Inside.com’s Search for a 1st Marketing Hire — Kevin Curry // Inside

Quotes

• “Inside is a B2B newsletter publication. We publish a bunch of newsletters covering mostly tech and business topics from AI, XR, transportation, and the automotive industry.” -Kevin

• “I think what is most notable about the Inside newsletter collections is who and where it started. It is a product that is founded by Jason Calacanis, a well-known venture capitalist and you work directly with him.” -Ben

• “Inside was previously Mahalo which was sort of the same thing, a vertical, topical content publication, and when Google and YouTube changed algorithms, that business mostly suffered because of that.” -Kevin

• “Mahalo transitioned into Inside. Initially, it was this news app that was curated content, giving news within 2 to 3 minutes, like a quick, digestible format of content. And then it was just hard for an app to get growth.” -Kevin

• “We just think that email is the best way to deal with our relationship with our readers and have direct engagement with them and usually it gets personal, so we think this is the right way to approach this but who knows in the future we could entertain doing an app again and we are exploring other mediums.” -Kevin

• “We make money two-ways, 90% of it comes from direct ad sales and thats been the core of our revenue since day one. Recently we have shifted our model to subscription model for our newsletters. So right now, we have a free version of our newsletters which is the daily brief which summarizes the most important news in the world that is happening today, and then we are launching Inside Business in a couple of weeks and its also free.”-Kevin

• “Our niche topics like Inside AI and Inside streaming, we dive deep in those and spend a lot of resources and energy on curing on the most important news in the industries and people are telling us that they would pay for the service so we decided to move to subscriptions. We are charging $10 a month for one newsletter and 25 bucks a month to unlock all our premium newsletters.” -Kevin

• “We have an in-house ad server that we have built that you can target audiences based on job functions and industry versus just the typical newsletter sponsorship fashion where you buy a whole list.” -Kevin

• “The organization as a whole has twelve full-time employees now. We are a small team with a lot of output. What we are looking to expand on, from an organization standpoint is a few more writers and more importantly, a marketer and a managing editor.” -Kevin

• “As a CRO, I am responsible for all of our revenue streams, which includes our ads in the newsletters, podcasts, and subscriptions. I have a lot of responsibility to try and tackle those channels.” -Kevin

• “Thats the thing, from a marketing perspective we have done nothing. All of our growth was organic through shares and through the newsletter. To be frank, the marketer that we are looking for has to wear a lot of hats. We need someone with a lot of skills and with a diverse toolset.” -Kevin

• “We never really had a chance yet to build a brand outside of what we are doing with our content growth strategy which is just great, great content and have a grow. So now we are thinking its to build a more cohesive brand.” -Kevin

• “I feel like this person has to be willing to take on things that they are uncomfortable with. They have been in an environment where you are testing a variety of things not just acquisition and growth but also focusing on brand and building a voice, tone, and brand.” -Kevin

• “What I hear from you is that this is very much an entrepreneurial-focused organization. You are very lean, you havent done a lot of marketing so there is a lot of meat on the bone in terms of what has to be figured out, what is the brand identity, what are the growth channels, how you are going to do retention and what is the balance of organic vs. paid.” -Ben

• “Its a startup and its a small team so, like everything you say, you can test and try for the most part. You can implement things quickly, and working with Jason Calacanis, the world-renowned angel investor. Were backed by Secoya and fun fact, Mahalo was backed by Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, so we have a really interesting history there.” -Kevin