This Couple Makes 7MYear Sending Letters sidehustle business businessideas entrepreneurship sidehustleideas

You were making like 36,000 a month recurring within your first four months. Yeah, that's wild. And it was just us, that was great. We're sending about 120,000 letters a month now. I didn't expect this. In 2024, we broke the five million mark. Last year, we broke seven. The best way to describe it is something you've never heard of, but your mother's gonna love. Is Mother's Day huge for you? It's our Super Bowl, yeah. That's awesome. What other niches do you think could be really interesting with the snail mail business? Would you believe that you could make millions of dollars per year sending stories through the mail? Well, that's exactly what Michael and his wife, Hanny, do with the flower letters. They charge 12 bucks a month, and they are sending 120,000 letters per month. Last year, they made $7 million in revenue. But what's most impressive is that within four months of starting the business with almost no money, they were making $36,000 a month, and most of that was profit. They grow the business through Facebook ads and referrals, and I am just obsessed with the snail mail subscription business. This is the second episode I've posted about it in the last two months. We'll link to the one I did with Hannah below. And at the end of this episode, Michael will give us advice for starting our own subscription business, what niches look interesting, how we can be successful, and most importantly, how to find customers. Let's dive in. You wanna start by just telling us who you are and what you do? Yeah, Michael Clark. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called The Flower Letters. The best way to describe it is something you've never heard of but your mother's gonna love. So we tell stories through letters sent through the mail. You get two letters a month for a year, and it tells a story. My wife is an artist and an author, and just so creative. She sings, she does everything. She's doing stained glass. Generally. I call her her creator. And it was about February, March of 2020. Anyway, we were just talking, we were on a walk, and she was trying to figure out how to kind of, she made these paintings. She, incredible, these 3D floral paintings, and she put one up for sale, and it'd sell within 20 minutes. I remember one night we were going on a date, and she put one up, and it was like three hours past. She's like, hey, this hasn't sold yet. Do you think it's not good? I'm like, hey, I gotta put this into context for you. You sell your paintings in three hours. Like, yeah. Most people have paintings up for days, months, years. People are, they want your stuff, and then, sure enough, in 30 minutes, someone bought it. And what was she selling these for, and on what platform was she selling them? Oh, this was to Instagram. She'd just make a painting, put it on Instagram, and say, hey, if you want it, let me know. Someone would say, I want it. And, you know, depending on how it suits, she'd make anywhere from this size to big. I mean, the big ones could be upwards of $1,000. But there's mostly small ones, so a couple hundred dollars each way. And so she was doing that, and, you know, really enjoying it. And then she was trying to figure out how to grow her business, and kind of get more people involved in email lists. And she had the idea, she's like, what if I, like, sent them a letter if they sign up for my email list? And I'm like, well, that's kind of an expensive thing to sign up for email lists. You just send them an email. She's like, what if I sent them a letter? She's like, there's all these old letters you can find. To be honest with you, all at once, the idea came to me. And I saw people, like, I remember getting mail, a letter in the mail. I saw people going to the mailbox, getting a letter, and it being a chapter in a story. And I said, hey, what if you wrote a story and sent it to them? And she's like, that's a terrible idea. Christy's a writer. And so there's a lot of details we had to work out, but I was like, immediately I thought of World War II. I was like, what if you write a letter, and I write a letter, and we kind of send that out, and we've kind of figured that out? And we just iterated, went back and forth. There was another subscription that we were doing called Letters From Afar. We actually did podcasts with them. They're awesome. We got their letters. And there's a sort of a stand-alone letter each month, which is like, great model. Do the stand-alone. And you were a customer of this, you're saying, at the time? We subscribed to it. And so we had been getting those letters. I was like, what if that was a story? And so Letters From Afar was a big part of our origin. We talked to them, and they're a great, great company. I highly recommend them. I think they're more geared towards kids, but they follow a character around the world. It's really fun. Their models, it's much simpler than telling a story. Figuring out, okay, what does this look like? How many letters do we send every month? It was like, it's gonna be a year, and it's gonna be 24 letters, and we're gonna send two a month. To be honest, when we looked at it, I was like, hey, this would be kind of fun. This would be cool. This'll be, let's give it a shot. I'm still working on my startup. I was doing some consulting, and we originally started. She wrote a letter. I actually, in our first story, there's a letter that I wrote, but it became clear I'm not a great writer. She is. She's a great writer. So I was like, okay. She's like, you know what? I'm gonna take this. I'm gonna write this. And so she's like, I'm gonna write this. I was like, oh, sounds good. We started doing Instagram posts, and just figuring things out. Just to her own friends and family, not from a big business page or anything? No, we just started a flower letters Instagram, put it out, and one of my things as an entrepreneur is when I tell people, I say, if you're launching a product or service, don't tell your family and friends. They'll give you a false positive. Your mom's gonna buy 10 of them, but she's not your customer. You gotta find your customer. We just put it out there. 