The true cost of speed

In business, speed is expensive.

It’s one of the most sought-after elements. I would say that the master addiction of an entrepreneur is the feeling of momentum.

The problem? Most entrepreneurs don’t know the difference between true momentum and actual momentum. Further, most entrepreneurs don’t know when it’s time to simply wait or when to speed up.

Most great businesses can fall quickly if momentum is used the wrong way.

This week, we acquired LetterGrowth.com, a service that allows people who have newsletters to “swap” with other people who have newsletters. It allows you to easily and effectively grow your newsletter.

By itself, it wouldn’t have a super high level of value. However, it allowed us to do something important— it gave us momentum.

See, we’re about to launch www.audienceswaps.com, which is a tool for creators to do these “swaps”. Not just with newsletters but rather for every single type of audience. From podcasts to websites, Facebook groups, and social media.

When I saw LetterGrowth, I saw the opportunity to add 700 newsletters (and access to 6 million subscribers) to AudienceSwaps, reducing our “ready” time by at least a few months.

Further, after purchasing www.newsletters.co, www.sponsorthisnewsletter.com, www.duuce.com and launching www.sponsorships.com, it gave us a property that would easily tie into our ecosystem for our media-based rollup.

In this case, I had to ask myself the question… “Do I want to spend the time to build this, or can I just buy it?”

In reality, it would be both cheaper to purchase LetterGrowth and allow us to launch AudienceSwaps in July instead of August (or, at worst, September).

Further… AudienceSwaps.com will integrate with Sponsorships.com (upon full launch in Fall 2024)…

Which will allow us to share the data, giving our creators and entrepreneurs the ability to not just grow through paid sponsorship but also through swapping audiences.

This is just one simple option for buying more momentum, and in my opinion, this is the right time to buy more momentum.

However, there’s also times when buying more momentum simply doesn’t make sense…

One of the advantages of having a portfolio company It allows you to be mindful that not every business is meant to scale every month of the year, or even every year.

In business there are times for building… growing… scaling… stabilizing and profiting… If you mismatch the season and attempt to build momentum outside of that season, you generally waste time and money.

As an example, we acquired www.alittlesparksofjoy.com about 4 months ago. It’s a website with well over 1 million visitors per month in the spirituality and personal development niche (one of our three core niches).

Our core thesis is that we could take a website that generates only revenue from display ads and turn it into a business with 5–7 revenue streams.

At the moment, it’s going slow— why? We’re building infrastructure that both allows us to prove our thesis and sets up our ability to duplicate this easily, which would allow us to purchase niche websites and turn them into media and education businesses. Once we have this done and are done laying the foundation, it’ll be time to build momentum and potentially purchase it.

With this business, we have at least another 3 months of “playing it cool” and another 9 months before I believe we’ll be ready to put the same “buying momentum” that we are doing inside of our media rollup.

The problem is that most Entrepreneurs don’t have patience…

And without it… you do things far before their season… or you don’t double down when it’s time to actually grow and scale.

Just because you can scale doesn’t mean you need to do that.

Just because you can build it yourself doesn’t mean you have to do that.

When you pair the season of your business with the right momentum choices, you obtain high levels of growth while continuing to profit and without losing your resources.

In our media roll-up, we’ve tested our business thesis, we believe in it and now we know it’s not the time to “wait”…

We’re building a rollup of media companies (including newsletters)…

Along with a rollup of businesses to help support those media companies… and for our current season, it’s building through acquisition, allowing us to obtain the critical mass required to build a sustainable, profitable, and high impact business in the creator space.

The core lesson is: know your season, and the rest is easy.

- Scott Oldford

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