How the Money for the Rest of Us podcast built a six figure membership platform

Founder David Stein also launched a data-rich investing app.

David Stein had an innovative marketing hack for growing his investing podcast Money for the Rest of Us. He put the names of other popular finance podcasts in his metadata, and Apple’s unsophisticated search algorithm would surface his show whenever people were searching for his competitors.

By the time Apple eventually eliminated that functionality, Money for the Rest of Us had built up a loyal audience that’s since downloaded the show over 20 million times. His audience is so loyal, in fact, that it sustains a membership community that charges $450 a year and generates well into the six figures in revenue.

In a recent interview, David walked me through how he developed his investing expertise, what he offers to paying members, and why he launched his own premium investing app.

Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:

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Transcript

Hey, David, thanks for joining us. That's great to be here. Thank you. So we're here to talk about this awesome podcast and online community that you've built over the years.

1:40

But first, I just want to kind of like dive into the origin story. So it's this finance community, this finance podcast. You actually originally came from the world of private equity finance. How did you kind of break into the world and what was kind of your initial career like?

1:56

Yeah. So I have an MBA in finance. And so, you know, after doing corporate finance for a couple of years, I joined an institutional asset management firm, an investment consultant, working mostly with university endowments, foundations. I was there 17 years. I became a managing partner. I was their chief investment strategist and chief portfolio strategist.

2:18

So I spent time both managing assets, working with clients such as the Texas A&M University System, Sierra Club Foundation, and then was in my mid 40s and decided I had met my number financially as a partner and was just ready to try something new. So I left that in 2012 and launched Money for the Rest of Us.

2:42

A couple of years later, there were some iterations between leaving and starting the podcast and community, but that started in 2014, so it's been 10 years.

2:51

So working in private equity, you were kind of obviously working for investors with a lot of money or like you said, large endowments and stuff like that. And we'll get into this in a minute, but it seems like what you're now focused on is retail investors or personal finance, things like that,

3:11

like individuals who maybe are in the middle class or whatever who want to manage their money better. What, like, were you always kind of interested in that side or were you, did you eventually go tired of working with like the big,

3:24

the big like money investors and wanted to go over to that side or what was kind of like your philosophy on that? Like as you were in your career in private equity?

3:33

Well, two things. One, when you work with, let's say, a university endowment, there's typically an investment committee. And so you're working with individuals, you're providing education and teaching them. And my podcast is... that most of them, you know, we rarely do interviews, so it's mostly a solo show just teaching about investing the economy and money for

3:58

25 minutes, which is not that different than what I would do with an investment committee. But also as part of the portfolios we managed, we also managed assets for financial advisors. And so I spent time not working with individual clients, but with advisors. But I mean, I'd speak at conferences, etc.

4:18

And the individual investors, in many ways, they just don't get the same tools as institutions do. And there was a desire to bring that institutional approach, asset class focused and just to individuals to help them, many of which which need help because they and they're interested in a lot of that information just wasn't available.

4:44

So you're so you're kind of like your edge or kind of your pitch for yourself as you're taking all these skills that you were giving to, you know, rich investors and you're kind of giving it to the masses, basically unlocking these features and stuff. Right.

4:57

Yeah. For the rest of us, essentially, that's the idea.

5:01

Money for investing for the rest of us. So you left in 2012. Was it like you kind of like was it quasi retirement where you kind of burnt out? Like what was kind of your motivation for leaving private equity?

5:12

I mean, we told clients I was retiring. I was not planning on working full time. You know, now I still I guess I don't really work full time. But the idea was to having spent 17 years saying we we think this we think that I wanted to say this is what I think.

5:31

And so that was part of it. And just for a change, I just couldn't. You know, I was at the peak of my career. I mean, there was no ladder love. You know, there was not another rung on the ladder. I was and I was just in some ways I was burnout. I was tired of

5:51

playing the relative performance game. The institutions or all investors can be very short-term focused and they're very relative return focused. Like is our portfolio, how is it doing relative to the benchmark such as the S&P 500? How are we doing relative to peers? Which not that that's bad, but it can be a little short-term focused.