33 people signed up, and I was like, okay. And what was your first pricing? $12 a month. For two letters. So you got two letters, and one month for 12 bucks a month. Yeah, 12 bucks a month. And then... And your cost is, I mean, a dollar, stamp, envelope, paper, and then time? The paper, everything, just to get everything at the volume we were doing, it was more around two to three dollars. Because we put a lot of things. We put a lot inside. Nice stationery, and stickers, and... Nice, and we've done that. And that's sort of what sets us apart. You can get a lot, and I can show you some things if you want. Costs were relatively low, it goes really well. We started dabbling in ads. So our main acquisition was through Facebook ads. And that's what really started to get us traction. Facebook ads on both Facebook and Instagram? Yep, yeah, Facebook and Instagram. And it was us just giving it a try. We knew nothing about Facebook ads. And then this guy that I was working with, this kid, really, I was talking to him about what I do, and he's like, hey, I want to try that. I was like, okay. Try the flower letters business, or ads? He wants to try doing ads and marketing with us. Okay. Okay. That's fun. I was like, let's go for it. And anyway, I remember by the end of the year, anyway, by the end of the year, we had a few thousand people that had signed up. And then he pitched me on coming and working for me full-time. I was like, oh. Okay. Okay. He started running your ads pretty early on? Yeah, probably around October. So we launched in August. We sent our first letters at the end of August. And then, yeah, October, we started dabbling in ads, just spending a few bucks here and there, and people started showing up. And then one of the things that was really important that I'm surprised how many businesses don't invest in is email. We knew from the get-go that email was really important because meta can break. You know, what if it goes away? You know, it goes down, you got your email address. So early on, we started trying to acquire email addresses so we could connect with people that way. How did you do that? Was that with ads as well? Yeah, ads would kind of come, people would come to our website. That's the first sort of on-site funnel is you ask for their email address for a discount. Pretty standard e-commerce acquisition. That's actually turned out to be huge for us. Upwards of 38 and sometimes 40, even sometimes 50% of our revenue is email-driven. Wow. Anyway, if you're an entrepreneur and you're not thinking email, think email. You have to, yeah. You gotta know it. Since then, we're at 3.5 million letters mailed. We're sending about 120,000 letters a month now. We've got six stories. Concurrently? More coming, yeah. So six stories but nine subscriptions you can send. One of them's a fantasy. And so there's seven parts of it. There's three parts currently. So eight, I should say eight. There's eight options that you have right now. Most of it's historical fiction and we're called the flower letters. And so that was part of the formula is at the beginning, it was all of our heroines have a flower name. Originally, we were gonna do historical fiction which is the predominant storyline for us. But then we have Nora Avon who's a fantasy and actually super popular and it's been tons of fun. It's one of my favorites. But that, Nora Avon's been part of our marriage. She's been writing us and building that world since we were first married. But yeah, it's been wild, just a wild ride. So first year, you said you finished at 2,000 or 3,000 customers. Was that the end of 2020 or your first full 12 months? It's just the end of 2020 within four months. Yeah, so end of the year, we had about 3,000 customers. You were making like 36,000 a month recurring within your first four months? Yeah. And it was just us and that was great. Yeah, yeah. What was your cost per acquisition on your ads in those early days? How much were you spending to acquire a customer? Early days, if we could go back pre-IoI 14, it was like 20 bucks. 15, maybe 20 bucks. Okay, true, crazy. Even on a subscription, we could be profitable within three months, right? And that's one of the biggest challenges with a subscription like this which I think probably people who are getting into it are learning. The key to our growth has been the prepaid option. Like a year up front? Yeah, paying up front. It's been interesting in this, what we do, it's kind of like they are buying a full story. And it is a subscription, but it's really not traditional. Subscriptions, your typical is like, all right, I'm going to pay 12 bucks and you send me a supplement, okay. Or some of these other letters, it's like I'm going to give you $8, $9 and you're going to send me one letter and it stands alone. With us, it's like for this to work, you have to get every letter and you have to get every letter in order. And so thinking about that, I mean, that's what makes it complicated. And across now, the stories, we're like, oh, all right, you know. I think when I step back and look at it, that has been our key to our growth and success is adding more stories, being able to kind of service a customer as they are in any story they would like, get them their letter soon. Now, I have to think with churn, with losing customers, I'm assuming on the story ones, your churn is low because they want to know what happens at the end, right? So this is a business built, it's a business built for very low churn. But I imagine if you do get churn, it's going to be after the first couple weeks or month because maybe the story just doesn't resonate. And then after that, if you keep them after that, you probably keep them for all 12 months. Is that pretty accurate? One of the things that makes our churn so low as well is that we're a very giftable item. Oh, yeah. They can't cancel for themselves, right? Like someone gives it to them. Sometimes it's funny, we have the best customers, they're incredible, but I never thought of this happening. It's like someone