Mark Ford has been in involved in dozens of multimillion-dollar businesses. He helped Bill Bonner build the Agora Companies, which has dominated the financial publishing industry for over a decade, and broke over a $1 billion in top-line revenue.
I met him the first time back in 2016 or 17 when my former business partner was managing the affiliate program for his Palm Beach Letter. Today we talk about the state of the digital publishing business focused on retail and self-directed investors. Plus, what ideas engage investors online and more.
Mark's knowledge of the business is what you would expect from someone who helped build a billion-dollar company in the industry - extraordinary.
In this conversation he and I discuss what it takes to engage a self-directed retail investor audience - ideas, worldview, and more.
When we turn to the future of the industry he then says some remarkable things.
This conversation is one you don't want to miss if you're building or work in a financial publishing business or, are hoping to build an engaged retail investor audience online today.
FinPub Pro is produced by The Financial Marketing Summit, the #1 networking and marketing conference for financial newsletter publishers, trader educators, and digital financial media.
John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson
Mark Ford has been in involved in dozens of multimillion-dollar businesses. He helped Bill Bonner build the Agora Companies, which has dominated the financial publishing industry for over a decade, and broke over a $1 billion in top-line revenue.
I met him the first time back in 2016 or 17 when my former business partner was managing the affiliate program for his Palm Beach Letter. Today we talk about the state of the digital publishing business focused on retail and self-directed investors. Plus, what ideas engage investors online and more.
Mark's knowledge of the business is what you would expect from someone who helped build a billion-dollar company in the industry - extraordinary.
In this conversation he and I discuss what it takes to engage a self-directed retail investor audience - ideas, worldview, and more.
When we turn to the future of the industry he then says some remarkable things.
This conversation is one you don't want to miss if you're building or work in a financial publishing business or, are hoping to build an engaged retail investor audience online today.
FinPub Pro is produced by The Financial Marketing Summit, the #1 networking and marketing conference for financial newsletter publishers, trader educators, and digital financial media.
John Newtson, host and founder of The Financial Marketing Summit can be reached via LinkedIn at John Newtson
All right. Well, thanks, mark, for joining me today. I'm really excited to have you on to talk with the Financial Marketing Summit community about the industry trends right now. So thanks for being here. Great to be with you.
John Newtson:John, if I remember the story right, I think you joined Agora when maybe it was somewhere around $6 million in revenue or something like that, and obviously it's grown into a behemoth of a business and you've had a huge impact on the industry. You guys have been the dominant player in the industry and then now, in 2022, we're kind of in a period of time where I feel like there's just a lot of things changing in the industry. And so, first and foremost, we have the, the increased regulation, kind of a regulatory attention, I should say, from the FTC and kind of the impacts that's having on the business. We have the mainstreaming of the industry becoming a much bigger industry as our customer base grows and as more and more individual investors become do-it-yourself investors and come online looking for information. And then we have all these intersections intersections with FinTech, intersections with other digital platforms like broker-dealers, capital markets and I did an interview with a gentleman named Ian Rosen, who was the GM of MarketWatch at one point and CEO of StockTwits and he's part of a fintech called Tiffin and they just raised $100 million and they're buying up a bunch of small publishers and he had a really interesting point and he's like, from the tech perspective, it used to be that developing technology and FinTech that was the hard thing, but that's not really the hard thing for those guys anymore.
John Newtson:The hard thing is what you guys have done, which is build audience, particularly at scale within the financial sector, and that is the most valuable thing right now and I think that you know. First and foremost, I'd love to get your take on what it is that engages investors right, because traditionally, the newsletter space I would say focused on alternatives, had personalities, but you guys have become the masters of this model of using content in promotion to engage investors. So when you think about what ideas sell or engage investors, how do you even think about that from a framework?
