In this week's episode, we talk with the co-founder of Swapstack about how writers can earn a living with newsletter sponsorships.

Each episode of Creator Kit is a deep dive on a particular tool or service that can help you take your creator business to the next level. Creator Kit is presented by HiBeam: we solve comment and DM overload for creators; follow HiBeam on Twitter and subscribe on YouTube for more great content.

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Jake is the co-founder of Swapstack, a marketplace that connects newsletter writers with brand sponsorships. He also writes The Premoney List, a newsletter that helps connect founders with advisors and investors.

On today's show, we talk about the fast growing newsletter space, what sponsors are looking for when working with writers, and why it's easier than ever for writers to earn without sacrificing their brand or reader experience.

Here are some of our favorite takeaways from the conversation:

1. Writers wear many hats; but some hats fit better than others

Like most other creators, writers must juggle skillsets to successfully grow their businesses. That's not always easy when it comes to sponsorship sales.

The issue that arises with sponsorships is that most of the writers and creators that we work with, they're really awesome at building audiences. And they understand the writing process. They're really good writers, but they're not salespeople and they never ran a business. And all of a sudden they have to switch their brain and become a salesperson... and do this whole process of actually going through the sales process, finding sponsors, et cetera. And that's a muscle that they haven't flexed before.

2. Newsletter sponsorships can pay the bills

Compared to other digital ad formats, newsletter sponsorship revenue can add up quickly.

What we see writers typically being able to charge brands (while still driving good brand results) is anywhere between $30 and $50 cost-per-thousand open. Cost-per-thousand open is our equivalent to a digital CPM. So a writer that has 10,000 subscribers and a solid open rate, they can make a couple hundred bucks a week by working with a brand. And that scales pretty well. You get to 50,000 subscribers, you can make a good amount as a side gig, or turn it into what Packy [McCormick] is doing and make a full living off of the newsletter.

3. Personal brands require careful partnerships

Because of the personal nature of the reader/writer relationship, the bar for sponsorship-to-newsletter match is high.

Generally newsletter sponsorships are much more genuine because the writers actually care, first and foremost, about their readers and their reader experience. And generally they're only going to work with sponsors that they know that the readers would react well to. So there's a built in quality and content adjacency that doesn't necessarily happen in a lot of other mediums.

Guest Links:

• Jake on Twitter

• Swapstack on Twitter

• Swapstack Website

• The Premoney List

This is Creator Kit, HiBeam’s podcast series on the tools that help creators thrive. If you enjoyed the conversation and don’t want to miss future episodes, just hit subscribe on iTunes, stream on Spotify, or plug our RSS feed in your player of choice. You can also read the full transcript of the interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity, below.

Jesse Clemmens: Awesome. Jake, thanks so much for coming on. Welcome to the Creator Kit podcast.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. Thanks for, uh, thanks for having me.

Jesse Clemmens: I'm really excited to talk about your company Swapstack today. We were about eight episodes into the podcast and we've focused a lot on different social platforms and video, and I've talked a little bit about podcasting, about one topic area that we haven't got to today or haven't got to yet is the newsletter space. So really, really interested to hear about your world and what you're building and what challenges creators are facing in the world of newsletters. Because it's a really exciting space that as you had mentioned in our prep call, a lot of folks have gotten into recently and it feels fresh and new and exciting and a huge opportunity. You and I met because I'd originally pinged your co-founder Jake Singer. I had followed his newsletter, the Flywheel for a little while and had come across his name again in one of these creator economy builders groups that is a great place where folks working on stuff in this space congregate.

And then I realized that you and I are actually former co-workers, although we didn't really cross paths, but we were both at Facebook in New York in similar times. So it's, I guess I can't say it's good to reconnect, but it's good to meet you. And I have enjoyed our chat so far. Sorry we didn't meet you earlier. Always good to talk to a former Facebooker as well.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah, definitely. I think we addressed this earlier, but I think, I'm sure we cross paths in the cafeteria at some point maybe over, an avocado toast or something.