to reach out, I was like, yeah, my mom says she hated it, I need to cancel. I was like, oh, your mom, that's creepy. And I was like, okay, that's fine. So they'll start getting it, like I don't like it. So that'll happen from time to time and that's great. To me, mail's a miracle. I love the postal service because of how well it is. Sometimes I get a bad rap, it's like, ah, the postal, they lost my letter. It's like, you talk to a kid this now, you tell them like, hey, you put this piece of paper in this box, it'll show up in Russia in a few weeks. They're like, whoa, wow, right? They can understand. Sometimes their mind works like, I can send a text and get it to Russia right now. How does that piece of paper get to Russia or to even the next state over? One of the things, so what sort of prompted me to leave everything, like I was a fintech guy, software, let's build a tech company, you know what I mean? But what sort of drove me into leaving all of that behind and focusing solely on this one was the opportunity, I think the growth. It was the impact. We started getting letters like very early on year one from people saying that they, how grateful they were for us because we're doing this because it's something I look forward to. I won't say her name, but I remember her name. She would keep it on her bed stand because she had this just, I think it was fibromyalgia. She's just in pain all the time. It's like, I look at that letter and I know another one's coming and it just keeps me going. Like, I'm reading these things. I'm like, I didn't expect this. I did not expect this. And we get these every week. We still get them of people having a very positive impact. And so I stepped back, looked at what we were doing and said, okay, if we can truly run a business together, my wife and I, we love each other and we really like working together, which I'm finding is unique. She does the art, I do the business. We step back and say, okay, how can we have a maximum impact in this business and grow it so that we can bring this light and joy to people's lives? And so I left everything behind and we focused solely on this and we configured, the best way to describe it, because there's a lifestyle business and there's, you set up and it's like, this is, you know, I've got 10 different things going on or there's like the generational thing. And we decided this was gonna be a generational thing for us. We want our grandkids to work here with us. That caused us to configure a little differently and reinvest pretty much everything back in the growth, back into the learning, the marketing, the customer acquisition early on. I mean, it's been fantastic. So much fun, but so hard. Oh man, you know. Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say, I had a shipping business and we shipped hundreds of thousands of packages and anytime I hear someone say like, X, Y, or Z got lost in the mail, I'm just like, no it didn't. Like statistically speaking, no it did not. Because we, almost nothing that we sent didn't arrive. Like it always arrived. So it is miraculous how that works. So your churn is excellent. What is your churn on a percentage basis and how has that changed over time, if at all, or across different genres or stories? Last I looked, globally, we're probably at like a 5% churn. Monthly or yearly? Yearly. So very low. That's incredible. We predominantly do sell our prepaid option. People are way much less likely to churn in the prepaid. We make it very attractive to come into the prepaid. What is the price for that compared to 12 a month? 12 a month, so right now you can do a prepaid for $100. It's like eight and a half bucks a month. Yeah, so that was our entry point. And then you can add a 10 to it. The 10 has been just so well received. People love it, they're pretty. You can maybe see one right back here. Oh, yeah, would you mind holding one of those up? They get that like with the first so they can store everything in it? Yeah, they store the letters in it. Brilliant. Looking across, we're relatively inexpensive comparatively to other subscriptions. But that's because we want to make it accessible for people because of the impact we want to have as many products as we possibly can. But we have other products that help from a profitability standpoint, like the 10, different things we can add. Why haven't we added a letter opener? It's like, man, that's like a no-brainer. It just takes time to figure that out. You could put it in the 10. Put it in the 10 when you ship it. I mean, there's so much stuff we can put in the 10, like letter opener, promo cards, stickers, different things they can add to their order if they want. So it's 10 bucks. Do they have to pay for additional shipping for the 10 as well? So the 10, we sell the 10 for 30. Oh, you said 10, not 10. Yeah, so then it'll be $8 shipping, $8, $9 shipping. Right now we're doing free shipping. Spring promotion's going into Mother's Day. And then standard shipping, if you do the letters, we started charging more shipping because we start to track. When we can at the volume that we, when we get into kind of busy seasons, we'll do free shipping just to remove any barriers to entry. Yeah, is Mother's Day huge for you? It's our Super Bowl, yeah. Okay, that's awesome. It's bigger than Christmas. Wow, is it more sons and daughters for their moms or husbands for their wives? It's daughters for the mothers. Interesting, more than anything? More than anything. And friends for friends. Our demographic is female 35 plus and probably skewing a little bit older. So it starts at 35, then kind of gets into like the 45, 55 is kind of the peak. And it's, oh, I love this market so much. When I think they're underserved, when you're interacting with them, they're the best customers I've ever worked with. Like across all of them, they're reasonable, they're forgiving, they're, you know, and they're like, oh yeah, you know, that's okay. And if they're upset, you call them and they're like, oh, you know, that's okay, you know, we'll figure it out. And our mantra is, hey, we're always gonna do everything we can to make it right