Hello, Again…

2023.7.2

A friend who I haven’t caught up with in two years asked me to email her about what I’ve been up to; I’ve been thinking about how to respond to that question for the past week.

What have I been up to? Quite frankly, I don’t even know where to start, nor do I want to take up the challenge of cramming a couple of years into a couple thousand words.

I’ve been a lot of different people over the past 2 years. Being someone who loves social media has NOT been one of them.

Enter this newsletter. Some of the content here will be current, some will be from the past. Over time, it will paint a picture of what I’ve done & what I’m doing. This is my attempt at never not having a good answer for what I’ve been up to again.

This is a pet project, not a business endeavor. I want to sharpen my writing. I’m trying out a weekly cadence, but if it gets boring, please let me know.

If we haven’t spoken in a while, I may mention things that you don’t have context on; over time, the very existence of this newsletter should solve for that. If there’s anything you’re curious about & want more color on right now, I presume you have my number.

I’ll play around with the formatting and content until I find something I like. This first draft will center on a problem that’s been confounding me over the last week. I promise that all of these won’t anchor on business; this just happens to be what’s on my mind right now.

Current Problem

One of my focuses this past week was on developing a strategy for promoting a newsletter for Ultima Insights, an AI fintech company I founded with some friends. We’ve raised an angel round for it; Ultima and my fund are what I will be focusing on for at least the next year.

Our challenge at hand is getting Ultima’s AI powered newsletter from 30 subscribers to 1,000. Via messages to friends, we’ve pushed it above 60 over the last few days. The next 900 or so is going to be the hard part.

Our daily digest sends each user AI generated summaries of news directly and indirectly relevant to publicly traded companies in their watchlist. In the long term, Ultima is not meant to be a media company; rather, the newsletter is a land & expand strategy for high price point B2B offerings that we have in the works.

Our conundrum is one of focus. If we market the newsletter as just another investing email, our customer acquisition net will be too wide. So, we are debating on honing in on a few industries — as an example, some of our highest engagement content as of now is about oil & gas companies.

Once we lock in on an industry or two, we then have to experiment with actually marketing to people who care about those sorts of stocks. Ideally, this group is largely composed of people who could later be enterprise customers of future products. So, we have to hone in on where those people might be found on the internet.

I’d love to chat on this if you have any ideas, suggestions, or know any email marketers who’d be willing to brainstorm with me. Of course, you can always drop the digest a free subscription to help us get to 1,000 :)

Travels

Since 2021, I’ve visited Iceland, Italy, France, Switzerland, British Columbia, Montreal, and a slew of states and cities in the US. Some highlights include a pilgrimage to the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting, a number of entrepreneurial retreats in Northern Michigan, a trip to California to watch Peter Thiel speak and then stay in an OpenAI dominated hacker house (pre GPT), and a few excursions to NYC. I won’t go in depth on any of these travels right now, but expect me to expand on one or two of them in later letters.

Right now, I’m staying in Austin at another hacker house put together by one of my friends. This is where I am writing the draft you are reading.

Some Quotes

DISCLAIMER: I don’t know who originated these quotes, I only know who I heard them from. Possibly slightly paraphrased.

Thank You

Thanks for reading my first go at it, &, more importantly, thanks for being in my life.

I have a lot more to say, I just really wanted to get something out so I stopped pushing it off; the rest will come out slowly but surely. This is sort of like our first date. Be patient.

Cheers,

Noah Jacobs