Mark Ford:Well, there's a very traditional way of looking at it, which is to imagine that investors, or rather people that are willing to pay money to get investment information, are motivated by either fear or greed, and fear certainly plays a role with many of our customers. But greed, I think, is a bad term to use because it short circuits all the other emotions that are at play when people are looking to improve are at play when people are looking to improve their stock market portfolio performance or their wealth, and, in fact, greed is probably a very rare motivation. It's mostly about other things like Other things like self-esteem and righting wrongs, and also curiosity and also worldview. A big part of it has to do with people had a like-minded view of the world. So, I think, go ahead.
John Newtson:Well, I was just going to hone in on that. The worldview aspect, I feel like, is one of those things that has been that's easily lost, especially in people who come at this business from kind of learning, a copywriting perspective, or they're coming at it from a very active trading perspective and they're thinking about, like the technical analysis, they're thinking about, maybe, individual stock picks, but they're not stepping back and saying no, like when you build a franchise or you're building a publication, you have to take a view on the world and be able to communicate that. So that's a pretty do you think that's pretty foundational, then, to messaging.
Mark Ford:Yeah, and I can understand how now with them. If somebody is coming into the business now as a younger person, you might think it's all about trading and profits. But you're not going to really build a big file that way. Where you know, agora is. I don't know how big our unpaid file is. It's three or four million, maybe five million, but the paid file is a million and a half and that's not counting a major part of our business that we just sold and you can't get those kind of numbers. Traders represent maybe at best 5% of our files. Certainly professional traders are really not the target.
Mark Ford:We're looking for individual amateur investors that want help. The traders among them are a small percentage of your file. So if you want to develop the file of 1,000 people willing to pay you $10,000, you're going to need at least 50,000 paid subscribers to listen to your general investment advice. So, yes, it would be a mistake to think that it's all about profits and making quick bucks and so on, and often the younger copywriters. That's something that the situation has to deal with, because it's hard for them to believe that if they go for a longer game in terms of developing relationship with a customer, that in the end everybody will be better off, including them, because their royalties will be longer and stronger.
John Newtson:Yeah, and that's like I remember the, like these old great magalog packages, right, I mean you go back to bookalogs like plague of the black debt, and I remember there was a promo I think it was ignore china, lose money, and it's these big macro kind of theses and it seemed like the copy was selling kind of a macro um and um view on the world, and then the back ends were much more like active, but the front end product and ideas were these big kind of macro trends often.
John Newtson:And then I feel like, probably like the last five, six years, that this kind of uptick in active trading everybody gets so excited about, I would say some of the trader educators on on that use a lot of social, who have maybe a younger demographic and they're thinking, oh well, this is the future, but like, demographically, that's still, you know, the younger, younger I mean the first millennial just hit 40 last year Our market is still very much an older investor, because that's when you get really serious about the markets is my view.
John Newtson:And so the I feel like, though there's this boom in trading promos that maybe because part of it was we had the, the crypto boom, we had, um, the cannabis boom, and so I feel like a lot of the copywriters that came up. Um, and I say this is somebody who was a copywriter for years. I was used to write for clayton make peace and um, uh, I worked in the trading niche when I started and it seemed like the the trading promos were so much focused on gains, big winners and systems that you have a generation of copywriters that don't understand how to write a big idea promo.
Mark Ford:Yeah, I agree, I agree with you and they also. They find it difficult to write those type of promos under strict regulatory controls. Controls because, you know, when the you know we talked about it before, the FTC is has been pretty active, we had a dealing with them ourselves and and their their rules are, you know, they're tough, they're reasonable rules, but what they're trying to eliminate, I think correctly, is people that are giving misleading impressions about track record, for example, for an analyst, track record by cherry picking winners and so on. And if that's your only game, you know, if that's as a copywriter, if the only thing you know how to do is just, you know, look at the track record and extrapolate, extract, cherry picked examples and put them repeatedly on a page, and what are you going to do when you're not allowed to do that anymore? Right, and there's plenty to do, Plenty of successful packages that can be written, but you need more arrows in your quiver than that. And that's not to say, however, that big idea packages always work. You know, as I've explained to my partners many times, that big idea packages only work about 20% of the time, 30% of the time. Most of the time it's very conventional packages.
