Paywall Podcast - Subscription strategies for news and magazine publishers

Pete (00:00)
Welcome to the Paywall podcast today. I have a very special guest. That's Travis Bembenek from New Mexico news daily.com. Welcome, Travis. Really great to have you here. You're the publisher and CEO and ⁓

You ready to talk some publishing success?

Travis (00:18)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete (00:49)
alright so i have a bunch of stuff to talk to hear about but the first thing i want to do for our listeners is here ⁓ what do you guys you know mexico news daily what do you guys publish what is your ⁓ content and who is your listener

Travis (01:04)
Sure, so ⁓ Mexico News Daily.

is the source of news and information in English about Mexico. Right? So my wife and I, having spent a lot of time doing business and, you know, and enjoying Mexico as tourists and now ultimately living here, we're always frustrated at the narrative that the media had about Mexico. Right? We believe it's a wonderful place. And yet the media, if you read an article, you know, in the US or Canada or Europe about Mexico,

times out of 10, it's going be negative, right? And there are negative things that do happen in this country. You there is violence in some areas. There is a cartel issue, but there's so much more to the country than that. And so our inspiration in purchasing Mexico News Daily, and we've owned it for three and a half years now, was to provide a balanced and complete perspective on the country that we felt was so missing. So today we have now over a million readers a month.

coming in to our site. And ironically, despite there being 2 million Americans and Canadians living in Mexico, 80 % of our readers are outside of Mexico. So about 60 % of our views on a typical day are in the United States, 10 % are in Canada, and then about 10 % are in Asia and Europe. So there really is a lot of interest in Mexico around the world.

for good quality, not sensationalist news.

Pete (02:43)
So if you were to segment your core reader, geographically it sounds like that's not really the target since they're all over the place. Is there anything else sort of in their profile that makes them likely to pay for a subscription?

Travis (02:53)
Right.

Sure, so I mean if you think of a couple different sub segments of people who are interested in Mexico, right? You've got as I said the two million people living here, right? So these are people that are you know actually live in the country that are from Canada or the US. Then you've got in a typical year over 30 million people travel to Mexico. So they may travel here on business, they may travel on vacation, but over 30 million

million people are coming to this country every year on trips. And then you have, you know, this whole group of people and it's getting bigger every day that are just more and more interested in Mexico to potentially live, right? So it may be people nearing retirement. It may be people a little ways from retirement, but are looking to have a second home. And we're even finding it's a lot of families just looking to provide their family and their kids an alternative environment to grow up in.

from where they are living today.

Pete (04:03)
What makes you think, what do you think is the number one reason for them willing to pay you for content? Cause you guys, you guys are a almost, I could be wrong here, 100 % reader revenue organization.

Travis (04:15)
Yeah, we eliminated

all advertising, not only from our website, but also from our newsletters. So to answer your question, you know, again, I think a lot of people around the world are getting turned off on, you know, media. And if you ask, well, why is that right? A big part of that, I think, is because media has brought it upon themselves. Right. Media is so political, so opinionated, and it's really brought about

Pete (04:21)
Mm.

Travis (04:46)
you know sort of an anxiety about reading the news and so what we do differently is first of all we are not politically leaning in either direction in either Mexico or the US or Canada so we're a little bit sort of back to old school journalism where we just present the news right so we say this is what happened here's what one political party says here's what the other one says and then we allow our readers to make

that choice for themselves. You the other thing is, ⁓ you know, we have no sponsored content either, right? So even not having ads were approached all the time by people saying, Hey, will you write about our hotel or about, you know, whatever? We don't do any of that. And so I think we've really created an environment where people trust us, right? They trust us that we're not trying to push our opinions on them. And they trust our objectivity.

when it comes to just telling you what's going on in the country and talking about what there is to see and do here.

Pete (05:53)
Yeah, that's a great word, trust. I'm glad you said that. I mean, that is, that is, think the power of publishers who are doing it right, right? Like whether it's local news or regional or whatever, if you're not catering to advertisers, like big media tends to do, and you're actually catering to your readers, that builds the trust. And that's, and that's why they give you money. Bottom line, if your content is good, they give you money.