Jesse Clemmens: Definitely, definitely. Cool. So I'd love to start and hear about your personal journey just briefly. How did you get into the newsletter space? How did you come to found Swapstack and- and what led you to work on this particular problem for creators?

Jake Schonberger: Before I was working on Swapstack, I had started in a newsletter called, called the Premoney List. I started the Premoney List as a result of having worked in the VC industry a bit. So I was doing some scouting mainly with a fund called Amplifyher Ventures, awesome pre-seed fund out of New York. They focus on female founders and I was basically sourcing companies to bring to them, to potentially invest in. And realized that generally that process while the fund is amazing, the process of scouting is pretty inefficient for founders. And what I wanted to do was expand the value that I could create for those founders. So I basically just turned the scouting process into a newsletter. I'm not a proper writer. So basically what I do is just curate a couple companies, two companies every week that are in the process of raising money, focus on female and BIPOC founders.

I try to keep a good balance there, and I send that newsletter out weekly to a group of investors and make introductions when an investor is interested. And during that process, I met other Jake, Jake singer, who has a newsletter, as you mentioned, the Flywheel, he's a proper writer. It's a really good newsletter. And we were both trying to figure out: how can we monetize our work? How can we monetize the audience that we're building with newsletters? And through a bunch of conversations, we started meeting a bunch of other creators that had really large audiences. They didn't know how to monetize their own work or their own audiences, and we realized, hey there's an opportunity to help those creators, help ourselves and honestly, we started doing the very manual work.

We found a couple companies that were interested in doing creator marketing. We connected them to the creators or the other writers that we were talking to and kind of just manually on an agency basis, kind of just connected them and ended up helping them run sponsorships. And that was kind of the moment to realize, Hey, we can build a product around this to help ourselves, but also help all these other writers.

Jesse Clemmens: Really cool. I think some of the best solutions that I've seen in the creator space have come out of needs that the founders had for their own purposes and their own creative endeavors. It's cool to hear the background story for those that are not as familiar with the newsletter space, what is it that makes advertising and monetization more challenging in the newsletter space? 'Cause if you think about like websites, if a creator has started a website and started to get some traffic flowing you usually would take like a Google AdSense tag and plug it into a page and you're off and running. But I understand newsletters are a bit more complex. What's the deal?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. So answers from both sides. So from the writer side, and then from the brand side. From the writer side, there is actually depending on what ESP or Email Service Provider you use, you can use something like LiveRamp, which is essentially a programmatic ad.

Jesse Clemmens: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Jake Schonberger:The ads end up, honestly, just being really crappy and really low CPM. So the writers don't earn much and the readers have a really bad experience.

Jesse Clemmens: These are like banner ads, basically?

Jake Schonberger: Exactly. And there's very low content adjacency. It doesn't make sense with the content they're writing about. And the reader experience is pretty poor. In addition to that as a writer, you really only make a good amount of money if you have a couple hundred thousand subscribers. And that's just not what the majority of the creator economy has. If a creator who has say like 10,000 subscribers wants to monetize their newsletter, they can either put up a paywall and make people pay to access their content, or they can sell sponsorships in their newsletters. The issue that arises with sponsorships is that most of the writers in the creators that we work with and that we meet, they're really awesome at building audiences. And they understand the writing process. They're really good writers, but they're not salespeople and they never ran a business. And all of a sudden they have to- they have to switch their brain and become a salesperson, become a business person and do this whole process of actually going through the sales process, finding sponsors, et cetera. And that's a muscle that they either haven't flexed before or haven't built.

And that's one of the things that we came in at Swapstack, we essentially want to be every creator sales team. We want to enable creators to just write and grow their audiences and help them with the entire sales process. On the brand side, a lot of brands have recognized that niche creators, so creators that have say a 10 to 50,000 subscribers, they talk to a very specific audience. They have a really unique relationship with the people they write to. And because of that, if that creator sponsors or works with a sponsor, their audience really listens. They spend a lot of time with the content.