and to do right by you. Because what we say, when we promise something that is pretty, it's a pretty tall order to fulfill, you know, something to look forward to as a story that continues and, you know, comes in order. When that doesn't go well, it's kind of like, we didn't make it happen. So we got to do whatever we can to make that right. Especially when it's a gift. How long are the letters? How many words? And cumulatively, how many words is the whole series? And have you ever thought of making that just into a physical book? Physical book, yeah, we have. But at the same time, no. Because you want to keep it special to the letters, right? Or else they're just like, oh, I'm paying 100 bucks for a book. I'll tell you, one of the things that we didn't do early on is make each letter formulaic. You know, I think if you're, I see what you mean. If you're a, you know, if you're thinking of starting this, you're like, okay, every letter's gonna be two pages with a postcard and maybe one little insert. And that happens every single time. That's great, it's very predictable. And that's a good model if it works. One of the things that I think has helped us that makes us, people like us, is it's different. Like, one letter, you're gonna get eight things. And you're gonna have a four-page letter. And then the next one, you're gonna have a two-page letter and a postcard, like a sticker. To the point where there's one where we had to do something because people kept reaching out. I was like, did I get everything? I was like, yeah, it's just the one we sent you before. There's tons of stuff. And I can, you gotta solve one for me. Yeah, I'd love to see it. How many words are each letter on average? I don't know. Okay, it's not something you track. Well, that's another thing with Hanni is, and we try to work into it, is writing a story in this way is an art form. It's that she's perfected. Because there's so much that you can do with different content. I know this is just a random letter from Lily Clara. But I'm gonna give you an idea of what comes in this one. So, this is the letter. And so, when she's creating this, she's like curating the experience, if that makes sense. And she's like, okay, in this letter, in this envelope, there's gonna be a letter. And this is three pages, so the front and back. And then, on this one, then there's, this is like an advertisement card. It's from the era. Oh, cool. This isn't part of the story. It's just like, let's send them this so they can be drawn into. Yeah, and that's a real ad from that era? Real ad, yeah. That's cool. American Machine Co., ice cream freezers. Pretty cool. Yeah. There's one that we were sending that ended up being, we didn't really notice it, but it was offensive. So, we pulled it. Yeah. Oops. And then, there's this one she designed. This is a bookmark. Wow. And she's designing all of these? All of it, yeah. This is, and there's like some silver metallic stuff on it. This is a character from the story, actually. Then, there's a telegram. So, this is the telegram part of the story. So, like, and it's like, you look at it, it's like a telegram can fill in a lot of gaps, right? And then, there's postcards. There's 12 postcards in every story that you get. Okay. So, we send these. One per month? Yeah, about one a month. Ish. Yep. Okay. How long did it take you to quit your job? Oh. Or your startup? Oh, man, that was hard. Because I was like, I love this so much. We started right during the pandemic. In fact, he's my business partner from then, he's killing it now with AI. And it's still going. It took me about a month to kind of truly, really decide. And it was January of 2021, where I went to him, I was like, I gotta go do this. I gotta, you know, do this. And he was supportive and great. I haven't looked back, haven't done anything else. This takes all my time. It's awesome. Today, it's been six years, going on six years? Yeah. Almost six years? And what are your monthly revenue and profit today? Monthly revenue, it varies month to month. Across it, it's about, in 2024, we broke the 5 million mark in total revenue. Wow. Wow. And then last year, I was like, man, maybe we could go to 10. And it's like, well, hold on, Clark. That's double. That's hard. That's hard. Last year, we broke seven. That's still. And so this year, I'm like, hey, what about 10? And it's like, hold on, Clark, that's a lot. Yeah. Well, after Mother's Day, you'll be like 12 for sure. And then come October, you're like, 10 would be nice. We'll see. We'll see. I have a goal. I mean, the next goal is a 10 million mark, just because that's sort of a benchmark. But if we can match what we did last year, I'd be thrilled. Because we were able to service so many new customers, and that's been a lot of fun. So our month, that's one of the biggest challenges of this business, is the seasonality. So you have these big peaks in Mother's Day, and you have to figure out, okay, we've got to make sure we've got enough operations to go then to get a next one, and continue to invest. And so that's been a lot of learning for us, especially because we didn't configure this to be lifestyle-driven for us. So we haven't extracted cash from the business. We tried to invest all of it, so we try to keep our net profit as low as we possibly can from a tax perspective, and keep the business growing, keep it fueled, and try to, with the intention of expanding our net. Yeah. We're hitting a critical mass, I think, where we're really poised to really start to expand into different categories, like retail. Retail's a real opportunity, I think, for what we do. We figured out a really neat product where we worked, I don't know if you've ever been back to the Newport Mansions in Rhode Island. They approached us last year. One of the person that runs their gift shop signed up, reached out, was like, what if we wrote a story about the Gilded Age, and we could put it in our shops? We were like, yeah, that's totally cool. We're in their shops, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. Then we're like, what if we could get this? What if you could walk into Costco, and