Travis (06:18)
Yeah, I mean, my wife and I said

that, you know, we didn't buy this business to sell more Viagra and more toenail fungus cream, right? And those tended to be the ads that popped up on our site, you know, and I'm kind of joking, but, ⁓ you know, it just ruined the reader experience, you know, and, and I felt like you have to pick a path you either are going to try to make money because of the quality and trustworthiness of your content, or you're going to try to make money through

Pete (06:26)
Yeah.

Travis (06:48)
ads, right? And the problem, the trap you fall into then with ads is, you start chasing and to grow your revenue on the ad side, you have to annoy your reader more and more, right? Pop-up ads and draggers and, you know, cryptocurrency things and it just, it's not what we were trying to do, you know, with this project.

Pete (07:11)
love it. Speaking my language. ⁓ So you had mentioned that you bought the publication. Before I talk about the success you've had with reader revenue, I want to just jump into the crazy thing you did. I think during COVID, ⁓ and Tamana were working corporate jobs and you decided to buy ⁓ a news site. How did that happen?

Travis (07:32)
Yeah,

well, I so I have no experience in the journalism industry, you know, but I have read, I've been a, you know, a kind of crazy reader of news my whole life. And when I say crazy, I mean, a couple hours a day, multiple different news sites. So I've met my wife and I have traveled a lot. We've been in the corporate world. And, you know, I think to be good in the corporate world, you've got to, you got to be up on top of global news. So we always had this passion for news.

⁓

But yeah, we were living in the Chicago area, corporate jobs, and sort of wondering what we wanted to do for the next chapter in life. We didn't want to just be in large companies our whole life working for them. We didn't know what we wanted to do yet. And as we were going through that thinking process, COVID came. ⁓ And we thought, we spent time talking, but as I said, we had spent a lot of time in advance. And we said, maybe this

is the time. This is the time to actually take that leap of faith without a clear path of what to do yet. And so we both left the corporate world and moved to Mexico ⁓ right at the beginning of COVID. And so, ⁓ yeah, we didn't have Mexico News Daily yet when we left our jobs. And as we were living in Mexico and taking the time during the rough first few months of COVID about what do we want to do,

We aligned on the fact that we wanted to do something impactful for Mexico and we thought helping shape the narrative on the country to be more positive, more optimistic, more realistic would be a great thing for the country to bring more people, more investment. And then we also thought being passionate readers of media and also really horrified at what was happening with the media. And we really saw it clear during the pandemic.

Pete (09:17)
you

Travis (09:31)
⁓ where not only the country was getting divided, but states, communities, school districts, families. And we said, well, what if we could be part of the solution and what the media is supposed to be, which is encouraging ⁓ information gathering and knowledge seeking and getting smarter and not just getting angrier. And that led us to call the current owner of Mexico News Daily. We were already readers of it. ⁓

Pete (09:55)
Mm.

Travis (10:01)
But we said maybe we should call him up and meet him and find out what's going on. And after a few conversations, I just asked him straight out. said, would you ever consider selling it? And the rest is history.

Pete (10:16)
Wow, you cold called that. That's amazing. Wow.

Travis (10:17)
It was a cold call. I was actually on the street

outside on my cell phone and the first call we had and that's how it all started.

Pete (10:27)
That's awesome. Okay. That's quite a leap of faith. I love it. Mission based. So.

Travis (10:32)
New country,

new business, new industry.

Pete (10:36)
Yeah,

yeah, that's amazing. My wife and I moved to New Hampshire from Boston with that mentality. She quit her job. I moved the business and we just said, let's do it because we wanted to be where we wanted to be. And it worked out. when you acquired Mexico News Daily, what kind of state was it in? How different was it back then than it is today?