6:12

Your typical institutional investor has about a patience level of three years. And so if there's an aspect of the portfolio that's that's not performing the way that they would expect, then after about three years, they get tired and they're ready to switch. And that can lead to unnecessary churn in a portfolio.

6:31

And I just kind of wanted to do my own thing.

6:33

Mm-hmm. And did you have any inkling of what you wanted to do? Because I know there was like maybe a two year gap between when you left that firm and when you launched the podcast. Like, were you thinking about?

6:43

Yeah, I was I I started under my own name, a website and several others right after I left in 2012. So I Which was a little weird because I quit. And then suddenly I was doing a lot of the same thing. It's just I wasn't getting paid.

7:05

And so I went for, you know, I tried a number of different things just to try to find it. And for a while, I just quit altogether. I just, I don't want to talk about investing. And then I, the local newspaper in Idaho wanted me to start writing a column for them.

7:21

And I thought, well, you know, I could write a column once a week. And that kind of got me back in. And a few months later, I had been a guest on a podcast in 2014. There weren't that many finance podcasts. So I launched the podcast and found that I enjoyed that. And I kind of enjoyed teaching.

7:40

So it was good to step away for a couple of years, try some different things, but then come back and do it in a way that fit my temperament.

7:47

So as you said, you went on as a guest for a podcast. What did you like about that medium? Like what kind of attracted to you?

7:54

Well, one thing I liked was one is just enjoyable to talk finance again and just be able to teach. But I also know about then you started to see more unlimited data plans on phones that people were accessing audio on phones in a way that they hadn't before.

8:13

Prior to that, podcasting was more challenging as people would download. And so it seemed like an opportune moment. I was also doing YouTube at the time, playing around with that. And I just wanted to try it out. And then it was a good time to get into podcasting. And so it kind of went from there.

8:35

So you launched this podcast. What's the name of it?

8:38

Money for the Rest of Us is the name of the podcast.

8:40

Money for the Rest of Us. So what was the format?

8:43

The format was 20, 25 minutes. I'll teach on some aspect of money, the economy. finance, investing, and just share stories. So it's narrative driven, like what's happening in the markets, try to use examples of what's going on. Just to try to make what's going on digestible. to individuals so they understand it.

9:10

Try to take complex topics, simplify them so people can grasp what's going on.

9:16

So it's like almost like a finance Wikipedia on like individual topics, like just kind of going deep on them.

9:21

Yeah, yeah. Just, you know, for example, in a recent episode was is a retirement savings crisis. This this past week, you know, 10 things I've learned in the past decade investing, you know, you know, variety, just whatever I find of interest that week, then I'll research it, you know, for three or four hours, you know, five,

9:44

six sometimes, and then on a Monday, early Tuesday, and then I'll record the episode and we'll get it out that week.

9:51

And like, are you writing a script? Are you creating an outline or are you just doing the research on a topic and then just kind of riffing for 20 minutes?

9:58

I have an outline. I don't write a script. So, you know, there's definitely an outline. And then and I used to I mean, the early days I would just that was it. I would sit there. I'd have my outline. I'd speak and put the intro music in and upload it. Now we do a little more editing.

10:14

a lot more editing, actually, mostly. It's hard.

10:17

I mean, it's different.

10:19

No, not so much that it's just I just I pause. Right. I mean, you can't typically talk for 25 minutes without there being some gaps to figure out what the next word is. And in listeners, I think as a rule, people want faster audio. And so we basically take out some of the gaps.

10:42

And I mean, it still sounds human and it is, but that helps.