you see the flower letters on a stand, and it's a gift, a giftable thing. It's almost like a gift card. Yeah. Come in, and they're giving you these. Yeah, you just bring it to the register. Yeah, so we built out a whole redemption website. Wow. Where you can come in, you scan a QR code, pulls up, you enter your address, and you're good to go. And so that's been built out and configured, and we'd love to get into retail stores. But also expanding into different mediums, audio. We've always explored, what if we could have the opportunity to turn this into a TV series? Yeah, why not? Why not a podcast where your wife just reads the letters? We thought about that. We have a podcast. We're sort of dabbling in it. It's called Stories Told Through You. People from our community come on and tell their stories. Come to find out, people are fascinated. One thing I've learned about this community from them, I had this experience where I was in the doctor's office, and this lady had a little post-it note on her desk. And I was paying for my doctor visit, and her post-it note was taped down. So one of those post-it notes, she's like, I'm gonna look at this every day. It says, your story matters. And that hit me. I was like, why would you think your story didn't matter? And so anyway, we invite people from our community to come on our podcast. We've heard some fascinating stories, just incredible. Yeah, and everyone has them. I don't care who you are, your story's fascinating, because you're human. You felt fear, you felt love, you felt betrayal. I mean, all of these things that make up a great story are part of your life. It's been fun to extract that and have people come and tell their stories. But yeah, that's a great idea. I like an audio version where she reads the stories. Man, there's so many different things. So if you were taking profits out of the business, what would you hope to do in net profit on seven million in revenue? If we didn't invest back into as much as we did in meta, I would love at some point to be able to have a net profit of a million dollars. Your growth would slow. Yeah, it would slow. We wouldn't be able to get as many customers. There is a tipping point where I think we start to hit a more organic growth. A lot of people referred this to their friends. With more people coming into this medium and doing, telling stories through letters, there's a lot of people that have started to do it in the last little while. It's becoming, I think, a viable, I think, way to experience a story. And I think with that, we've never really invested in organic growth until it's all been paid. But as soon as we're able to crack organic and not have to spend so much within meta, that's when net profits will start to really build and grow. How much are you spending on meta today? Oh, so last year we spent 2.6 million. And your cost per acquisition went from 15 to 20 in the early days to what today? Oh yeah. Oh man, if we could do 15 to 20, we'd be swimming in it. Yeah. But it's, I mean, every e-commerce brand has, I mean, you can't do it, you can't do that. That's virtually impossible. Some do, I mean, just, you know, because they're really good at it. But ours is 40 to 50 at this point. Did you hear my episode with Hannah, the snail mail business? I heard part of it, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so she's all organic. Yeah. You should go look at her TikTok page and like the style of video that she posts, because there's a lot to learn there. She's doing it really interestingly. Yeah, I'm learning that organic, what you do, is an art. I don't know. Because you go, you're, I don't, I imagine you spend a lot on ads for what you do, but you have a huge audience. Depends on the thing. You've been able to kind of get out and make it happen. But every time I see, it's like, figuring out the organic would become a full-time thing. Because when I look at it, it's like, well, what organic, there could be some organic approach, because we're a product, right? We're not, a lot of the organic success, or brands that are organic, the people are the product in a lot of ways. Where people are buying them when they buy their product, because they like their content, they enjoy their, you know, what they are, and they've attached themselves so closely to the brand that when you buy their product, you're essentially buying them. That would be essentially me and Hanni really investing in that organic approach, which we thought a lot about. Like, she's writing stories, that's what she does. I don't know, there's lots of things we could do to try to figure that out, but the more I look into the organic and see the people who are successful in it, I'm like, wow, they've really kind of, because it's not just, you know, I really appreciate what they do, because it's not just a willy-nilly, it's like formulaic. Yeah, yeah. You figure it out, you know exactly, you know your hook, you know everything, and it's what I do. But it starts willy-nilly when you learn from them. You figure it out, you're like, hey, wow, they like that? Okay, I'll do that. Yeah, let's do more of that, yeah. So roughly, I'm just estimating here, you're spending like a third of your revenue on costs of goods sold, postage and paper and supplies. You're spending another third-ish on meta ads, straight to meta. And then the rest of it is going to pay your people. Operation, yeah. Invest in growth, operation, yeah. Yeah, it's a reinvestment cycle, which has been fun, right? But it's kind of a, because you can see opportunities, different ways you can grow, and nothing's ever different. Like every year's exciting, something else is happening. New stories are coming out. Like a lot of it goes into investing in new stories, to be honest. Researching the stories, things like that. But yeah, that's kind of, that's where we're at. So your yearly churn is 5%. You know, $100 per year per customer. How long, I mean, it's still early, you're five and a half years in. How long are customers staying? What's your like, year-over-year churn? Or like, lifetime value, I guess. What's the lifetime value of a customer? A month lifetime value right now is about $180. For across 12 months, really? 