A Few Quick Updates For Ya

I wanted to share some updates with you real quick.

This isn't part of a marketing campaign or some sort of sequence to eventually get you to buy something. I just wanted to shoot you a raw and honest account of what's been happening and where our heads have been since about November.

The last few months have been a whirlwind for me and Joe. We caught the NFT bug and got so consumed by it that we decided to go "all in."

We shut down the Evergreen Profits Letter after 5-years of publishing it. This was a combination of our renewed love of crypto AND because the rising fulfillment costs made the letter unprofitable. We spent a TON of time producing it only to break even.

We partnered with Adam Schaeuble and his Download Growth Club so that anyone who purchases PodHacker got access to his course and anyone who grabbed his course received PodHacker access. This partnership led to Adam taking over the day-to-day operations of PodHacker (and PodHacker customers getting WAY more value than they originally signed up for).

We also ended all of our existing sponsorship agreements on our podcast because they didn't totally align with the new topics we wanted to discuss.

Outside of affiliate marketing and some crypto earnings, those were our three main internal revenue streams for our business...

To be honest, we even stopped putting much focus on affiliate marketing. We have a couple of profitable ad campaigns running right now but the numbers aren't anything your typical internet marketing guru would brag about.

Before I get into what we've been up to, I want to share what I think the biggest mistake that we made was...

It wasn't shutting down the products that we have control over... That's a decision we're still very much happy we made.

It wasn't that we turned down our affiliate marketing efforts to a low-simmer. It's been quite nice to have a bit less maintenance there.

It wasn't even going all-in on crypto a couple of months before the markets erased so much of the gains made in 2021. Nope, we continue to get more bullish by the day.

The biggest mistake that we made was that we stopped reaching out to you as often as we used to.

We started traveling down a different path with our content and our day-to-day workflow and we snubbed our noses at most of the existing digital marketing that we were doing. We had this idea that "web3" and crypto were the new way and that digital marketing as we knew it was dying.

We stopped playing with Facebook ads, gave up on SEO, and stopped shooting out emails as often. We totally threw the baby out with the bathwater, as the saying goes.

We made these stupid assumptions that, since we were going in a new direction, the people that were paying attention to us in the past wouldn't be interested in what we've been up to.

But, holy hell, that couldn't be further from the truth. In the months since we've "course corrected," our show has grown faster than it ever has before, passing the massive 1 MILLION download milestone. A thriving Discord community has sprouted up and our Twitter engagement is the best it's ever been.

You all embraced the changes we made when we thought everyone would hate us for them.

So we were scared. We were scared to send you emails and keep you in the loop. We honestly thought that, since we weren't talking FB ads and list building tactics anymore, you probably didn't want to hear from us.

But we've been proven wrong over and over again... Hence this email, promising to stay in touch more often and keep you in the loop on our new journey.

We know this new journey isn't for everyone and that some people who may have followed us forever are going to fall away. But those of you that are still interested and/or just plain curious... We're back and we're here for you.

So... What have we been up to? It sounds like we have no revenue streams anymore.

In some regards that's kind of true. We get some commissions from our longstanding affiliate partners like Thrivecart and Convertbox and we do earn royalties from our deal with Adam on PodHacker but those combined don't quite cut it.

(Those are affiliate links BTW, if you want to support us by using them, we'll hook you up with sweet bonuses)

We've actually just been going deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole.

We started by talking about crypto and web3 as a whole, including blockchain tech, NFTs, gaming, DeFi, etc. You name it, we wanted to learn and talk about it.

The deeper we dug, the deeper we realized the rabbit-hole went. Saying that we have a business that does "crypto" is like saying that we have a business that does "internet stuff." It's just a broad topic with so many nuances and sub-niches.

We stumbled onto DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and gaming/metaverse as the two areas that really excited us. Those were the two areas that we saw a ton of active utility. DeFi was offering better returns than traditional finance right now and billions of dollars were being invested. And play-to-earn gaming has been sprouting up as a legitimate business model for gamers. There were active utility and proof of concept in both of those areas.

We dug even deeper, talked to more people, started building a little mastermind of smart folks around us and realized that gaming is where we really see the most value. Play-to-earn gaming and the metaverse will become the biggest industry in the world as more and more people realize that they can build careers by playing games.

Gamers earn an income by playing the games and earning rewards.
NFT investors can earn an income by allowing gamers to use their in-game assets and split the profits.

There are a lot of nuances to it and the opportunity is mind-blowing. We'll dive even deeper in future emails and podcast episodes but, gaming is where we see the opportunity for generational wealth by those that are actively building that space.

These realizations led to a company that we originally called Hard Fork Media. However, as we further dialed in our USP and became more clear on who we could serve with the company, we rebranded as "Hard Fork Gaming."

Yup - The 2 dudes that started a blog about personal finance in 2007 and then went on to sell courses around blogging and traffic now have a business that's purely focused on the gaming industry. 🤯

I'm not going to break down the model or the economics of the business in this email. It's already WAY longer than I anticipated but, trust me when I say, the opportunity in this space is bigger than anything we've ever seen in our lives. And we're here for it!

So here's what you can expect from us...

You can expect to hear from us via email a lot more frequently. A few times per week at least. We'll continue to cover topics in both the digital marketing space and the crypto space (likely with a large emphasis on the opportunity in gaming). The new business bridges the gap between both worlds to be honest.

You can expect to hear new interviews with founders, gamers, creators and blockchain experts on the podcast.

You can expect a much more raw, vulnerable, style of email and podcast from us. We really stopped caring about how we come across anymore as we don't technically have customers anymore. You're just going to get raw, uncensored, insights into what we're up to.

This email is going out to about 12,000 people and I expect we'll lose probably 2,000 of you over the coming weeks because some people just aren't ready or just aren't interested in what we have to say anymore...

But for the other 10,000 of you, buckle up because you will hear from us a lot more and I think we're finally ready to start pulling back the curtains on the new business and sharing all of the braingasms and "ahas" we've had recently.

LFG! 2022 is going to be exciting y'all!