunteer firefighter where you get paid a dollar a year and you work once a week, a 12-hour shift. And so I did that. And so I did that. I actually just retired a couple of years ago from from doing that, working one shift a week. Um, but I guess my wife would tell you that that was the riskiest thing I'd done. For a dollar?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, did it did it did it pump up your pension or something?

SPEAKER_00

No, no, it's just a it's a kind of a volunteer basis.

SPEAKER_01

So I had to keep up all my California for a dollar, 12 to 12 hours shift.

SPEAKER_00

I wasn't doing it for the money, right? I was doing it because I really enjoyed it and I had good partners and we had fun doing it. It was a lot of fun. Um, but you know, it's changed over the last few years too, since COVID and all that. So I'm kind of glad I'm out of it. But um, I think the you know, maybe the biggest risk was quitting my full-time job as a police officer to do business. That was a scary time. I had a wife who was in grad school. I had an infant daughter. Um, so talking about just business risk, that felt like super risky. But these days, you know, I think the idea that working for a company is the safe thing to do. I just don't think that's the case anymore. I think, you know, working for yourself, getting a side gig going on the side, and then quitting and doing it on your own. I'm kind of ruined to be an employee ever again because I I just I like it. I feel you there. What's uh what's one hab that you swear by? For me, it's getting up in the morning and just kind of affirmation stuff. I know it sounds corny, but I have affirmation stuff that I read about self-talk positive, because I I can get into these negative self-talk things about mistakes I've made or mistakes I'm making. But I think really starting the day with reading affirmational stuff about having positivity, positivity, and confidence in yourself that you're doing the right thing. It it kind of sounds corny, but when you do it day after day, I think it really works. It works for me anyway.

SPEAKER_01

The last one would be any any books or podcasts that you're into right now you recommend to people.

SPEAKER_00

So uh I listen to a ton of podcasts. I really like Andrew Warner's. He's it's a YouTube video and podcast together, the next big thing. It's fairly new. I like it. He talks a lot about AI and using AI and specifically how you can apply AI to your businesses. I also like a web uh podcast called 20 VC, which is these three VCs. Um, one of the founders of Saster and two other VCs talk about business and that sort of thing. I really enjoy that one. I listen to all then too. I like them to talk about uh business and politics and that sort of thing. So uh kind of those three I think that I listen to the most. I I walk every day, I walk four or five miles every day. So it's you know, podcasts I'm listening to all the time in the morning.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I was just on a 20-hour road trip around the state of Florida taking my daughter to colleges, and I was listening, I wasn't listening to uh podcast, listening audio book, and I was listening to Steve Jobs. Yeah, and that book is insane. That guy's a freaking nutcase.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Oh man, I'm I think the world really misses Steve Jobs. I mean, Apple products were just so incredible, and it's just the this this ease of use, it just I think it's lost now. It's not there anymore. So man, what a huge loss. Yeah, great, great book too. Have you have you read the Elon book by the same author?

SPEAKER_01

Not yet. Um that's on my next by the next one I'll get. I I don't really listen to audiobooks or do that. I I really just do them when I'm driving or traveling, uh, which is I mean, talk about a a good habit or or thing to do when you're driving long distances. It makes time go by so fast. Like I used to dread driving four, six, eight hours, twelve hours, and uh, I can put on an audiobook and it seems like I'm in the car for two hours basically. Yep.

SPEAKER_00

Yep. We're about four and a half hours from Las Vegas, and there's a lot of conferences there. So we I used to fly, but it's just the easiest to drive now. So I'm doing that, you know, three, four times a year, going to Vegas. And so podcasts are the way to make that trip really short for sure. Nice.

SPEAKER_01

Uh, is there anything you want to plug or where can people find you?

SPEAKER_00

That's it. You can kind of see some demo videos at afteroffers.com that kind of shows how we do it a little bit differently than most people out there. But you know, I recommend that if you're a publisher, if you're a newsletter publisher, you should be using CoReg to monetize your signups, whether you use us or somebody else. Give it a try. We don't have any long-term commitments either, right? You put it up in your pathway for two weeks. If you like it, you like the money, great. If you don't like it, take it down, right? It's okay. And on the other side, give it a try as an advertiser. Um, start slow, drip it into your sequences really slowly to start. And co-reg works best when when you've got a funnel dialed in and you're you just want more traffic on top of it. That's the best way to use it.

SPEAKER_01

Awesome. Fuck. Tim, I appreciate your time. I think uh this is a good, great, actually great conversation. I think we we we dove really good and deep into co-reg. So I think we're gonna open some people's eyes on, you know, actually the especially the the care you guys take on your network to make sure the the best quality traffic and products are coming out, which I don't think people realize so much when they start doing these things. They just you know think it's any leak coming in. So I think uh I think people will enjoy this conversation. And uh are you going to the newsletter conference in New York or no?

SPEAKER_00

I won't be at that one. Um I go to uh I would I just got we just got back from New Media Summit. So we'll probably go to that every year.

SPEAKER_01

Oh you there.

SPEAKER_00

Yep, and then we'll be of course at uh Financial Marketing Summit, which is a great one if you're a financial publisher. Go to that one.

SPEAKER_01

Is that one back in Orlando or where's that one?

SPEAKER_00

That's in Orlando every January, and then they've got one coming up at the market beat offices in July.

SPEAKER_01

Oh I'm I'm I should be coming up for that one too. Yep. So we'll see. I will see you there. All right, sounds good. All right, Tim, appreciate it. Take care. Thanks for the time.