👋 Howdy! This is the Open Source CEO, the weekly newsletter that gives your brain the strength of ゴジラ (Gojira).

COMING IN HOT TODAY 💥 

✍️ So you wanna be a writer: An open-source view of this newsletter.
💥 Another useful newsletter: It’s nearly as cool as this one.
🥉 Question to the audience: What do you struggle with the most?

If you’re interested in sponsoring these emails you can see our different partnership options here.

PARTNERS 💫

Today’s edition is presented by Athyna. Hire, manage & retain world-class global talent.

Build out your entire squad from start to finish. From sales and marketing to product and engineering, we match talent specific to your needs in 5 days.

No search fees, no activation fees. Don’t pay a cent until you find the right fit. Some recent roles placed lately:

Salesforce Consultant - Brazil - 🇧🇷 - $5200 p/m  💥️
SDR - Argentina - 🇦🇷 - $2700 p/m 🙋🏻‍♂️
Media Buyer - Argentina - 🇦🇷 - $2400 p/m 🚀
Data Engineer - Argentina - 🇦🇷 - $8400 p/m 👾

And a load more incredible talent, matched at lightning speed. ⚡

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Hello world

We are ~10k subscribers in to the newsletter as of time of writing, so I thought it was a good time to look back and reflect on why I started and how we got to where we are today.

In the following paragraphs you’ll learn how the idea started, the size of the newsletter (and media) industry at large, our plans, metrics & heroes, and what we plan for the future of Open Source CEO. Hope you find it interesting!

Early idea generation

The idea for the newsletter came to me in a dream … ok, it didn’t. It came to me from the podcast My First Million. If you don’t know My First Million, it’s an awesome business that’s often helpful but always hilarious hosted by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr.

The thing with their podcast is, they talk about newsletters a lot. Or at least they did, as Sam successfully sold a daily newsletter, The Hustle, to Hubspot in 2021 and Shaan, having taken the playbook and run with it, whipped up a similar daily crypto newsletter, Milk Road and exited that in 2022 … in less than 12 months.

Both of these exits were in the 8-figure ranges. The Hustle, reportedly ~$27M and Milk Road for something around $10M. Here is the *alleged* playbook they use to do it by the way.

However, I didn’t really care for the acquisition idea. I am a creative. Always have been, always will be. I call my company Athyna; “my great big piece of art” and I think about writing in the same way.

The idea of selling a newsletter isn’t top of mind for me. Though the reason for them being so easy to scale and sell is because they are a great cash-flowing businesses. And relatively low maintenance too.

The (big) business of newsletters

For the longest time (just over six-months actually) I have been telling anyone and everyone that newsletters are the second best business model behind SaaS. It may sound insane but people inside of both SaaS and the newsletter space tend to agree.

Sure, you may not ever see a trillion dollar newsletter business (the industry does have billion dollar newsletter brand, Agora) but if you weigh the difficulty with the chance of a life changing level of wealth, the odds stack up incredibly well for newsletters.

Take a look at this interesting breakdown below by newsletter-kinda-guru-ish-guy Matt McGarry.

And another great one here from some good bloke named Matt Ragland.

Pretty interesting right? What’s more interesting is when you look at the value of a newsletter by way of subscriber to price value.

So, if you examine the 13 acquisitions listed in They Got Acquired’s recent newsletter deal report you will see something stunning. Newsletter (acquisition) value per subscriber is a whopping $38 per subscriber.

I know this is somewhat irrelevant information to you right now because the CAC of a subscriber could be $1-million-dollars for all you know. But it’s not. The typical cost to acquire a good, engaged subscriber to a newsletter, is somewhere in the vicinity of $0.70-2.50.

Yep, you read that right. The value per subscriber is $38 but the cost to acquire is only a dollar or two … hang on a second … that must mean that…

There is a ~25x multiple on the price you pay for a subscriber, and the price you can sell them for. Not a bad arbitrage right there.

The plan for Open Source CEO

Firstly, I need to make it clear; this is my side hustle. I am currently Founder & CEO of Athyna - a global talent platform. We are currently profitable, growing fast and building the best AI-driven marketplace in the world. So, I have my hands full.

But I don’t worry about that. I still have ambitious plans for myself and the newsletter. I have begun explaining my ambitions as being ‘The Lenny of leadership’. If you don’t know Lenny, he’s the writer one of the top 5 largest Substack’s in the world with Lenny’s Newsletter. And he also has a booming podcast named, you guessed it, Lenny’s Podcast.

Lenny’s focus is on product & growth (and a little bit of careers) while I want my focus to be on leadership. I want to be looked at as the #1 place founders, investors and leaders in tech go to outperform the competition.