10:48

So like a lot of podcasts, including this one you're on right now, like it's a dynamic between at least two people, if not more, because it's a little bit easier to have a conversation. Whereas like some people, including me, would have a hard time just sitting in front of a mic and just

11:04

talking like some people have that talent and uh and you know i don't in particular do you feel like you have that like why did you decide why did you decide to just have you speak into a mic versus having someone else on was it just because it was

11:18

just easier that way or do you find like you have like a natural ability to just like talk into a mic for 20 minutes straight and sound intelligent

11:26

Well, I had spoke. I mean, I was already used to speaking. So like I said, with, you know, speaking at conferences, speaking with clients. So I was used to teaching for 20, 25 minutes. And I mean, there would be questions, but so I could carry an audience.

11:43

And so that that actually was less intimidating for me in 2014 than the idea of trying to figure out the tech to do an interview. and and have to book the interview, etc. So I just it was just easier for me to just and partly I knew that I wanted to monetize through courses or or premium content.

12:06

And as a result, I wanted people to relate to me. I mean, when you when you're just doing interviews, you're basically I mean, if you're you're sharing, you're letting that person be the spotlight, which is which is fine. But I I wanted I wanted to share what I was thinking. And so that's why I chose that format.

12:26

It is easier for me. We'll do, you know, we'll do a couple interviews a year, not very many and partly Well, because we're differentiated, there aren't that many solo podcast. And so but occasionally I'll you know, there'll be a book I read or just something that I just want to ask. I want to interview people.

12:46

And despite that, I mean, we'll get dozens of requests for interviews a week, even though we basically hardly ever do interviews.

12:53

And how quickly did it find an audience and where did it find an audience?

12:57

It it. took off pretty well. And partly there weren't that many, and partly Apple's SEO was easy to hack. Back then, in the author field, you could put, I did put, this is like Planet Money and some of the NPR-like podcasts. And because the way that their SEO worked was it was based on the name.

13:32

So if I had Planet Money in my podcast, I mean, my author field, and then it would rank based on that number of downloads. And since there weren't that many for years, if somebody starts Planet Money on the Apple app or any app, that was using the Apple catalog, my podcast would show up next to it.

13:49

Yeah. So like to just like in the metadata or like the author field or something like that, you would put planet money in it. So people would search for planet money, which was a very popular NPR podcast and planet money would come up first, but then maybe yours would come up second.

14:01

Right. Yeah.

14:03

And then you were also like doing these kind of evergreen personal finance explainers and stuff like that. So people searching for those terms because you didn't have a lot of competition that was coming up pretty high as well.

14:17

Well, at the time, yes and no. Apple never indexed based on the title of the episode or the topic. Yeah, it was basically the name of your podcast and your name. And any other names that you put, I mean, I put like David Stein, this podcast, you know, is like these three shows, but it didn't, yeah,

14:43

they just, and it was like that, I think until at least four years, 2017. And it wasn't anything, it wasn't wrong. I mean, they never said anything. Now, eventually, apparently they said you shouldn't do that. And then I got kicked out of the Apple store for, you know,

15:03

a week because my podcast got taken down and I just I fixed it and that was fine. But no podcast is a rule. It was that and word of mouth, but they're not they don't go viral typically and they're not easily searchable even today. And so it's it's very,

15:22

very difficult to launch a podcast and for it to be successful to grow, which is why your media and podcast episode gets 200 downloads because it's hard to be found.

15:32

Interesting. So you really kind of like hacked a flaw in the Apple system and also benefited from there just not being that many podcasts. Right. There was this explosion caused by serials popularity, but all these people now were newfound podcast listeners looking for more stuff to listen to.

15:48

There really was a vacuum at that point before all the media companies and VCs started investing in podcasts. You start building up an audience very quickly. As you said, from the very beginning, you weren't thinking about mass scale. You were thinking, how could I funnel people to high-priced

16:07

products right so like you you said that you sold a course very early on i think it

16:11

was even that same year right yeah yeah it was it was that same year and it didn't sell well uh and i because i was using one of the the course platforms i forget which one it was thinking i think you told me it was udemy oh yeah yeah udemy yeah and uh

16:27

But it's like anything like you get on a platform. Some are incredibly successful because the algorithm chose them. Right. And I thought, well, there aren't that many. Well, the algorithm didn't choose me back then. And so I thought, all right, well, I'll just market to my own audience. So so I launched the podcast in May.