12 months, yeah. Wow, why not closer to 100 if they're paying Two stories. 12 bucks a month, okay. So you'll have a customer, and this is not uncommon. They see your ad, they're like, oh wow, I'm gonna gift this to my mom and to my sister so that I too. And then, you know, later on, they're like, you know what, I'd like to do this. And they buy it for themselves. So now that person has spent upwards of $300, depending on what, how many, do a 10 or whatever. But we have a lot of repeat purchasers. I saw one, someone bought like 10 for their friends, and I was like, man, that's crazy. I mean, incredible. How do we get more of those? Because you still spent 40 or 50 bucks to find that customer too, you know? Yeah, but it's also, we have a really strong core of people that, when we release a new story, they're excited to sign up for it. Because they love what we do, and they know, they kind of know what to expect from us, from a story perspective. We're not trying to be edgy, we're not trying to like scare you, we're not trying to like throw anything in this controversial, the stories are all designed to be just full of light, happy endings. You know, we're not apologetic about that, we're not trying to throw any curveballs at you. But our customers appreciate that and really like that. And so, if they're spending $180 per year, do you know how many are coming back for a second year? It depends, a lot of it bleeds into the other, because it'll be, they'll buy two, and then six months later, they'll buy another one. And then, you know, a year later, they'll buy another one. So, we'll have win-back campaigns, where people maybe haven't, you know, they're paying attention, you know, we have another story, so we'll do email campaigns to try to win them back. I think we've built a really good core of loyal customers. Now, it's sort of hard, because it just doesn't renew, right, it's not like, after your story's done, you don't just roll into another one and pay against. You sign up individually for each story. But that makes it a little bit more challenging for us to really get subscription data. We also don't process our annual subscriptions through a subscription software. We kind of do that on our own, and we use a software from month to month. And so, we don't get as much, we kind of get the, the software's good, because it gives you more, like, a subscription. We treat them a little bit differently, because they're sort of buying that story, that experience. And we don't have to pay 1% to the subscription, for the prepaid. If Mother's Day is 10 out of 10 busy, what is Christmas, Thanksgiving, how does that compare, on a scale of one to 10? Well, they all feel 10 out of 10. Christmas can actually be a little bit more hectic, because, just from a personnel standpoint, that's when people want to go be with their families, and want to, and so, now that we have people staffed, it's a little bit more challenging. But Mother's Day usually, you know, goes really well. Yeah, I think from a business standpoint, Mother's Day's 10 out of 10, say nine out of 10 for Christmas. And what does your team look like? How many people do you have? And logistically, are you in, like, a warehouse? Do you have automation equipment for stuffing all these, or are people doing that by hand? It's all by hand. So, the way that, and we have a warehouse, just over in Orem, Utah. Right now, our headcount's 16. We've had as many as 25. But, we've built in, like, our operations manager is fantastic. To give you an example of how efficient he's gotten us, we used to have, like, 15 people stuffing 20,000 letters. Now we have five doing 120,000 a month. Holy cow, that's incredible. But, yeah, it's very high touch. So, people are handling each and every piece that you get. It's come through the hands of our team. It's funny, I talk to a lot of business owners, and nine out of 10 times, it's like, how are you using AI? How is AI gonna transform your business? How are you gonna make more money with AI? And with this business, I'm just thinking about it, and it's like, you don't need AI. But then, that's a feat. Well, I guess, you don't want AI to write your letters. Right? You're not gonna get AI to stuff your envelopes anytime soon. You could use it in your meta ads, but how are you using AI? So, AI has been, I'm fascinated, I love it. I think it's just this incredible opportunity. I mean, if I were gonna start a business, it would be an AI business. There's tons of them you can start. But I use it every day to process thought. I'll do analysis on a string of emails I've received. Pull in data from our Facebook ads, and have it run an analysis on our efficiency. Put in our financials, right? Plug in our financials, have it do an analysis, and give us some insight into how we're operating. But yeah, you're right, we wouldn't use it to write the letters. I think there's some that are probably using AI to write letters, things that they're doing and generate images. And I think time will tell how well-received AI-generated entertainment is. I do know that the entertainment industry is, I mean, they're already using it. They're already leveraging it. Yeah. From a writing standpoint. But yeah, for me, it's more about business intelligence, running and bouncing ideas. Sure. I generated a webpage. It took five minutes, and it was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I don't think I told you this, but my wife is in the middle of starting a snail mail business for cooking. Cool. Yeah, it's called snailmailsupperclub.com. Nice. And got a couple selfish questions for you. Sure. And she's starting it because she read a book called Bread and Wine, and she was inspired to start a cookbook club with her friends, where every month they meet, they all bring their own meal, appetizers, entrees, desserts, around a central theme. Like this month was Greece, or Mexico, or St. Patrick's Day, or a country, or a day or a theme. And they all kind of have a group chat, and they just bond over it, and they share their food, and they