Mark Ford:I'm not talking about trading greed, you know hyper. There's a big difference between front end and back end. But there are two or three and and Clayton knew this better than anybody there are two or three general, I would say approaches to or aspects of investor. I'm going to just say investor for the moment, although we know that many of our subscribers don't actually invest. They just like reading about it. But we'll call them investors. Investor psychology is so.
Mark Ford:You have the let's take a quick look. You have these macroeconomic people, the people that have a view of how the world works from a macroeconomic point of view, the permadears and so on, and they want to buy your newsletter to prove that they're right about their economic theories. Then you have there's a version of them that's different their economic theories. Then you have there's a version of them that's different. There's a version of kind of a fire and brimstone gold guys that feel that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. These two overlap, but it's a different approach.
Mark Ford:Then there are the investors who believe that the way to get wealthy is through little tricks and gimmicks. There's little things you can do. You save a little money in tax. You try this over there you invest on Monday morning instead of Monday afternoon, and that's a whole different mentality. And then there's people who their primary interest and these are mostly people that are retired or just about to retire is income, and what they want to know is how they can boost their income. So there are those and there's probably two or three others I haven't mentioned.
Mark Ford:But what you'll see in the market, if you have a perch, like I've been lucky to have over the past 20 years of having, you know, I don't know 60 or 80 promotions that are going out every month that I can look at inside and out and see the results on, you'll see that there are waves. There are always waves. And you go through all these different aspects, aspects of buyer psychology. You know the things that appeal psychology. You know the things that appeal Sometimes. You know huge gains appeal, but sometimes like small dollar amounts. You know how to put an extra $300 is more powerful or more believable than how to make 360% on your next. So these, so these things go back and forth and of course that's.
Mark Ford:That's one issue. And then the other issue for the copywriters you've got the product that you're selling, which is an actual thing, with a real track record and you can't make it turn into just anything. And so that's a. You know, that's another issue too. Some you know that's another issue too. Some you know. Again, from our perspective it's one we could manage because we could put. We could, you know, take a third of our promotions, keep them going, keep the back ends going, but not do any front end promotions, because we know that whole approach is just not going to work for another six months or a year and there's no certain way of knowing, you know, when these things are coming and going.
John Newtson:So Well, so when you build a franchise, I mean like it seems to me, like the, you know you have these different market segments and the, the, the worldview that you present, like that. I remember when you launched Palm Beach letter, you had a very kind of clear worldview. You had a very clear kind of even the tone to it. That is very different than, say, some of the more financial franchises that were much more aggressive. So do you think, are you how much overlap is there between these kind of like? You know you have the guys, like you said, who are looking for little tricks. It's a different mentality. So you have these different mentalities of investors. In a general franchise like, I can't imagine you tapping more than two or three of those really consistently then, because they can be pretty varied. Right, like the super active options trader is very different than the income investor.
Mark Ford:Okay, I'm not quite sure I answered the question, but let me answer a question on that I thought you might've asked, which is that you can have a franchise. Generally, what we've done is you create a franchise that has a certain that's based in not it must be based on the key idea person in that franchise let's just say it's an analyst and then from that franchise you develop backends that are appropriate to it. Now, if your guru, your analyst, has any integrity, he's only going to allow you to do certain kinds of backends. So when I was writing the front end for Palm Beach Letter, you know I was not interested in promoting any backends that I didn't feel were useful. So, as far as you know, I was willing to sell an option service that sold puts but not many other things.
Mark Ford:But it turned out that that was fine because I was able to engage with the trader that was going to be recommending and we came up with a system that reflected my own point of view and even a few new bells and whistles that I thought was clever, that I took credit for, and and we it sold very well and it was really kind of a bread and butter version of, you know, selling puts with a couple of little twists, but it was wrapped in. It was wrapped in me and my very conservative approach to investing. And so people felt, in fact, we sold hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe over a million dollars worth of that product before we ever launched the product, just by me talking about what I was doing editorially and asking them if you wanted to sign up for a, a hot list. You know. So when we bring it out and we, I mean those people, just they didn't even read the promotion and just signed up.