And although I am busy, I think I can do it. Purely and simply because this is not work to me. It’s play. And so is Athyna. When you are entrepreneur, you get to create art.

The creative process

Getting the ball rolling was the fun part. As I mentioned, I am a creative. I went through a number of iterations with some help from the creative team at Athyna (cheers Cucu, cheers Marce). Here are some runs of the original creative we were going for.

The issue here was, I was not in control. Marce (designer at Athyna) had made some amazing work giving me some of the tools to be able to create my own artwork for the brand, but it was too restrictive. So not long after, I decided to try my luck on Canva (cheers Mel), and pretty promptly found I could whip up a design, that I thought looked cool enough, in under 5 minutes.

Next was the designing of the newsletter. How do I want it to look and feel on the inside. I used a few ways to go about this, but ended up using Figma to cut and paste sections of other newsletters I liked into one place to create a sort of Frankenstein’s Monster layout.

But it worked. The newsletter looks a lot like The Hustle but with inspiration from a lot of other places.

This may seem trivial, but you would be shocked how poor the creative and brand inside (and outside) of most newsletters is. All one font, no thumbnails, with no real care or thought going into them.

Reading is a visual exercise. It needs to engage by the words on the page, but also the way they are laid out and the things you see around them. I believe our brand is a strategic advantage. A pattern interrupt.

The writing process

Beginning the newsletter was a bit daunting. As is any creative exploit. You are putting your thoughts out there, and not everyone is going to align. Add to that, there is the risk that your writing actual stinks also.

Because of this, time constraints, and not wanting to bite off more than I can chew, I began with interviews. Interviews are quite simple because they don’t require any heavy lifting from my end. They are not my thoughts.

I just edit and package things in a way that will hopefully be valuable and interesting to you, the reader. So far we have had some amazing interviews with 7x-edited founder & investor Tony Jamous, founder of APAC’s greatest VC fund Niki Scevak, and loads, loads more. I plan to do many more interviews in the future, but now that I have found my footing, it is great to be able to brand out into deep dives, business stories, original pieces and more.

Now that I am writing more deep dives and original pieces, I am starting to find my voice. The writing process is fun. I enjoy it and it definitely lifts me up. The thing is, I can never finish a piece with anything more than 1 hour to spare. I work best with a gun to my head. I wish I didn’t. But I do.

Luckily, I have a writing assistant, Bia, who helps me. Her role is Content Assistant technically. She’s a pseudo-ghost-writer for me, and the crazy thing is she is a 22-year old girl from Brazil. The internet is just crazy.

When writing a piece now, a deep dive for example, this is the process that Bia and I work through.

1. Decide on piece (me)

2. Research piece (Bia)

   1. Collate and chronologically stack 20+ articles on subject.

   2. Find 10-15 interesting assets on subject. Photos, videos, GIF.

   3. Ask ChatGPT how it would write piece in 3-5 different ways.

   4. Synthesise ChatGPT’s work.

3. Draft piece (me)

4. Add piece to beehiiv (Bia)

5. Polish and launch piece (me)

This is all done in Notion and the fact that I have Bia working alongside me means each deep dive realistically takes me 10-15 hours of total work rather than 20-30 hours.

If you are looking for a Content Assistant, Researcher, Video Editor etc. feel free to hit me up or head to Athyna and we can help you.

Above is a photo of Bia, with the A Song of Fire & Ice (Game of Thrones) series after you, the readers voted our next deep dive to be on King Torrhen Stark of Winterfell. Awesome.

The metrics

Today, I am going to be quite broad and non-specific around metrics, P&L and so forth. I do plan to spend the time to go through in line-by-line detail when we celebrate 1-year in 4 or 5 months. For now, here is a quick breakdown of the story so far.

If you truly want to dominate this game, and treat it like a startup, you need other acquisition channels.

Caveat to that is my pal Tommy Alder, who writes Strategy Breakdowns. Never have I seen someone go viral so consistently. He has 30k subs now, mainly from viral posts. Most of us are not Tom.

In order to grow so far, I have invested $10,156 (USD) into the newsletter. And we are currently sitting on a cash balance of $3,977.

The money I have spent has gone towards Refind ads, beehiiv Boosts and SparkLoop Upscribe. With a very small allocation towards Twitter ads.

I won’t go too deep into the stats, but the rough opens and click through rates on my acquisition channels are as follows.

To put it into perspective, 50% is a good to great open rate today. Mine, is 45%. As as you can see, Refind sucks, but I buy Refind subscribers for around $0.70 and have a ruthless automation where if you don’t engage in 60 days, you get unsubscribed.