dress up all nice. And she has absolutely loved it. So she heard my episode with Hannah, and she's like, I could just turn that business into a snail mail business, where I could write the recipes out, and we could get some artwork done. And it's great for referral marketing because we're encouraging groups. So one person signs up, the chance that they send it to their seven friends is much higher. They don't have to, they could do it themselves, but then they'd each get a unique recipe. So there's kind of some logistical challenges there. But she's launching for Mother's Day. And I'm curious, like, what other niches do you think that could be really interesting with this snail mail business that you're really not interested in tackling, but you see opportunity in? Oh, the recipe's interesting. There's a friend of mine that started a company called Peachy Recipe. You can essentially upload your own recipes, and they'll print out a cookbook for like a family cookbook. It's pretty neat. Oh, cool. But yeah, the recipes ones, that's unique and fun. I think when there's a lot of this, any sort of like, the pen pal one is interesting. We have people that, I think there's other pen pal businesses that do it. I'm just trying to think. Anything that's like a standalone, like once a month thing, is way simpler than getting into the story business. The story business, it's a much different animal to tackle because when you have to write a story, that's difficult. Recipes and things like that would be interesting. Someone was like, hey, you should do Santa letters. And I was like, huh, that's in our brand. But I know there's a couple people that do Santa letters around Christmas, and they do well. Guys, I hate to break it to you, but you're not very likely to actually start a business based on something you see or hear on this podcast, unless you spend a little more time with me and with other people that are doing just that. So come check out TKOwners. That's TKOwners.com, where hundreds of people are launching, starting, testing, experimenting with business ideas that they heard from this podcast. If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together. Check out TKOwners.com. We'd love to have you. What about true crime? There's a business called the Hunt a Killer, and they do true crime boxes, right, where you solve, that's like $150 million a year business. That's huge, yep. And so why not take that and put it in a letter form and just a true crime story or like a puzzle, something to decode, you know? I think there's one that does it. I think I saw one that is doing that. Good, they proved the model. Yeah, we can go copy them. What it comes down to, honestly, that the reason those companies were so successful, one, they knew their market, and they marketed the heck out of it. It's all meta ads. Yeah. I think you can only go organic in your business so far. Yeah. Especially when something's sort of niche, where it's not a mass market appeal. You're gonna need to advertise a market and brand and develop e-commerce skills, you know, CRO. Like, CRO, I didn't even know what that was. Conversion, for the listener, conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization, like. Getting 3% of people to buy to 3.2% of people to buy. That could be a lot of money. 3.15, that's. Yeah, there you go. And it's like, it's the craziest stuff. Hey, let's make this button green. Yeah, let's move it from the left to the right side of the page. Who cares? Like, why would you care about that? It's like, well, when you have 100,000 people come to your website in a five day period, that could be significant. Yeah. The fact that a button's green, and people are more likely to click on it, it's wild. It's kind of crazy. Or if you learn, like, Samsung users in Turkey, for some reason, like, the checkout button doesn't load correctly. So, there's so many one-off things, and in aggregate, it can really make a big difference. It's huge, yeah. If you're an entrepreneur or you're a business owner, you probably see people, you know, coming up in your feed, telling you you're doing it wrong. Let me show you how to do this. Let me show you how to do that. You have to know your business. You have to know your, like, if you don't know your customer, none, or your business, or your product, none of it's gonna work. You gotta know who your customer is. You gotta know how to talk to them. That's why, early on, the more someone can really, truly understand who it is they're selling to, and who it is, is their customer, the better off they're gonna be. Because people ask us, well, who's your customer? It's like, well, anybody with a mom. It's like, hmm, no, that doesn't work. Well, it's a great Mother's Day gift. Well, everyone has a mom, so just market to everybody. It's like, well, no, there's a specific demographic, a specific type of person that this will resonate with. Marketing for us, marketing to men, it hasn't worked. It just doesn't work. Because we don't get it. Men see this, and within a 30 second, it's very difficult to get. I hope I don't sound sexist, but. No, no, not at all. I don't think about it. You have to hook them. In your head, you have to hook them. Ironically, like, if, I mean, most of the people that watch this will be men. And by the time they get to the end of it, they're watching it for business reasons, but they're probably like, you know, I'm gonna get that for my mom. Because they're sold. But if they were to see a video, the same type of video, you would not hook them in the first five seconds. It's been super fun to figure out all that stuff. But it can drive you nuts. It can drive you wild. There is an 80-20 to all of it. You have to, at some point, you have to stop moving pixels, right? Yeah. Well, my last question for you, I wanna be respectful of your time, is if someone's watching this and they're entrepreneurial and they wanna start some sort of a snail mail subscription business, what is some advice that you could give them that could help them save themselves a world of pain or hurt or all that? Know your customer. Know and, but also know what you're