Travis (10:59)
Well, I mean, it had had a Trump bump and COVID bump, you know, so that that was helping, but it was definitely in decline. ⁓ You know, it was in it was in pretty serious decline. And I think, you know, the owner had become overly reliant on. ⁓

you know, on advertising. And I also think, and this is not a paid plug for Leakey, but the owner had a paywall service that was crippling the business, ⁓ absolutely crippling the business. And I just think, ⁓ you know, it was just, you know, he was losing his sort of desire and willingness to keep doing this every day. ⁓

Pete (11:22)
I mean...

Travis (11:48)
And

Pete (11:49)
Hmm.

Travis (11:49)
so I think I called it the right time. So it was not doing well in terms of new subscribers. It was not doing well in terms of traffic trends. And it was becoming overly reliant on advertising. That being said, like I said, there had been sort of a life preserver ⁓ with COVID, as many news services experienced. And then Trump as well was good for the media industry.

Pete (11:56)
Mm.

Hmm.

Right.

How did, how did you know to dump, like go the dump advertising, change and lean into paid subscriptions?

Travis (12:24)
Well, you know, again, my wife and I have a combined 50 years of global business experience. So we've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't work. And we just took it from a customer perspective. day one, we eliminated at least half the ads. ⁓ know, these literally the owner had gotten into this trap where, you know, you click on an article and the first thing that appeared was an ad, right? And then, or these ads that would drag

along with you. And so immediately we, you day one eliminated those. So just had an immediate and those were the most profitable ads, as you can imagine. But if we just, went with our experience and our gut and just said, you know, from our own experience, it's a horrible reading experience, especially on a small cell phone when those ads are popping up. It's horrible. And so, you know, we literally day one eliminated

about half the ads and I said to the team, our goal is to get to a position where we can eliminate all ads. And I think they thought, you know, we were crazy when we said that or it would never happen. And it took us about two years and then we eliminated everything. We just said, that's it. So, you really, you know, if you ask me, well, do you think your readers appreciate that as much as you want them to?

Pete (13:42)
That's amazing.

Travis (13:51)
Probably not, you know, but you know, I mean, if you look at some of the best newspapers in the world, they have ads, right? And sometimes they're pretty annoying. mean, a New York Times article will have 10 ads in it. And so I don't know if they appreciate it as much as we want them to. But what we do know is when you read Mexico News Daily, if you're free or paid, it's a nice experience, right? So the other model so many people go with is, well, why don't

Pete (14:04)
Yeah.

Travis (14:21)
to just put ads on your free people. And again, I have a hard time in my head believing you can lure someone to pay by having an annoying experience and telling them, if you pay us, we won't annoy you. ⁓ I think that's maybe a benefit I have of not being from the industry. I'm not cynical enough yet, but I think telling someone, pay me to not annoy you, isn't a good value.

Pete (14:29)
Right.

Travis (14:51)
proposition. You know, want it to be pay us because we give you a lot of value.

Pete (14:52)
Wait.

I got to bring

you along to talk to other publishers because that is the battle today where, know, and I mean, you see this, we see this all the time. You, you, you hit the site, like you said, there's a pop-up of some kind, right? You have to get rid of it. Then there's another pop-up and then the ads are sliding in and all of a you're, you're webs, you like, you're treating the visitor as the enemy instead of as a friend. And,

Travis (15:21)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (15:25)
to converting paid subscriptions you really gotta like you said you gotta really make the experience a good experience that's cool all right no no

Travis (15:30)
Yeah. So it's not easy, right? I mean, it takes craziness

or I don't know what the word is, but, you know, patience, right? And just believe in your product. And we just work so hard to improve the product and differentiate our content to the point where we felt comfortable ⁓ that people would recognize that.

Pete (15:54)
Not everyone has your confidence though. I mean, just speaking to, you know, thousands of publishers, like confi-

Travis (15:58)
Yeah.

But maybe publishers

will say, give him five more years in the industry and he's going to be putting more pop-up ads. Who knows? But it's working for us. And we're 100 % committed to what we're doing.