It's not like a programmatic ad where you're kind of scrolling, past an ad. You actually spend time and ingest it. Brands understand that value, but the issue that they have is there's thousands of newsletters out there. And it's really difficult to go out and find all the newsletters that are appropriate for their brand. And it takes a lot of time. So from the brand perspective, what we're trying to do is we go to brands, we curate the right newsletters for them to work with. We cut out a ton of time for them to go out that they would have to go out and find those newsletters work with them. And we just make that whole process a bit easier.

Jesse Clemmens: Super cool. It reminds me a little bit of what you were describing around creator size and the difficulty for advertisers to effectively connect with creators that are just smaller and that frankly, there's like a longer tail of. Reminds me a little bit of the influencer space, where sometimes if you look at Instagram as a channel, for example, micro influencers, I guess you would call them someone that has between five and 15 K followers. Sometimes they have the best engagement rates. They have the best conversion rates, but there's just so many of them that an advertiser needs to reach that it traditionally wasn't effective before some of these like marketplace solutions started to stand up. So the description of the problem makes a lot of sense to me in the newsletter side, where it sounds like there's a similar kind of ecosystem.

Jake Schonberger:Yeah. We look at a lot of the corollaries on the, the traditional influencer space, like #paid.

Jesse Clemmens: Mm-hmm [affirmative].

Jake Schonberger: We look at them and see what they're doing. The problems are very similar. And the ways that we're trying to solve those issues are kind of in line.

Jesse Clemmens: So if I'm a creator newsletter writer, I guess you guys call them writers, I guess, writers as a subgroup of creators. If I'm a writer and I sign up for Swapstack and I sign in- in the traditional 'cause I know you guys have another, uh, solution called Plug & Play, which we'll get to in a minute, if you log in, sign up as a writer, put your newsletter in a listing on the site. What is the experience like if I was to sign on for the first time?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. So you sign up, you basically build out your profile. Tell us a bit about your newsletter. We ask you like, what is your open rate subscriber count? We ask you to build kind of ad units. So the types of ad sponsorships that you're willing to take. So a classified ad, so like a really small little, say 50 character shout out of the brand. You can do a takeover, you can build a package, but essentially once you build your profile right now, it's kind of like an Upwork experience. So we show you a gallery of all the sponsors and advertisers that are looking to work with newsletters. And you can basically go and send pitch requests to those sponsors. It's basically a request to be introduced to the sponsor. And if you send a request to a sponsor that is interested in working with you, they'll approve that sponsorship or that introduction request. And we connect you over email, you hash out details. And then as a writer, you can invoice on the platform. Swapstack is a hundred percent free for writers.

So if you invoice a brand for a hundred bucks, you get paid a hundred bucks, we add 10% on the brand side, which they cover as a platform fee. In addition for you, you kind of sending sponsor requests to sponsors, anytime a new writer joins that fits the criteria of what a sponsor is looking for. We send a ping over to the sponsor and say, "Hey, this newsletter just joined. It would be a great fit for you guys." So they can also go into the platform and send out introduction requests to writers as well. So if you want to join the platform and kind of sit back and wait to get approached by brands, you can do that. Or you can jump on and send a bunch of requests and see who approves and start working with them.

Jesse Clemmens: So I guess using the comparison to banner ads and display ads that we were talking about a little earlier, it sounded like earning potentials typically higher for these types of placements. But am I right to guess that it really depends on the different format between classifieds, takeovers or all different rates. Is there anything you can share around what creators can earn for this type of placement?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah it's pretty amazing what creators can earn. So typically at least compared to say a programmatic ad on Facebook, a CPM cost per a thousand views is about $15. You probably have, uh, more updated experience. I think you left Facebook, uh, more recently than I did.