signing up for. If you're doing a story, it's much harder than doing a standalone month-to-month. Because a story is, you know, you have to get it right, it has to come in order. You have to tie it all together. Yeah, yeah. Well, first you have to write a story, right? One of the reasons why it works so well with my wife and I is she's the creator, right? And I think most people, and I think it's not with Hannah, my wife's name's Hannah as well, but with the person you have on your podcast, works well with us is she can really focus on the creative and I can really focus on the business. Yeah. And when you have a creative venture, it's very difficult. So authors, that's why authors and writers and creators, creatives often struggle, is because they just wanna create. They wanna write, they wanna do this, they wanna do their art, right? Which they should do, but you gotta sell it. And so you gotta figure out, okay, now how do we marry these things together and really get a customer base and make a viable business out of this thing that I'm creating? Yeah, I think that would be know your customer, figure out the business side. And if you can have a partner, whether it's a spouse or a friend, that can handle one side of the business and the creative, because it's a creative endeavor, right? Probably with your wife, if you run, maybe to help her run the business side and she does the creative side with hers, it could be a match, great match, because you can see your tracking, customer lifetime value, your acquisition cost, and all the different business, and she can focus on, ah. Because that, honestly, enabling the creative is, because that's your product. That's the magic, right? That's squelched in any way, shape, or form. It's not gonna be as good. But I'd say that, I don't think that's just for Snama, I think that's for any business. Have creative minds, business minds that can really help understand the ins and outs of business, but also, I mean, the more you think about any business, like the creative, I think sometimes we undervalue creativity and the creative minds in business. I think if people have a hard time finding or knowing their customer, because I agree, that's paramount advice. Know who your customer is. If you don't really know how to figure that out, just start with a customer of one, you, right? And my wife and I had a conversation about this snail mail business is, she wanted to take videos of her making all the recipes and then put a QR code in there so people could watch how to make it. And I was like, okay, great idea, but that's a very big lift. That's a lot more of a lift than what you're currently planning on. And I asked her, would you, do you watch videos of people cooking when you make meals for us? And she's like, no. I'm like, well, build it out for you. If you're not likely to do that, then people aren't likely to do it either. And so, if it's not a big lift, then try it, but if it is, then maybe just give it a month or two before you try it. No, that's really actually insightful because when Hanni was creating our first story, which is Audrey Rose, she wrote it for her. And she wrote it, it's like, I'm gonna write this for me and I'm gonna curate this so that it's something that I love. Turns out, wow, there's lots of different people that like it. And now they feel loyal to her because they're like her. We like people that are like ourselves, right? Right. So, it's good business. I think people need to remember the markets are huge. Like, I think sometimes it's hard to fathom. Like, just think about 100,000 people. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people. Times that by 10, that's a million, that's a lot of people. Times that by 10, that's a lot of people with a lot of different preferences. And just because you haven't sold anything doesn't mean the market's not there. You just have to keep trying. You have to keep finding it, iterating, and it could be, try weird things, I don't know. But there's markets for just about everything out there. I think a lot of people get discouraged because they're like, all right, got it, launching it and nobody buys. Like, all right, it didn't work. Yeah, yeah. I also have a theory that I tried, because a business is all transactional. It's, to me, it's whether it's a transaction of coming into a store, and I think that's a transaction. I came into the store for some reason. I transacted by walking through the threshold into the store. I transacted by picking something up and feeling it. And then ultimately, the final transaction is a financial transaction where they purchase your goods or your services. Number one leading indicators of a successful financial transaction is someone giving you their email address, because they want to get what you're sending. There's a way, a secret, and if I were to start another business that would do this, I would develop a product concept idea, and I would build a website. I would put up a form, coming soon, here's my product, here's what I'm doing, here's my service, give me your email address, stay up to date. If I can just run some ads, just little things here and there, and I can find a pretty good mass of people that are willing to transact with me through their email address, I'll say, okay, I think I got something going here. I think there's maybe something here. That's a really easy way to test a market. Sounds easy, but, oh, I've got to build a website, it's like, well, that's easier now than ever, you know? But anyway, that's something that people could try, before they really invest anything. That's excellent advice. Michael, thank you for your time. This has been incredible. Obviously, we can find you at theflowerletters.com. Is there anywhere else that we can find you? Social media, the.flower.letters. But yeah, our website's the best. You'll find links to all of our social media there, and obviously, you can sign up for our email list as well, and hear from us there. Awesome, thank you. Thank you, man, I really appreciate it. Great to meet you. All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on The Kerner Office.