16:44

In December, I launched the premium community. So and and that's been our main source of revenue. for 10 years now.

16:52

But you launched the course before you did that? Yeah,

16:54

so I launched the course in, I think that fall is something like seven steps to invest or something like that. I mean, fine, but it just like, well, whereas the community took off from the get-go. And so that Basically, it's a subscription service is what it ends up being.

17:17

Correct me if I'm wrong, you originally charged $200 a year for that community. The price has been raised since then, but that was what it started out as?

17:27

I think we did $20 a month or $200 a year.

17:31

What did you offer? What was your pitch for joining a community?

17:34

We offered way too much. They got an additional... a premium Q&A podcast every week. I was doing an audio lesson. They had a forum. I did a monthly investment conditions and strategy report, which is basically looking at the markets and what's going on and economy. And we still do that.

17:59

And I think we know we didn't offer any model portfolios. And so that was mostly content. on investing, most of it audio.

18:11

Yeah. And what platform were you using to kind of use?

18:15

Oh, gosh, I forget the name of it. It was it was a platform that basically had did a custom version of WordPress and they were using member press in the background. It was owned by it was owned by copy blogger. They've since sold it and and what was that called? But anyway, it was a platform.

18:34

So it was sort of they were trying to they put it all together. They ran it, and so I hosted it on a separate website. You know, we've cinched, moved, transitioned to hosting it, our own WordPress install on MemberPress.

18:51

And, like, how did you drive people to the community? Was it just literally, like, click on the link in the notes in the show notes?

18:55

Well, I mean, from the get-go, we did a newsletter. So our main call to action in the podcast was join our Insider's Guide email newsletter. And so we would pitch it through that and I talk about it. I mean, obviously, if I'm a solo show, I can talk about, you know,

19:12

plus member ask this or I would use it. And so I would just organically would talk about it. And so about 3% or so of the audience joined, which was, you know, the audience was bigger and big enough that, you know, we had to start out with a few hundred members join. So it was enough.

19:31

Yeah, and so it eventually you raise the price to like, what, $400 a year?

19:37

So we're at $450 a year, although it will, you know, based on activity, you know, as people interact with their newsletter, get on the website, we'll send a discounted offer to them. So our average member is paying around $300 now. You know, some are paying higher, some have been there a long time.

20:01

Uh, we have hundreds of lifetime members. So we, we tried that experiment and that worked and yeah, so it, um, we kept raising the price helped. I mean, raising a future, running a membership community, we, we kept the price the same for existing members and then raised it for new members. And that kept old members from quitting.

20:26

because they could block in their earlier price.

20:29

Yeah. And then when you're about to raise the price, you can start teasing that and saying, hey, if you want to get locked in at this lower price, sign up for now. That causes a rush of signups.

20:39

And we would. I mean, when we raised the price, I think in 2020, meaningfully, we went from 300 to 450. And I think we had several hundred members join just then. I mean, there's a lot of people probably fence sitters is the word, but just indecisive.

20:58

And so sometimes they just kind of need a push and locking in a lower price can can help with that.

21:05

So and I think the last time we talked, you had somewhere north of like a thousand subscribing members.

21:11

And we still do.

21:12

So, you know, yeah, yeah. And so that's like if they're doing an average, you know, just doing back the envelope, but just the subscription business alone is, is, you know, well into the six figures throwing off $300,000 a year, but you've also started to expand into some other things.

21:28

Eventually your podcast got like big enough to where you could actually start selling advertising on that specifically.

21:33

Yeah. Yeah. So we, I think we started doing ads in 20, 2016. So we were with mid-roll and we've done ads since. So we'll run two ads, an episode. So Audioboom's our sales agent now. And yeah, so we've run advertising ever since.