John Newtson:Well, that's, I think that's, I mean. There's a couple of things that come to mind to that one is I mean, first and foremost is I've read your editorial quite a bit and your, your promotions, and your editorial is so smoothly transitions, it feels like, into a promotion without even trying that you can't even tell the difference when, when it's when it was, when it was especially in the early days of Palm beach letter, when you were really writing a lot there, I don't think you could tell the difference easily between your promotion and your editorial, which is, I think, a remarkable thing for for people to notice.
Mark Ford:Well, I'm you know, which is, I think, a remarkable thing for people to notice. Well, I've always said to copywriters that the only difference between good copy and good editorial writing is one is selling an idea and one is selling a manifestation of an idea. That's the only difference. It's very little difference. So when I was selling, when I was, in other words, for me, there was no difference.
Mark Ford:I was writing about, you know my skepticism of options, and now I learned this and I learned this, and this is all true. But I knew that people would be interested because I knew that I had a. You know, one of the advantages I've had in our business since the very beginning is I've never been interested in investing, and so I've learned very little and I've maintained a level of ignorance that represents beginning enthusiasts. You know, I kind of know all the terms, but I don't really know and I don't really want to. It feels painful to me. So when I decided that we had to have, you know, I had to have a back end service to make the thing viable, I just let people come along with me, showed them my, my doubts and concerns and then and then show them how this Tom Dyson, who was my younger partner who is showing me how to do it right, getting excited about the discoveries, and so it was all genuine and it was seamless, because there wasn't any.
Mark Ford:I was literally selling the idea of, you know, this type of option strategy as I was discovering it. You know one of my best, one of my most productive emails I don't know what I attached it to, but it was an email. I was 60-something when I was writing it and I had just read my I've been in the business now for over 30 years at this time and I read I just read my first book on Warren Buffett and I wrote an essay about how amazing Warren Buffett is and what Warren Buffett is, and this thing sold like gangbusters. I forget what it was, what we attached to. It might have been even a free premium or whatever, but I got a huge response and I just you know. It just shows you that we often underestimate the level of sophistication of most of our readers, of our basic reader.
Mark Ford:And also that our readers feel a little bit intimidated. So that's why readers don't really for the front end, which is the most important. What readers are looking for is somebody that they can trust, because they know they'll never really understand all these terms. It's like talking to an insurance agent you know you're never going to know what the hell you're buying, but at least if the guy seems honest, you're willing to go ahead, and so I think that's why.
Mark Ford:So some people are looking for a person that has the same geopolitical views. Some people are looking for somebody that has the same like moral, ethical views. Some people are looking for somebody that has the kind of approach to living life like little bits and pieces making. You know that makes them feel comfortable, and so that's what all that other stuff is really about. It's about that that what you're doing is you're introducing yourself to people that you know want to be in the investment business. You know individual investment business, but they're amateurs and they know they'll always be amateurs. So they need guidance and they don't want to be taken. But they're not idiots, you know. They know that they're vulnerable to be taking attention, to be taken advantage of, and so they do what? The only thing you can do. They use their emotional intelligence to try to figure out whether the person that um they're thinking about subscribing to is trustworthy, and knowledgeable and so on.
John Newtson:I love that that's. That's an interesting like way to frame it, that they're using their emotional intelligence on that, which makes total sense because there's this big element of identity then in what they buy, like I will buy for a person who's this, but I wouldn't buy from right.
Mark Ford:but I'm glad you said that because there's a corollary, contrary corollary to that, which is that in in every and this is more for publishers and for copywriters but but within every group of 10,000 or 100,000 or a million subscribers, financial news subscribers there's a portion, there's always a proportion of them that are like crazy traders and want to make crazy money, and they exist in every segment. I mean, you know, I remember, you know my partner, bill Bonner. He writes, just, you know, everything is doom and gloom and I remember seeing he wrote one particularly you know gloomy piece about how you should just never get near stocks and they're all terrible. And then right after that, like right in the middle of it was like a little ad for another service and the ad said, like how to make a thousand times your money or whatever, and I looked at the numbers and that thing was exploding. People were, you know, they took a pause from hearing why they should never invest in stocks.