Pete (16:12)
Hmm

Cool. Well,

let's talk about that in a minute. But next segue is let's talk about the success you've had with paid subscriptions. So now we've known each other for at least a couple of years. don't know how long it's been. What I do know, and I'm not going to reveal any numbers or anything, but I do know, no, no. But I do know that three things have really grown for you.

Travis (16:36)
Not even the parents know them, so I hope you won't.

Pete (16:44)
in the last couple of years. One is website traffic, ⁓ which sounds a little crazy when you put up a paywall and it's like you're actually walling people up, but through the newsletter, Groove, your traffic has grown, your email list has grown, and your paid subscriptions have grown. And as far as I can say, I'll just use the word, you've had a lot of success doing it. So can you give our listeners an idea of how you got there?

Travis (16:59)
Mm-hmm.

Pete (17:13)
How did you, you what do you do? What's the funnel look like? And how are you converting visitors all the way to paid subscribers?

Travis (17:23)
Sure, and I don't claim to have all the answers yet. mean, one thing I love about what we're doing is every day I feel like we have kind of limitless things we can do to get better. ⁓ And so we just keep getting better every day at what we're doing. And really, we did have a falling knife. ⁓

business when we got it. So I mean, our number of paid subscribers was literally falling off a cliff when we bought it. And so that was stressful, as you can imagine. really, first, my wife and I have owned it for almost three and half years now. To simplify it, I'd say the first year we focused on the back office. It was just messy. The sort of behind the scenes on the site was really messy. ⁓ Then we focused on the user experience.

Experience again eliminating ads cleaning up the site ⁓ adding categories that made sense ⁓ And and now you know over the last year or so and it's accelerating and this year. We're really going to lean in more to ⁓ Sort of the marketing we've spent not a penny on marketing ⁓ You know on anything yet, but we feel like you know we are are just Increasingly working to understand our customers

and what they want and what they need and what they can't get from social media, right? Or Substack, right? I mean, we talk about that all day, every day, because people say all the time, well, what is your competition? you could say, I mean, everything, right? I mean, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, you name it. And you could then say, well, Substack. And in our case, you could say, any think tank that puts out content

on Mexico or government entity. I mean, we have infinite amount of competition.

But you can also say, how do we find that space where we have something unique and differentiated? again, a lot of corporate experience and a lot of customer and marketing experience has just gets us, we're fanatical about it. How just each and every single day we're talking about how do we differentiate? What do we give our customers? And we try to be really in tune with what's going on in the world.

We're cognizant of the fact that if we cover the US-Mexico trade argument, know, Trump has been putting tariffs on Mexico, if we just cover that every single day, it'll get clicks, but people are going to get tired of it, right? And so we have to be thinking, how do we balance that with lighter content or content that makes people laugh or smile or inspires them? And so we are, and it sounds like a cliche, but we

are just razor focused on what do our customers want to read and how do they want to read it. And I find a lot of times talking to some other publishers it's really more about what they want to write and what they want to put out there. And I think again not being from the industry I think has given us a little bit of a benefit of just being way more sort of customer focused to do that.

Pete (20:38)
Hmm.

getting the content right. Okay,

so from the content, so you sharpened up the content, let's talk about the funnel. So walk me through the experience, a visitor from social media or Google search ⁓ gets to be a paid subscriber at the end of the line.

Travis (21:06)
Yeah, so I mean, you know, you know, using round, I mean, we get a good chunk of our traffic directly to our site. We get a good chunk of our... ⁓

traffic through sites like Google. Still, we haven't seen a drop off there. And we really, the previous owner had not put really any emphasis on social media. We've put, I would say, a light touch on social media because we just have yet to see, and again, we've only done a light touch, but we just have not seen

Pete (21:22)
Hmm. Hmm.