Jesse Clemmens: That sounds about accurate. Yeah.

Jake Schonberger: What we see writers typically being able to charge brands while still driving good brand results is anywhere between $30 and $50 cost per thousand open. Our cost per thousand open is our equivalent to a digital CPM. So a writer that has say 10,000 subscribers and a solid open rate, they can make a couple hundred bucks a week by working with a brand. And that's- that scales pretty well. You get to 50,000 subscribers. You can make a good, either a good, uh, amount as a side gig or turn it into what Packy is doing and- and make a full living off the newsletter.

Jesse Clemmens: Would you mind describing to the audience who is?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah, sure. When I said that, I realized maybe not everyone knows. So Packy McCormick writes a newsletter called Not Boring. It's a business, deep dive newsletter and it's been really popular. He has tens of thousands of subscribers and he works with brands. I believe he sells ads twice a week on his Monday and Thursday and he makes a couple thousand dollars off each.

Jesse Clemmens: Awesome. And he also does sort of like investment vehicle as well, where he brings- one day a week he does a sponsored- a sponsored newsletter where the newsletter is only about the company he's profiling and he's paid by the company to profile. Now he's very clear that like editorial standard or like the rules of the editorial job are a little bit different because he's very clear that he's taking money, but he also doesn't take money from any company that he doesn't sincerely believe is like a really exciting opportunity.

So it ends up being this really interesting mix that frankly, I think works really well as as a reader, I love getting them, but perfect example of someone who's like kind of paved a whole new road into modernization in a totally different way. And it's a great example of like sort of a surprising use of the medium. If you thought about- thought about newsletters, like five years ago, they were typically less associated with individuals and they were fairly straightforward, usually like distribution of blog articles. But now you have a different one on one type connection that is arguably much more powerful between the individual brand, as the creator and the end reader. And what comes along with that is this incredible marketing opportunity where trust has already been built. And so ads perform really well as unsexy as that might sound. It just really works as a way to get a marketing moment with- with readers.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah exactly, I think the Packy example is a really good example of that. As you said, he only features companies that he either believes in or has used the product of, and generally newsletter sponsorships are much more genuine 'cause the writers actually care about- they care first and foremost about their readers and their reader experience. And generally their only going to work with sponsors that they know that the readers would react well to. So there's a built in quality and content adjacency that doesn't necessarily happen in a lot of other mediums.

Jesse Clemmens: Yeah. That's such a good point. It's almost like the stakes are higher because the connection feels stronger. And if you're showing up in someone's inbox with sort of a personal appeal, it better be good compared to a website where if I go to CNN, they're almost off the hook because I know it's a banner ad. And if I see something weird or not that interesting, I can kind of go blind to it versus it feeling like a- kind of like a personal letter coming from a newsletter writer. One area that I was curious about that's more about the general newsletter space and then we'll circle back to Swapstack again. In keeping with this thread that we're talking about in regards to how newsletters are actually like a pretty cool canvas for experimentation and doing really creative stuff. Your newsletter is a good example of that.

Where in your words, not mine, you're not a proper writer so to speak.

Jake Schonberger:[laughs] that's correct.

Jesse Clemmens: But you're doing a job. You're doing a creation job that serves a super valuable purpose to the people getting this newsletter. And the other one that came to mind as like a great example of a creative use of newsletters is you might need to help me with the name. But I think that they're a Swapstack customer, is it Flow State? It's like this, work, daily sort of like daily playlists for focused music to listen to while you work.

