Black Swan Street: Building in Public - Week 1

Welcome. Welcome. You have just stumbled across the best blog post series you’ll ever read. You have stumbled across “Black Swan Street: Building In Public”- a weekly series that will take you on a wild, daring, and jaw-dropping journey behind the scenes of building a media company. This is Week 1, so we will mostly just be discussing what this new weekly series means. Make sure you read to the end, as there is some surprises in here…

What Does It Mean To Build in Public?

Building in public means we'll be sharing the process of growing a media company in front of everyone (cue my crippling stage fright). Throughout this weekly series we will have one main goal: Transparency. This means we'll be showing an in-depth look at the progress, strategies, challenges, and triumphs (however few of them) that we encounter as we try and grow Black Swan Street. Basically, we'll be spending countless hours trying to grow our media company, and you get to just sit back and laugh at our mistakes.

Join us on this wild ride as we navigate the treacherous waters of content creation, audience building, and revenue generation. And, of course, we want you in on the action too! As you follow our escapades, feel free to jump in with us. Share your thoughts, offer advice (heaven knows we need it), and even feel free to throw some virtual tomatoes our way if we deserve it. This is a community-driven experience where we all learn, laugh, and grow together.

Oh. Wait. I might have skipped some formalities. I haven’t even introduced myself or our company. Oops. 

Who The Heck Am I and What is Black Swan Street?

My name is John Wetter. I am the CEO and Founder of Black Swan Street. I’m currently a graduate student at a Top 30 Nationally Ranked Business School, and I’m studying to get my Master of Science in Finance. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Nobody cares. And to that, I say: You’re probably right.

I just wanted to introduce myself since we’ll now be spending every week together. Okay, enough about me…

What is Black Swan Street?

Black Swan Street is a financial media/news company covering the latest business and financial news. We primarily focus on the stock market and covering events that will impact it, such as business news, economic news, etc.

We also have a newsletter that we send out weekly to our readers. Our newsletter “filters out the noise in the stock market, leaving you with a concise, yet comprehensive overview of the latest news, market trends, and actionable insights delivered straight to your inbox every Friday”. I may or may not have stolen that from our landing page, but anyways, if you’re interested, you can join for free here.

The newsletter is the central focus of Black Swan Street. All our content we make across our Website, Tiktok, Youtube, Twitter, and the various other platforms is intended to drive subscribers to our newsletter.

Where Is Black Swan Street Now?

Black Swan Street’s current newsletter stats are:

• 567 Subscribers

• 26.8% Open Rate

• 7.5% CTR

Not great, I know. But there’s a reason for this:

(Wait. Before we go into the background of Black Swan Street. Quick side note for people who don’t know the newsletter business: The Open Rate is the most important metric for a newsletter as it measures the percentage of the audience that actually opens the emails that are sent to them)

Okay, now let’s talk about some of our hiccups. Before Black Swan Street, we used to go under the name Morning Tendies. We essentially did an entire rebrand. We switched our website, domain, logo, mailing address, and anything else you can think of. And yes, this hurt our open rate. Our open rate before rebranding was 41.7%, now it's 26.8%.

But lo and behold, there’s good news. We’re fixing the problem.

We’ve sent two newsletters since the rebrand.

Below you can see the data for the first newsletter we sent after rebranding to Black Swan Street ↓

16.5% open rate. Geez. If we’re being honest, it still hurts my ego to look at this to this day.

Below you can see the data for the second newsletter, aka our most recent edition of Black Swan Street ↓

As you can see, our open rate from the first to the second newsletter increased from 16.5% → 37.1%. I gotta give myself a pat on the back for that turnaround.

The End Goal

100,000 Subscribers. The end goal for this series is to reach 100,000 subscribers for our newsletter.

As I mentioned earlier, this is a weekly series that will unfold every Sunday. In upcoming editions, we’ll be covering current strategies, challenges, data, etc. We had to lay the groundwork for this first edition and explain what this series will look like, and explain where Black Swan Street stands now.

Ladies and gentlemen hold onto your hats because this is just the beginning of our adventure. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for Black Swan Street.

Subscribe to Black Swan Street and help us reach our goal ↓