21:56

Which has generally been about 25% of our revenue or so. Yeah. And it's, uh, it's like, is it programmatic or that, or no, their host read ads.

22:08

And well, we host with art 19. So we'll, if we have an open spot or in the past, we, we would run programmatic ads. Uh, now we run. a programmatic pre-roll so in older episodes episodes older than three months or so on a programmatic pre-roll but you know we

22:33

Even then, we've cut back given the chaos in the ad space, which I suspect we'll talk about, talk about. And so we're basically running our existing sponsors and just keeping them in at this point. We used to keep them in for three months.

22:52

But given it's harder to get the impressions or because we pre-sold ads a year ago, you know, we sold ads last September, last October for 2024. And with Apple's iOS update, you know, most podcasts are finding that the promised impressions aren't there given the same number of listeners in many cases.

23:12

But in terms of downloads, it's not the way it was. And so we're keeping the sponsors in longer to meet our contractual commitments.

23:21

And are most of the sponsors like investing services and stuff that want to reach like retail investors?

23:26

No, most aren't actually. This year our main sponsor is LinkedIn, Monarch Money, which is kind of a budget service, NetSuite, Shopify. So we don't...

23:42

So business adjacent. Yeah. Yeah.

23:44

It's people that they're sponsors that want to get in front of a very high net worth, educated audience.

23:51

And so you mentioned the iOS update. So that's when iOS updated its podcast apps and the way that it automates downloads. So it used to be if someone kind of fell off listening to a podcast. it would stop downloading new episodes, but then if they started listening again,

24:07

then it would go and download all the back catalog of the episodes or a bunch of the episodes that they hadn't listened to. They stopped doing that and suddenly there was a huge crash, at least in the number of downloads across the entire podcast industry.

24:19

As you kind of alluded to, a lot of these podcasts that had a ton of industry saw their a ton of inventory suddenly saw their inventory like cut in half in some cases, especially for like daily podcasts and stuff like that. So like, how did that affect you?

24:33

It's the same as everybody else. I mean, the podcasts were down 50%, mostly back catalog. But even the way that they do it, if somebody I think if they haven't listened in three or four weeks, it stops downloading the episode. So but surprising so what's interesting is we just raised our rates so all right if

24:59

the if we promise so many downloads at this this absolute dollar amount then well it's not like there's less listeners and the ads are still effective we're still converting so we just we basically make the same amount of money we just promise less downloads

25:17

Yeah.

25:17

And so we raised the CPM. So the cost per thousand, we almost doubled it.

25:25

Yeah. And, and I mean, technically marketers and advertisers are kind of accounting for those like false downloads. And so they were, you know, they recognize that you still have the same size audiences before. So the technically your audience should be worth the exact same amount that it was worth before, even if the download numbers are lower.

25:45

Yeah, I mean, we have we for next year, we've had to cut our rates some, but just because I mean, I think the audience is smaller because there are so many more podcasts out there. And I think short form video is encroaching in the podcast space. So I think there are your typical podcast is seeing fewer listeners,

26:10

just not only because of the iOS update, but also because It's hard to find new centers, replace old ones that for TikTok or Instagram reels.

26:20

Yeah. So like, even though there are way more podcast listeners than there, there are two more podcast listeners today than there were 10 years ago. There were also way more podcasts. And so you've definitely, have you felt that it's just harder to grow now? Oh yeah.

26:33

No, it's been harder to grow since for the last four years.

26:37

You know,

26:39

we used to see 50,000 new podcast a year, a hundred thousand, you know, that's sort of 2018, 2019. million new podcasts in 2020, another million in 2021. And now you still get hundreds and hundreds of thousands of new podcasts every year. And so it's a tougher medium than it's ever been.

27:00

Yeah, and as you alluded to, podcasts are kind of morphing into having these video components where they're like, you know, this episode now is going to air the full thing on YouTube, but then also podcasters are getting more savvy about then cutting up those clips

27:14

and distributing them on YouTube shorts and Instagram and TikTok and stuff like that. Have you tried to get into video at all? And what's kind of your strategy been if you have?