Travis (21:41)
conversion from social media to our site, right, or even traffic, right? It's awareness and that's why we're doing it, but as far as someone seeing something on social media and then going to our site, you know, it's a pretty loose, you know, pretty loose connection there. And so ⁓ we on the site, you know, we have a paywall after a couple articles every 30 days. ⁓

And then, you know, people can sign up for a free newsletter that we have. And we actually we have a morning newsletter that's more topic. So one day it may be about articles about business in Mexico or one day it may be about Mexico City tourism articles. And then we have an evening newsletter that has, you know, the day's news. And so, you know, through those newsletters were obviously once we've

gotten them, you know, getting this free newsletter, we try to, you know, encourage them and inspire them to want to pay us to see all our content.

Pete (22:51)
Would you say the newsletter is an important tool in the toolbox?

Travis (22:54)
of course, absolutely. And I mean, we, I think we're in just our initial phases of getting the most out of that newsletter. We just had a conversation this morning and we're, you know, the future again, with that hyper customer focus is, you know, let's just take Pete as an example. Let's say all he cares about maybe is Puerto Vallarta, right? He doesn't really care about Mexican politics. He doesn't really care about, you know, business. He's retired and he

just cares about Puerto Vallarta because he maybe wants to retire there. And so we want to offer that customization in the newsletter of saying, okay, we'll just give you the articles we write on Puerto Vallarta. Right. So that that degree of customization in the newsletter is where we're headed next. And, you know, everybody's feeling fatigue on everything. I think social media has managed to make us fatigue, not just on our phones or to read, but just in life, you know, just because

There's never a down moment. And so, you know, we just have to be very cognizant of that reality of humanity and make sure we're giving people exactly what they want. And no more.

Pete (24:06)
You know,

it's, yeah, it's funny. don't know if this is a trend or not, but I turned off notifications to all my social channels some time ago, because I was miserable. And I became a happier person, like much happier. I try, yeah.

Travis (24:19)
and

I don't have notifications, but you know, something

interesting happened at the start of this year. We have a 26 year old lady in our office and I sent her something on Instagram at the start of the year. And I came in the office and I said, did you see it? And she said, at the start of the year, I deleted Instagram. You know, this is a 26 year old girl who you'd say she's in the target market for social media. And so I do believe there is an

Pete (24:41)
Mm.

Travis (24:50)
increasing trend, not by everybody, but by an increasingly large segment of the population saying, there are some benefits of social media, but the negatives are just too much. And obviously we want to be there to still be able to inform, inspire, ⁓ entertain people ⁓ when that happens, when people say, just can't, I don't want the baggage that comes with social media.

Pete (25:17)
Yeah, yeah, I think you're right. Actually, I think you're completely right. Just from having two kids myself, like they are really aware of how bad it can be. So they're super cautious. They use it, you know, very privately amongst friends and they don't, you know, they really try not to get sucked into all the nonsense that's out there. It's not, it's not a hundred percent for sure. And doom scrolling is still a thing. And I think for my teenager, I think it's shopping scrolling. It's like fashion, fashion scrolling.

Travis (25:44)
Yeah,

Pete (25:47)
But he's

Travis (25:47)
exactly.

Pete (25:48)
aware of his problem. Anyway. All right. So, ⁓ okay. So we talked a little bit about newsletters. have ⁓ niche, like city-based newsletters that folks can opt into. You're sending newsletters, I know every day, maybe twice a day. There's a lot of newsletters going out, which is, in my opinion, the number one direct marketing tool for publishers. Very, very important.

Travis (25:50)
That's good. That's step one.

Yeah.

Yo.

Pete (26:15)
Now, one thing that ⁓ we skipped over a little bit is how folks get on the newsletter. They hit the site, you mentioned they get one or two articles, and then can they optionally opt in or is it required opt in in order to?

Travis (26:30)
Well, I mean,

you can read an article and then if you want to read the second one, it asks you to sign up for the newsletter and that allows you to read the second one. And then if you want to read the third one, you've got to pay. That's every 30 days. So we've tightened that up ⁓ over the time we've owned it. We've tightened up that paywall, ⁓ you know, because

You know, it's just, if you give people too much, they're gonna, you know, so we tightened it up. And I think even where we're at today is still somewhat generous. I mean, I go to some, you know, large newspapers at Chicago Tribune. I mean, it's like the, they won't even let you read one article. You know, that wall is right there. So that's where we've settled in right now.