So although Boosts and Upscribe provide much higher quality, I make up for it by cleansing and still get a good sub for $1.5 or so. The winner really though, is SparkLoop, because you only pay for engaged subs. The above stats were overall subscribers, but when you filter for those I paid for this is what you see.

After trial and error on a number of platforms I will move more and more (possibly all) of my spend to SparkLoop soon.

Now to sponsorships. If you have been subscribing for a long while you would have seen me running ads for the last 4-5 months or so for Apollo, Oyster, Deel, Notion. And you probably thought ‘oh, wow, how did he land those amazing sponsors’ - truth is - I didn’t. They are affiliate partnerships.

Having said that, I do get paid ~$600 per month in affiliate payouts now, so it’s certainly better than nothing. And we do have great paying sponsors now in The Startup Podcast (of which I am a listener), Sidebar (of which I am a user) and Athyna (of which I am an owner).

We charge a CPM or ~$100 at the moment (Athyna gets half price) which is a pretty reasonable rate considering the audience demographics of founders, investors and leaders in tech.

You can see our sponsorship options here and below is a chart showing CPMs across other newsletters.

We also make money via donations made from downloads of our free tools & resources which is cool. As we continue to scale the newsletter, these will become larger and larger, and we may eventually roll out some premium tools where you need to pay $$$. But also, maybe we won’t.

As of today, the newsletter is more or less breakeven and growing fast. I believe we have passed the tipping point and it’s very exciting, as every dollar of revenue we make goes back into growing the newsletter.

And that will likely always be the way, as long as I am being paid a wage at Athyna. More revenue = more growth = more ways to help founders, investors and leaders in tech outperform the competition.

Literary heroes

My inspiration for the newsletter and the style I want to write in are as follow: Packy McCormick and Not Boring, Lenny Rachitsky, Mario at The Generalist and How They Grow.

• Packy because he breaks down technology and the internet at large, in a totally noting boring way (hence the name).

• Lenny because he is the ultimate source for bettering yourself and learning how a business and product scales.

• The Generalist because, put simply, it’s fucking awesome.

• And How They Grow because it might be the most methodological breakdown of growth levers I’ve ever seen. I could not do what they do.

If Open Source CEO could be half as awesome as any of the four publications listed above, I will be over the moon.

The future of the brand

There are a million different ways to take this newsletter. One, is keeping it as it is - a newsletter. But that’s not really in my personality. And although this is my side hustle, and Athyna will be my main gig moving forward, there is no reason why we can’t make Open Source CEO something incredible.

What I do know is, I will work incredibly hard to make Open Source CEO a brand our readers and our community love. A brand that can be trusted as quality, useful and even sometimes entertaining. And a place that founders, leaders and investors turn to, to outperform the competition.

Fun facts

• The original name for the newsletter was going to be Interestingly Enough. I have no real idea why I chose that. I am glad I un-chose it.

• I actually created Barefoot CEO on OnlyFans with the same branding. I get DM’d for foot photos all the time for some reason. It was going to be my secret revenue driver. Stalled for the moment.

• At first the plan was to write all original pieces. That was until I saw Michael Batko’s How Do You CEO? series. I waited to read it every week for 10 weeks and loved it. This was the original content style for Open Source CEO.

• I missed the deadline on this send. Gun to my head as usual, Tainá, my partner helping with my proof-reading … late Saturday night.

Extra reading

• A Not Boring Adventure, One Year In - April, 2021

• The Generalist Turns 1 - August, 2021

• The Generalist: Year Two - December, 2022

• 5000 by Lenny Rachitsky - September, 2023

And that's it! As a reminder, you can connect with me on LinkedIn here and Twitter (X) follow here.

TOOLS & RESOURCES 🔥

This week’s tool is another newsletter - Houck's Newsletter. Their tagline is ‘Join 83,000+ founders getting tactical advice to build, grow, and raise capital for their startup from an a16z-backed founder’.

I actually read it and it is 100% not shit unlike most other business newsletter getting launched right now.

Also, check out a couple of tools he released recently.

• AI Investor Database - 550+ VCs and angels investing in AI.

• Early stage lead investor list - 810+ seed & pre-seed rounds.

It’s a valuable sub and he’s a good follow in Twitter (will never call it X) also.

COMMUNITY THREAD 🏡

Question: What do you struggle with the most?

• Professionally speaking, what keeps you up the most at night?

• How have you learned to adapt to it?

• Do you have mechanisms to improve your situation here?

• Bonus: How has this changed over the years?

Answer in the comments so we can all learn from each other and get better together. 👇🏼

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it from me. See you next week. 🫡