27:23

Well, we have. Recording myself, recording is boring video, so that doesn't work if you're a solo podcast. But we have done YouTube in the past where I've just recorded a separate video. Even YouTube is a challenging medium because there's so many more personal finance I mean, I started uploading finance videos to YouTube in 2012.

27:56

So, you know, I've toyed with it. I've never stuck with it the entire time to my fault. But even when we have, it's not easy to be found. And so, I mean, it's easier than a podcast because if you can search, the search mechanism is better. But no, so what we did instead is realize, all right,

28:22

we're not going to be in the podcasting business long term. We got to do something else. And so we launched a different company, a software as a service company, basically a custom built membership community. That is so that the premium membership community was always what we call plus membership was. Here's what I think. Here's expected returns.

28:49

Here's our monthly report. But because the index providers controlled all the data, we couldn't really give them the tools. Right. And so there was very much receiving. Here's what we think. And we launched something called asset camp. last year where we actually give people the tools. So here's.

29:13

All this information on 48 stock indexes and 28 bond indexes. So basically what I would have dreamed of to have as an institutional money manager. And as you know, even as an educator, we were paying, you know, our research budget was 100 grand a year that we would pay for resources to share with plus memberships.

29:34

But we couldn't share a graph without getting permission from our vendors. And so we decided this is stupid. We're going to sign licensing agreements with Bloomberg. and MSCI and we'll just build the graphing capabilities ourself and then share it to people that want that type of data for 200 bucks a year. So that that's our main avenue.

29:57

And with anything you have to, you know, we'll grow it through the podcast, but we're doing we're much more active on LinkedIn. I'm done here. I'm going to record a video short. And then paid advertising. So let's talk about this. You just can't wait for people to find you anymore like they could.

30:20

And so we have to do paid ads. And that's what we're working on.

30:26

So just to kind of translate everything you just said, let's dive into this. So like you were, you were transferring our company from being like a content media slash membership community type company to like basically being like a, a bootstrapped FinTech company. Is that kind of kind of an overview of what you're doing?

30:43

And so, and so you built this thing called asset camp. Is it a mobile app? Is it a web app? Like what is the actual, it's a web app for it?

30:51

I mean, it's, it's, it's, It's mobile optimized, but it's a web app and it yeah, it it has many of the features of our our plus membership. And there's people can do expected return modeling. We're answering three questions like what happened with the markets? Where are we now? Where are we going and take action?

31:16

And so it's the same steps that a university endowment would take that as individuals we should be taking. Most don't. And so it allows people to understand what is driving index funds and ETFs to understand what's under the hood as opposed to just guessing.

31:36

And are you like licensing APIs that you're then plugging into it? So the app is like up, like updating with new information? Yeah, no, it updates.

31:46

It updates monthly. So we pull the like, it's not an API. I wish it was, but it's basically. Yeah, the data server, you bring down the raw data and then in our software puts, you know, creates the database and then we have the front end. So we and a lot of the tools were value added that it

32:11

It's amazing as an individual investor, you cannot get a... If I want to know what is the historical valuation price to earnings ratio for emerging market stocks as a whole, an ETF, you can't get it. It's just not available. And we tried for years to get it to like, even we, you know, I signed up for Refinitiv.

32:39

Well, they ought to have historical valuations for emerging market stocks and other indexes. No, why charts doesn't do it. I thought MSCI, you know, we signed this agreement with MSCI. It's like, oh yeah, we'll get you a file you can download, but we don't have any graphs or charts. And I'm just, I'm, I'm a picture person.

32:56

I want to see, A graph. Here's, is the market expensive? Is it cheap? And so that's- And like,

33:04

so you're getting into kind of like an adjacent thing to like Bloomberg terminals, for instance. It's like, I mean, would you kind of consider yourself to be in kind of that category of product?