Mark Ford:Now, not all of them, obviously, a tiny percentage of them. So you do need to remember that, as a business person, publisher, that there are always going to be some people that just are in it for the biggest promises and yeah, but so they'll be there for you. But my general point is I think you shouldn't be there for you. But I my my general point is I don't. I think you shouldn't be looking for them on the front end. You know, look for the people that are going to stay with you because they appreciate your perspective, your approach, your view of the world well, I think that's.
John Newtson:it's such an interesting thing because the because of where I'm at in the publishing, I don't have your view of as many businesses, obviously, but with the conference we see lots of small publishers, we see lots of small trader educators. I know a lot of your publishers and then when I see the businesses that are stable in revenue versus the ones that might kind of have like a big run-up and then they disappear, that front end piece is very much different. It's the the more aggressive that copy is on the front, it seems more volatile to customers absolutely, yeah, 100.
Mark Ford:and and not just the piece itself but the franchise itself. The first, uh, the first successful package I wrote was for an investment club. This was back in I don't know what in the early 80s. It was the first promotion I ever wrote and it turned into what's now the oxford club, which is one of the um, the publishing franchises, and that has never really changed from that first promotion I wrote. Well, it's changed in a sense that when I wrote it I was making stuff up. Now it's actually real. They really do have these mansions all over the place and these great people behind them.
Mark Ford:I was writing about what I would like it to be and it's so solid their franchise that it's very hard to write a promotion for them that doesn't have some solidity. And of all the franchises, the group publishing groups and investment side in Agora that has had it hasn't had the greatest growth, but it's it's had the most steady growth, continued growth, and there's a lot to be said for that because it's it's. You know it's great fun to go from, you know, a hundred million dollars to $300 million, but when you drop back down to $80 million, boy, that's not fun at all.
John Newtson:Yeah, yeah, and it is. The Oxford Club is one of the ones that I feel like, because I remember the Oxford Club. They were a big, they were one of the more successful ones back when you did way back with Earlier to Rise, when you did a marketing conference, like a one-time marketing conference that you sold out to the space, and I remember the Oxford Club was one of the ones. I think at the time they might've been 60 million, I think they said, or something like that yeah, yeah, and they're still here and a lot of publishers came up after them and have disappeared, but they're still stable, that's right, yeah, yeah.
Mark Ford:Yeah, so that's again, you know, if you're a copywriter, that this stuff may not be as important to you. But if you you know, if you decide to get into the business of, you know, selling information, then it is important to know. I mean, what you're always looking for is lifetime value, and that you know your lifetime value means it comes from, uh, from years of relationship, and you know your customers won't stay with you unless you're giving them value. Eventually they'll. You can fool them once, you can fool them twice, but after that they're pretty much gone right, yeah, so let me.
John Newtson:Let me switch a little bit because I know we don't have too much time, but, um, the the kind of direction of the space going mainstream, and that has to do with the fact that we've been in a bull market of a self-directed investor for probably close to 10 years and that's going to continue. I think it's a generational transformation of how people choose to invest. What do you think the direction of the industry is?
Mark Ford:Well, yeah, it's a good question. I don't know the answer. There are times when I think that we're at the end of our industry. Honestly, I think that there are between. Well, I would just say, because of the general, the way the media has developed, the access to alternative information, the ability of regulators to squash things, you know, I've seen other sectors of our general industry disappear and sometimes I think this may be true to us. However, so far it hasn't excuse me, so far it hasn't happened.
Mark Ford:Generally, what happens is you go into slumps and things change, and and so you know, I'm certainly not going to give up on it, but it is different, very different. The fundamental way that it's different from back in the direct mail days is was apparent to me 20 years ago, which is that was apparent to me 20 years ago, which is that and this is something we introduced to Gora a couple of years ago to be a good business today, you're going to have to be. Authenticity and transparency are key. You can't pretend to be a business that you're not, because everything is transparent today. People will find out who you really are and what you've done, and so on, and all these things are on the permanent record.