Jake Schonberger: Exactly. Yeah they're Flow State, that's the right name. We just started working with them a couple weeks ago and Jake Singer actually used the music. So yeah, they send out a daily or weekly playlist essentially to help developers and anyone doing deep work, just get into the flow state. And it's a really unique form of curation in a newsletter format, but yeah, generally-

Jesse Clemmens: That's awesome.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. This is the direction of the question there's generally kind of two big buckets of newsletters. One is curation and one is writing. I don't know if that's the right label for the- the bucket, but curation is super valuable for- for certain reasons. It cuts out a lot of time if you are interested in very specific things and you have a creator that's curating article or news, or just tidbits and information about stuff you care about. Then that's X amount of time you don't have to waste doing it yourself. And then deep dives, like what Packy does, what Jake Singer does with The Flywheel they're completely different type, essentially a different type of medium all within the newsletter space.

Jesse Clemmens: Yeah.

Jake Schonberger: More article based story based narrative based.

Jesse Clemmens: More of like almost hybrid like knowledge/opinion product. Really cool. Okay. So I now more fully understand the kind of like core experience that a writer would have using Swapstack. I know you guys recently announced a new product called Plug & Play. Tell us a little, little bit about that. How does that differ from the core marketplace and correct me if I'm using the wrong words to describe these things?

Jake Schonberger: No. Yeah, those are the exact words we use. The core marketplace is essentially where we connect a brand and a writer together. You work very directly together and talk about what a sponsorship looks like, how it feels, what the content is. And there's usually some level of back and forth between the writer and the brand. What we noticed early on was that there was a good amount of brands that we were working with that had affiliate programs. And there was a lot of writers that came to us and said, "Hey, we have a sponsorship slot tomorrow. And do you guys have any brands that we can just like put in there right away?" And our solution to kind of solve those two problems, the one on the brand side, one on the writer's side was to create an affiliate program. But we took a slightly unique approach to that and basically created Plug & Play, which is a pre-approved affiliate program.

So the way that it works on the writer's side is you log into Swapstack. You build your profile. As you build your profile, we ask you some information about what kind of topics do you cover? What is the size of your newsletter, as I said before. And we match you up to pre-negotiated deals that we have on the brand side, based on that criteria or based on what's in your newsletter, uh, profile. So when you create your profile, you log into Swapstack. We have 15 brands that have basically pre-approved that you can run a newsletter with them or an ad with them on your newsletter. And all you have to do is basically copy a personalized link. It's a trackable link. You go to basically a creative folder that each brand has. They've plopped in a bunch of logos images, sample creative, and you basically just build your own ad and put it in your newsletter.

And it enables you to go in to Swapstack and have a paid sponsor that you can use within five minutes or tomorrow. You can basically fill any remnant inventory that you have and ensure that anytime you send a newsletter, you have a sponsor there. And on the brand side, you sign up once, we do some validation, we negotiated a deal and you kind of set it and forget it. And that's a really good way for brands to have a very hands off opportunity to get in front of a lot of different newsletters, which ultimately gets them in front of a lot of different niche audiences.

Jesse Clemmens: Cool and just one quick term definition, I'm also familiar with this word because I was in the space, but remnant ad inventory. So when you say remnant, that is basically a newsletter that's done the very best they can to get ads wherever it makes sense. You know, ads placed wherever it makes sense basically to sell ad space. Sometimes for whatever reason they have, you know, more inventory or more readers than expected, or maybe a brand could drop out at the last second, but the newsletter's going out every Tuesday and Thursday, for example, you don't wanna make no money and you would, you know, be happy in some cases to take something that's been pre negotiated, plug it in there and make as much as you can from that space rather than zero. Did I get that right?

Jake Schonberger: Yep. Yeah, that's correct. I kind of forget which to terminologies are well known and not, but yeah. Remnant inventory refers to any ad slot or any part of a newsletter that you would typically put an ad in that you just don't have a sponsor to fill.