33:14

Yeah, except they charge $30,000 a year and have way, way more data. And we're very focused on right now, stock market, bond market and $200. So it's more user friendly plus we have what we found within the fintech space a lot of

33:37

things are built by engineers but nobody shows how to use it so we do a monthly live webinar showing people here's what's going on here's what and just it's kind of like the ikea model where you buy something ikea everything's sort of pre-made and you put it together and we wanted that level of transparency it's like here's

34:01

everything But here's a monthly webinar. Here's what it means.

34:06

And here's what you can do with it. And so you said it costs $200 a year. So this is something that you're running separately completely from your membership community? Like this is a separate product that they subscribe to?

34:17

Yeah, it's separate. And partly because the membership community is built on MemberPress. And it needed to be custom because it wasn't available. So we built it through Stripe. I mean, Stripe's handling the subscriptions, which is how MemberPress Stripe handles the billing and all that stuff. So you basically build it with Stripe handling the customer service,

34:43

which wasn't available 10 years ago when we launched the Plus membership, not to the level you could do it today.

34:50

Yeah. So you have experience running a subscription thing, but a completely different kind of subscription. What are you learning about how hard, how difficult, how easy it is to do a more SaaS product versus a membership community? What are some of the differences or what are you finding is way different running

35:10

this thing versus running your membership community?

35:12

Well, what I like about it is... The software, like these are the tools that I wish I had as a man, that I would, if I could have done it 10 years ago, this is what I, this would have been our plus membership. Like give people, and because they've asked for it all the time.

35:28

Can we, how do we replicate this ourselves? How do we analyze it ourselves? And so it's way more powerful than what we currently offer. The challenge with anything is finding who's it for. Like finding those people that want this, type of data and and we know that they exist but it's like getting the people there

35:54

are people that that want to know what happened and do a performance attribution to understand is the market cheap as expensive be able to rank i mean there's hundreds of fintech companies that do this for individual stocks which is always way more sexy Like if I can find the next NVIDIA or something like that.

36:19

But most investors should be focused on assets, like which area of the stock market should have more in U.S. versus non-U.S. And those tools aren't available for individuals. And so it's bizarre to me. But it's like anything, you just have to keep, you know, we've had to refresh it. We just released the bond component last month.

36:43

And so it's it's slow growth. It's a grind.

36:46

Do you find it easier to convert people to a SaaS subscription or a membership subscription?

36:53

It's about the same. Partly, I mean, the membership in some ways was easier because they listened to whatever, lots of audio of me beforehand. And so it's it's sort of like, all right, we know who David is. I want more content. I want to listen more.

37:13

So this is different because we're bringing in people that aren't familiar with our work and we're not selling me. We're selling a process. We're selling the data. or a way to manipulate and understand data. And so it's different.

37:30

Is the attraction kind of the same attraction to any kind of tech company? It's kind of the infinite scale type of thing? Do you want this to be your legacy is building the next Bloomberg for X type of thing?

37:44

I just want to be successful in the sense that i i know we have this this you know my my two sons are are partners with me so i uh in you know all we have three kids they've all worked for me with me for the last

38:03

decade they all work with me now two of the two older sons adult sons are partners and so we just We want to grow this to where we can work half the time that we're working now. So we're not it's not so much legacy. It's like this is this is powerful tools to be helpful to people.

38:23

It does scale infinitely. We did bootstrap. I mean, we could have taken outside funding, but we don't want to because we. We want to do it ourselves and grow it slowly over time, you know, as we iterate and figure out what people want. And and that's that's our approach.

38:42

Have you ever thought like, man, this would be so much easier if I had a few million dollars in VC cash to like hire someone to just think about, you know, paid acquisition or something like that?

38:52

No. Having spent the last few months doing paid acquisition, most VC funded companies fail. And most even when they go public still haven't figured it out. They're growing, but they're losing money because they're paying more to bring people on than what their acquisition cost is greater than their lifetime value.

