Chapter 1: What is the focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, you guys learned from Johnny Naster, how he gets 8,000 downloads per episode and how he landed a copy blogger partnership. Okay, Top Tribe, our guest today has a great name. His name is Nathan Chan and he is the publisher and editor of Founder Magazine, a digital magazine for young entrepreneurs on the App Store and Google Play Store.
Now, his story is amazing. He launched Founder in March of 2013 from his bedroom and in a small period of time, it's become a top 10 ranked business and investing magazine on the App Store. Now, his magazine has had so much success, he was a finalist for Publisher of the Year for 2014 in the Digital Magazine Awards.
And his magazine features interviews with the world's top entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, and much more. Nathan, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's do this. Awesome. I can't wait. Thank you for making time. I know it is, I think, 11 p.m. where you are in Australia right now. Is that right?
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, hey, time soon.
Well, we're going to be fast and we're going to be efficient. And then you can head right off to bed energized from the interview. So walk me through exactly what, you know, Founder Magazine, what it is and what it sells for in the app store.
So we're a digital publication, as you said, targeting young entrepreneurs, early stage startups. And you can access the magazine for $2.99 a month, direct debit or $21.99 a year. And it's for mobile and tablet devices on the App Store and Google Play Store.
You said $21 per year? Yep. Interesting. Okay. And so walk us through, I want people to get a little bit more context about kind of the emotion behind why you did this. So tell us a little bit more about why you created Founder Magazine and why it's important for you, to you.
Yeah. So, you know, I could, I'll try and go in the most roundabout way, pretty much, Found as my first serious business, I've always, I always wanted to become an entrepreneur. I didn't know where to start.
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Chapter 2: How did Nathan Chan launch Founder Magazine?
I didn't know, there's so much information out there. I didn't know what to trust. I'd read a lot of business books and I'd read, you know, the traditional business magazines, but they didn't really sit well with me. So I'm creating a publication and now a platform That really helps and equips entrepreneurs that are, I guess, in the early stage startup founder space.
So, you know, for aspiring novice stage entrepreneurs.
That's great. And so walk us through how old is it? You said you founded it in back in 2013, right? Yeah, so two and a half years. Two and a half years. So walk us through, again, I'm not familiar with how you actually sell something in the Google Play, or I know how it works in the App Store, but I assume people are just logging on with, say, their Apple ID.
They're purchasing the $2.99 per month thing, and it's just like purchasing a regular app. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. It's just in-app purchases. Great. And so walk us through how many people have decided between Google Play and Apple, how many have decided to purchase the $2.99 per month option?
Yeah, that's a great question. So we've got collectively across not just the $2.99, but the yearly, just over 25,000 monthly readers.
Got it. And are monthly readers the same as paying customers or is there a free option?
Uh, No. That's paid customers.
That's fantastic. So you're obviously, I mean, that's amazing. So we talk to SaaS entrepreneurs on here all the time that are thinking about lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, things of that nature. Just like Peter Shallard was in episode three, where he built up essentially 37 grand a month. You, it looks like, he has a really high ARPU.
You've got a much lower average revenue per user at three bucks per month, but you've got so many readers, 25,000. How Walk us through, do you remember when you got your first paying customer and can you tell us a little bit about that story?
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Chapter 3: What pricing model does Founder Magazine use?
But for the most part, majority, it's on monthly.
Would you say more than 80% of the 25,000 are paying monthly?
No, probably about, probably about 60%. And then, yeah, probably, yeah, then the rest is one-off issue purchases and yearly, they build up.
I asked these questions, Nathan, and this is why I was excited to talk to you because we've all done, most of us have probably read the Harvard Business case study. that Time Magazine did where they had pricing options for the magazine.
And it was basically, I'm going off the cuff here, but it was basically for just the print version, it's, you know, a hundred bucks for the year, but for the print and online version, it's a hundred bucks per year. And obviously they were positioning that to sell the second plan more at the same price because there was, you know, it did some weird psychology stuff.
Walk us through, have you ran any experiments around the $2.99 per month, which comes out to about, what is that, $36 per year versus the $21 per year?
Yeah, no, that's a really great question. I wish I could say I have, but I haven't. You know, one thing with the magazine is I've realized that it's it's an entry-level product and it's a way to build our community, but there's so many more ways to service our community. So with the magazine and the whole founder brand, I've realized it's a multifaceted platform.
And I actually haven't really told anyone this, but I've realized also that the amount of impact we make and from a lead generation standpoint is it's probably in our best interest to make the magazine free. So actually, this is going to be really interesting. In the next six to 12 months, you will probably see the magazine for free.
Oh, interesting. Well, let me just make sure I get the revenue math right first. So if you've got about 60% of 25,000, right, or about 12,500 people paying three bucks a month, you're cranking in a healthy, you know, 37 to maybe 45,000 bucks per month just on that. Is that accurate?
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