Mark Ford:So, yeah, so on the one hand, it makes for a lot more competition because everybody can see what everybody else is doing and you know, like constantly and make adjustments and knock each other off, and so there are many, many more players than there ever were in our business.
Mark Ford:Also, the barrier of entry is smaller business and also the barrier of entry is smaller. But also because of all that competition, uh, the, the cost, the media cost, is high, you know it's it's like at optimal, it's kind of at peaking levels all the time, because you've got a bunch of it's like um being on worth avenue or on, uh, fifth avenue, new york, you know, a, you can make money there, but the rent is so high you've got to have really good game, and so I think that's kind of where we are right now. So it's a lot of pressure and you know, I do think people, businesses will survive, but they're the guy you're going to, since you need transparency and you don't have authenticity. You have to have something solid to sell, something that does distinguish you in some way, and it's, I think it's going to be very hard for the wannabes and the you know, to the people that are knocking each other off to just they'll have a moment and then it'll be, it'll be gone. I don't know if I answered your question at all.
John Newtson:No, you did Absolutely. I think that that there's two things that that first, I have a comment, which is the media cost issue, I feel like is something that too many people are ignoring right now, because I see so I see a lot. This is the first time we've been running the Financial Marketing Summit for almost 10 years now. This is the first time in the history of the industry, as far as I know, where we have media agencies that primarily were serving our space. I have more media agencies in the 25 to $70 million range than I have publishers.
John Newtson:That means that, obviously, media agencies are fundamentally a parasitic revenue model. Right, they're only as big as a percentage of their customer base, and their customer base now includes a different mix of people where we have actual issuers, like the reggae and crowdfunding space that is reliant on either a newsletter covering the issue or a marketing campaign, and I've seen guys doing a reggae campaign and they're spending $10,000 a day on Facebook to fill it. And so the media just from that one segment, competition is coming. Then we see some of these other platforms that are coming in and trying to go after the investor. Um, there's a lot more money coming into the space, which is click competition. So I think you're right like that. You have to have a higher level of game just to stay alive yeah, yeah, and there's some good and some bad about the.
Mark Ford:The good is that um, uh, in other words. In other words, what's happening is we're starting to compete with actual money management firms, hedge funds and so on, and the difference, the problem there is that for us in the newsletter industry, a high lifetime value for a customer might be $600 or $700. For them, a modest is $5,000. So that's a lot more money to spend to acquire a customer. And the bad news is for us is because, you know, obviously we would need to figure out how to get our lifetime value up a lot higher. We would need to figure out how to get our lifetime value up a lot higher. But the good news is that when you have all that money to spend, you don't have to have such crazy copy.
Mark Ford:Fisher Investments is all over the place. With very modest initial entries. You can have a much longer customer onboarding, whatever they call it today, and so I think that's generally good for the business. But again, like it's to me, it's authenticity and transparency. If you don't have a something you know, an actual business product that is really good and solid and has value, then it's like you're trying to build a business on swamp water. It's just more than ever and you need that, and that's why I feel kind of generally optimistic. I guess I'd put it this way Our business as we know it probably will disappear, but people that are smart in our business and understand the fundamentals will continue and reshape their business into whatever it needs to be, and whether that means offering alternative services, offering. You know, at Agora we're offering a lot more technical solutions for, like family stop losses and all kinds of things like that that people enjoy. So we'll see how that goes, but I generally feel optimistic about it.