39:13

but they're still going because I've never figured out a profitable business model because as it turned out, paid advertising is incredibly difficult and it just, you have to be in the market longer. You're always testing and figuring out, all right, this works or because people they're, it just takes time.

39:34

And so no, if we had a lot more money, I mean, the product's already there. So, I mean, we built it, right? And a VC could not have built it any better because I was based on two decades of experience in managing money and looking at all the products out there,

39:52

many of which cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. and so at this point if we brought in vc money it would just be to run even more ads and we'd still be trying to figure out okay why did this ad work why didn't

40:04

this ad work and so we'd rather just it's easier to microtest on our own to figure

40:09

it out and like how much from your own kind of personal network audience is driving you know membership in this app versus like uh just paid acquisition and just educating the broader it's about

40:24

Oh, it's probably two-thirds of our existing audience.

40:28

So you think there's a lot of scale ahead of it outside of your already existing audience, probably.

40:33

Oh, yeah. I mean, there's 300,000 financial advisors out there. And you think of YCharts, which focuses on them, they have 6,000. Yeah, because this is how you manage money. It's not like... And it's sort of... kind of frustrating because it takes forever to grow things. But everyone has a 401k and some want to, like,

41:01

they're more interested in figuring out, well, should I put it all in the U.S. or non-U.S.? What are these things? What's a reasonable return or any of that stuff? Is. The market expensive or cheap, or how does it even work? Like this is. In fact, I did the episode I did recently retirement savings crisis.

41:25

There is a crisis because basically most people don't have a pension plan anymore, and they've been responsible since the early 80s for managing their retirement and taking on the risk. And it worked great for the first 10 years because the the the stock market was super cheap and the bond yields were super high.

41:48

And so you had this huge tailwind in the 80s that made lots of millionaires in 401k. But since then, it's been much more difficult. And your average 55-year-old has $200,000. The median, sorry. The median, the middle person that's 55 to 64 has $200,000 in their retirement portfolio. And if you spend 4% of that,

42:14

which would be what an advisor would recommend, that's $8,000 a year to live on in retirement, plus Social Security in the US. Like that's a savings crisis because people don't, I mean, and I used to do this at my old firm. I would do 401k education. And it was laughable because I'd go to,

42:36

I had one shepherd or a chemical company client, third shift come, they're trying to stay awake and they want me to talk to them about asset allocation and your 401k options. And they're trying to stay awake. Like this is, it's stupid what has happened. And I used to, I mean,

42:55

I had pension fund clients and you had a professional management, you had a committee. You had risk pooling, and now everybody's on their own without the tools to really figure out what's going on. So we've built a tool.

43:08

So when you look two to three years down the road, what do you want to be doing that you're not doing today? Or maybe for you, it's actually the opposite. What do you not want to be doing that you're doing today? Do you see yourself winding down the membership community to focus 100% on this?

43:22

Or what would you like to be doing?

43:24

No. I mean, we sold... hundreds of lifetime members ship. So people, so I'll keep writing about investing. I would like to podcast less instead of doing a weekly show. In fact, next year we will, we'll do fewer episodes. I'd like to write another book. So one girl, he'll publish my book about five years ago.

43:45

So I enjoy writing. We travel. So the end, we, And I've done this for 10 years. So I'm used to teaching, spending time learning and teaching. And I still like podcasting. I just don't want to be on a hamster wheel. We'd like to stop selling ads. So that would help. Cause then I can podcast when I want,

44:13

but no, I haven't done this long enough that I know that I'll keep writing about investing and teaching.

44:21

Is the goal that this app will be the vast majority of your revenue by that point?

44:25

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean that, cause this is scalable again, cause it's not, People aren't having to wait around for us to tell them what to think. They get everything and they can see it and do the analysis themselves. So it's much more scalable.

44:43

Okay, David, those were all the questions I have for you. Where can people find you online?

44:46

You can find us at moneyfortherestofus.com is our main website. Also, assetcamp.com is our SaaS product.

44:55

Awesome. Well, that was a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me.

44:56

Yeah, thank you.