Jesse Clemmens: Makes sense. And then as opposed to the general, like core sponsorships are the plug in play opportunities, mostly revenue shares on like sold products or like fees for getting people to sign up. How do the financials work, I guess for writers?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. So the deal that is pre-negotiated, they're all paid per conversion and each brand can kind of define what a conversion is. So that could either be, Hey, somebody signs up to run a demo with the brand or they buy a product and the writer gets a percentage or whatever the product is sold or how much the product, um, sold for. So any conversion that the brand wants to set, they basically set a fixed price per conversion to pay out the writer. So as a writer, if you drive 10 conversions to a brand, we have a brand called Fulton. They make a unique sole or in shoe insert. If you drive people to buy something from Fulton, you'll get paid out $6 per conversion, you drive. So the definition of conversion is defined by the brand. And then we negotiate basically a cost per that payment.

Jesse Clemmens: Sounds super cool. And like, because everything's already set up ahead of time and you can kind of just grab it and set it up. It sounds like actually a really easy way for someone that's just getting started. Do you expect that people will come onto the platform and use Plug & Play actually first before some of the more core experience? Or would it be the other way around?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah, so we just launched it a couple weeks ago. So we're trying to figure out exactly like what kinds of writers are more attracted to Plug & Play or not. What we do know is that Plug & Play is a really easy way, as you were saying for a writer that just launched their newsletter to have a sponsor and make a little bit of money. It's very difficult for a brand to work with a really small newsletter. It just doesn't necessarily make sense.

Jesse Clemmens: Right.

Jake Schonberger: So if there's a way that's super hands off like Plug & Play, that does enable these writers that typically wouldn't be able to get in front of a brand in a marketplace or direct fashion to run newsletters. Our expectation is that the majority of writers using Plug & Play are a little bit newer, smaller, and we'll probably see a couple of the larger writers trickle in to plug and play and use Plug & Play. One of their newsletter sponsors kind of drops out, or they wanna test out a new ad unit. Our expectation is that Plug & Play is more attractive to kind of smaller writers that haven't really started working with large brands yet.

Jesse Clemmens: Yeah, it's, it's actually interesting that I'm thinking about my experience as a newsletter reader and comparing it to, again like the traditional website experience of ads. Whereas going to a website and being hit by a bunch of display ads can sometimes be a really crappy experience so much so that a lot of people install ad blockers when I'm in a newsletter, it's much not subtle because it's def- it's the- it's in some ways more integrated into the content, but it's like less obnoxious almost.

And the other funny thing is that, especially for smaller writers, I bet that it actually like makes a newer newsletter feel more legit to the reader because they know there's like a marketer involved. Even if a reader may not know that behind the scenes, it's a pre-approved kind of self serve model. It feels legit if you're like reading a newsletter and you're like all of a sudden, oh, there's an Allbirds ad in here. Like, that's pretty cool. This- this is like a real thing, which many creators struggle with this like almost imposter syndrome when they first starting putting content out. And anything that adds to the credibility of their work is much appreciated. It's really funny to think of ads as something that can add credibility but it- it really feels like that could be a thing.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. It's a hundred percent a thing. I ran. One of our first Plug & Play partners was Masterworks. They basically are a platform that enabled people to invest in fine art. And my newsletter Premoney, I have about 1500 subscribers, nothing crazy. And I ran Masterworks as a plug and play deal in the newsletter as a sponsor. And I got a couple emails back saying, "Oh, I love Masterworks. That's pretty legit. You're working with them." And it is true, I am working with them, but I'm not necessarily- they're not like, I'm not huge. I'm not buddies with like their CEO or anything. But it does add legitimacy and the readers don't know that. So it's not, it's not trickery either, it's just adds validation.

Jesse Clemmens: Yeah. It's a nice, almost like halo effect, especially if the reader likes that brand already, which if you and the newsletter writers have done a good job of pairing the two together, then it should feel pretty cohesive. And no one has to know that you didn't like sit down in a board meeting to, with with the company to get the deal done.

Jake Schonberger: Exactly.

Jesse Clemmens: It's really awesome. I think what you guys are building is fantastic. I had one more question. You used a term earlier. Was it email service providers? ESP?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah.