John Newtson:Yeah, I think that there's definitely the opportunity with the tools kind of inside of the business. But I also see because, if I look at other areas of financial and how they're kind of moving like reaching towards us, in the sense of you have platforms, you have VCs out there who are trying to do media and content and really, like I did a big presentation for FMS last year on all these different trends and one of them is how all the business development functions and capital raise functions in traditional finance are actually merging with a content media model and so as we see that happen more, I think that one of the things that I've definitely learned from you guys about the newsletter industry is that it's focused a lot of times on alternative ideas, fringe ideas, early ideas, things that you can't get in the mainstream, or else why would you pay for it? Ideas, early ideas, things that you can't get in the mainstream, or else why would you pay for it? As the power of having an audience and the power of your audience is unrivaled in the retail space. I mean, I know people out there who are trying to. They're so eager to find a way to get a company into your ecosystem because for a recommendation on an earned media basis that because it could drive two, three $400 million in volume for their public company. And I think that with that kind of power, I think that we're moving into an area like the business is going to change, but it's going to be more like a revenue strategy change that we're going to start to see where, taking the worldview and the ability to engage us and the investor and merging it with some of these VC models and or partnering with accelerators and groups where you can create something, where they can attract a more unique deal flow right Companies and now the franchise has unique early opportunities because I've talked to a lot of capital markets players has unique early opportunities because I've talked to a lot of capital markets players guys who are pretty sophisticated, a couple of guys who have multiple billions in income themselves from taking companies public and what they're telling me is that the capital market process has kind of changed so much because so many of these brokers that they used to rely on have moved to asset management models that they want publishers to come in, work with them to earlier and get customers into deals way earlier than they ever would have allowed them before, because there isn't anybody in that spot that could fill that piece of the capital life cycle.
John Newtson:And so just we have one guy. He was Dr Ghosh, he was the head of macroeconomics for mubadala, which is the uae sovereign wealth fund. He invests like um, he worked at bridgewater, raised a billion or something like that for for them, um, and he's all about impact investing and alternative energy and things like that and he gets chunks of of uh deal flow from companies that are raising with Bill Gates's family office or his breakthrough energy, his VC fund, and he's saying, well, maybe I could find relationships in the publishing world to slice off pieces of these deals that are getting in at the same time as those guys. We're talking about some of the most sophisticated investors in alternative energy, and if he could find a publishing partner, he would love to be able to take that and say, hey, now we have customers who can co-invest at the same time as these traditionally A-level investors, because that capital power all of a sudden is there, and so I believe fundamentally that that is one of those areas that we're going to see.
Mark Ford:Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you're right. We have one of our our superstars is very much, you know working towards that as business. I mean for for Bill and for me it's it brings us away from what we, what we're interested in doing, staying on the idea side and staying behind the First Amendment and so on. But I think you're probably right. It's just the logic of moving that direction is so strong and the the rewards are so evident that I I don't see how people resist. To tell you the truth, yeah, it's more of.
John Newtson:It's more of a question of like, how do you, how do you do it when you have such an established revenue model and you know business that you don't want to put at risk because you have relied on the first amendment business and so it is a more complicated environment, I think.
Mark Ford:But Well, if you figure it out, let me know.
John Newtson:We have a lot. We've spent a lot of time and we spend a lot of time talking about it internally with our small group. That's great. There are some models that we've developed actually that I think we're going to work really well.
Mark Ford:Oh, I'm serious, Let me know.
John Newtson:Oh yeah, no, I'd love to run them by you. Probably not on a recorded call for everybody, but Right, probably not. But no, I hate Mark. I know you have to go here in a minute, so thank you so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed talking to you. I just to reiterate, except that I said in an email like you've had a huge influence on me going back to you know, awai earlier to rise like all your books, when we started our accelerator group, the first thing that we did was we bought copies of Ready Fire Aim for everybody. If you're going to build a publishing business like this is this is like direct response, publishing 101. Like you have to know this stuff. So that's good.
Mark Ford:I'm glad to hear that. Thank you, and if any of you, your readers, want to follow my insightful advice on how to persuade your wife not to watch the movie that she wants to watch with you and how to deal with your bad eating habits, they can follow me at markfordnet.
John Newtson:Wonderful. I'll post that link with this. Thanks so much, mark. All right, john Pleasure. Thanks, bye. Bye, take care Bye.