Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Still at 10,000-ish Twitter followers. My fears were obviously, this is not what you're supposed to do. You're not supposed to use a newsletter to shill. Sponsored content is a dirty word because, in a normal journalistic institution that has integrity, there's a wall between the people who write the actual journalists and the people who write sponsored content. It's this thing that is optimized for SEO, clickbaity, and all that kind of stuff. Sponsored content does not have a particularly great name, but I was like, all right, so if I do this, really, my bar for myself has to be as high as it would be writing a normal piece. I'm only going to write about things that I'm actually bullish on and companies that I would actually invest in myself. This is before there was a fund or anything that I'd put my personal money into. So that was the bar that I set for myself. I was like, you know what, I'm going to ask the audience even like, did you hate this? Please let me know if you hated this. One or two people, every time I write a sponsored post is like, you're shilling, this is sponsored, no sponsored content, please. But the vast majority either don't care, although the open rates are actually fairly consistent, maybe a little bit higher on the Monday pieces, or they get something out of it. MainStreet had a bunch of people, went and got a bunch of money back. So they love that. It's interesting because I serve a bunch of different audiences. When I talk to founders for Not Boring Capital now, a lot of their favorite pieces actually end up being some of the sponsored posts because I get behind the scenes access into some of these really fast-growing successful startups, and get to write something more detailed on them than anybody else has written before. Yeah. I am an investor in Modern Treasury. I learned a lot about the company from your recent sponsored post on Modern Treasury. Even Ben Thompson on his podcast, I think it was back in February, without calling me by name was like, there's somebody who writes a newsletter who does this thing where the startups actually pay him to write about them, but it's actually good because he gets more information for these companies that aren't publicly available. He was saying that he doesn't write about private companies as much because he doesn't have as much material to analyze. But if I actually worked with the company, I have a bunch of stuff to analyze. I'm very honest with them that I will talk about what I think isn't great if there are things and I will talk about competitors in a positive light. I will never say just like, do a hatchet job on competitors in the piece, unless the competitor is like a straw man. I talked a lot of [...] on passwords when I wrote about Stitch, and that's fine because nobody loves passwords. But as long as I keep that bar high and I'm very honest, I say upfront every time, this is a sponsored post, this is how it works, here's a link to a doc that I wrote about how I choose them, people end up liking the post. So what I'm saying is founders end up liking those because oftentimes, they're either at the same spot in their journey or they're a little bit behind where those companies are. So they're learning how to be practical on the ground things that those companies are doing and can take lessons from that. So those actually feed, in a lot of different ways, really well into the fund.…

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