Jesse Clemmens: Cool. So I'm familiar with newsletters being very associated with Substack. And then the other company that I know of is Ghost, which is, as I understand, like more of an open source newsletter platform. And then I know a whole bunch of other companies are getting into this space, Twitter, Squarespace. Does your platform at this point, interoperable with any solution or are there ESPs that Swapstack works better in conjunction with, how does that all work for someone that's just getting to started?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah, so we are actually completely platform agnostic at the moment. So a writer can work on any platform they want or write their newsletter on any platform they want and work with Swapstack. We're in the process of figuring out which of those ESPs or platforms we want to do more deep integrations with, but, you know, you could be on MailChimp or more ConvertKit and be writing your newsletters on those platforms and have a profile on Swapstack. And it's not a problem.

Jesse Clemmens: That's a beautiful thing.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah.

Jesse Clemmens: Cool.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. The purpose is to be every creator sales team. So we're trying to build the platform in a way that's as approachable and as usable for all types of creators. And I'm using the word creator because we are starting with newsletters, but we know that a lot of our writers podcasts, they have blogs. They might have other types of audiences. And the plan is to expand the platform, to support all those other, what we call creator types.

Jesse Clemmens: Awesome really exciting. I know you guys are kind of on a tear on the newsletter side already. I read kind of public number you shared, which was surpassing $200,000 paid out to creators since the company started, which was not too long, like less than a year ago, eight months, nine months ago?

Jake Schonberger:Yeah. So we technically launched our Slack community in December, but we didn't launch actual product until the end of January. So I think the end of January was the first time we actually facilitated a transaction. It took us about six months to get to the $100k marker where we paid out writers a hundred grand of sponsorships. And then about three months to get from 100k to 200k. So we're trying to keep that momentum going.

Jesse Clemmens: That's so awesome. That must be a great feeling. I like one of the reasons that I got into the crater space was because it's really exciting to beyond just building a cool company or a cool product to do something that actually helps other people in their entrepreneurial pursuits, however, big or small, and like help pay their bills, that's a cool feeling. So that must have been an amazing feeling for you guys as founders of the company.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah, honestly, there's a lot of good vibes around what we're building. Most of the creators that we work with are just super pumped about what we're building, because we're enabling them to, you know make money. And so there's a lot of good vibes going around that definitely keep us going and keep us, uh, motivated.

Jesse Clemmens: That's awesome. It's always fun to work on a product where you're sending checks out rather than asking for payment.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah, right.

Jesse Clemmens: And like paying your customers is a good position to be in.

Jake Schonberger: Sure yeah, exactly.

Jesse Clemmens: Super cool. So in the current state, can anybody sign up and where would they go to do that?

Jake Schonberger: Yeah. So anyone who has a newsletter can sign up really doesn't matter how large your newsletter is. We have solutions as we were talking about Plug & Play or direct solutions with sponsors. So you can go to Swapsstack.co and sign up.

Jesse Clemmens: Awesome.

Jake Schonberger: Yeah.

Jesse Clemmens: And we'll put that link in our show notes as well. Anyone that wants to reach you personally, what's the best place to do that?

Jake Schonberger: I'll give out my email. That might be a bad idea, but it's jake@swapsstack.co

Jesse Clemmens: Awesome. No one would've guessed.

Jake Schonberger:[laughs]And we are on Twitter @swapsstackHQ. You can DM this there too.

Jesse Clemmens: Awesome, man. This has been really fun. It's an area that I've been like newsletter space is something I've been super curious about. I love marketplace businesses. I love empowering creators to make a living. And you guys are kind of at the nexus of all those things. So thanks for talking to me. This was great. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Jake Schonberger: Thanks for having me. And this has been awesome. Looking forward to working together more deeply in the future too.

Jesse Clemmens: Sounds good. All right, Jake, have a going one.

Jake Schonberger: Cool. Thanks Jesse.