Pete (27:14)
we have a lot of publishers that are very nervous about putting a registration wall up and, restricting access. So they're like playing around with just a few articles and, and, leaving most of their content open. But you, think your registration wall sits on the entire, ⁓ content base. And when you say tighten it up, ⁓ that means like giving away less free articles, requiring an email before getting to the content. What happened when you tightened it up? Like, did you notice a difference?

Travis (27:29)
Yes.

maybe.

No,

I mean, no, we saw more. didn't. We saw we've only seen an increasing amount of new subscribers, right, as we've tightened it up. So we went through that as well. You know, should we shouldn't we are we going to lose people? Are we going to get less traffic? I mean, we agonized over all of that. But again, I mean, you go back to the previous things I said, if you're going to get tough on your paywall, you better not be annoying them with ads. You know, you better have awesome content. You better not have people reading your content and wondering

Is this paid sponsored content or is this real? You know if all that starts entering in yet, you know, it's not I believe it's not gonna work So you got to get those pieces in place and then you can get tougher on the paywall the other thing is obviously social media has trained everyone that everything's free, right and so ⁓ You know, it's something you got to kind of retrain people know if you want quality if you don't want ads if you want to trust if you want to make

sure that's not AI, you know, there's a price to that. And some people get that and a lot of people don't. But that's where we're at on this.

Pete (28:52)
Well said, I love it. Okay, last content piece ⁓ on the success side. So you started something called MND Kids, which is a really fascinating content experiment, I think. ⁓ It's new and you're taking your existing content and you're leveraging it by helping people learn Spanish, right? Or kids learn Spanish. Can you tell us more about that?

Travis (29:02)
Yes.

Yeah, sure.

So, you know, I talked about our mission before, but it's mostly focused on adults, right? And so we started getting more and more feedback from friends and family and even some people in the educational space saying, why don't you guys do something for kids? ⁓ And they said, you know, not only ⁓ is it interesting to have short form nonfiction content for kids, which schools told us they needed more of, ⁓ but also

Also,

you guys can do it in Spanish and English. Also, you can reinforce the importance of news. ⁓ Also, you can reinforce the fact that it's not politically biased. Also, you can reinforce with teachers, you know, how to look for AI. And then you can also reinforce Mexico to kids as well, right? Unfortunately, as I said, a lot of adults in the United States, Canada, and beyond

have been trained by the media that Mexico is a dangerous bad place if you leave your all-inclusive hotel in Cancun. And so we felt like it would be a nice extension of our mission to be able to offer kids real...

quality news and information about the country so they don't grow up with those same misperceptions as well. And so we've got this going in schools in both Mexico and the United States. If anyone listening to this would is aware of a school district that would be interested in something like this. But as Pete said, basically what we do is we take one of our articles a day from our main site. This is set up as a separate site and we rewrite. First of all, we select an article that kids will be interested.

in. And then if you go down a little bit more Pete, what we allow is you can choose to read the article in Spanish or in English and you can also then choose level one, two or three.

Pete (31:19)
Back up to this article we're looking at on MND Kids.

Travis (31:22)
Sure, so

the child can select whatever article they're interested in, whether it's a culture one or about pyramids or about food or about sports, and they can select whether they want to read the article in Spanish or English, and then they can also select whether their reading level is, you know, elementary, middle, or high school. And the article appears in the right link.

language

written at the right level with some discussion questions and things like that. So we're just getting started with it. It is being used in schools in Mexico and the U.S. ⁓ And we think it's going to be a great, great tool because really, you know, it's more important than ever for the U.S. and Mexico or the U.S., Mexico and Canada to be friends. And it doesn't feel like our politicians are are enabling and fostering that right now sometimes. But

but it is important and so it would be sad to leave the next generation with a legacy of distrust about your neighbors and so you know we're trying to change that with what we have and and hopefully leave a legacy of curiosity and and not being naive about our neighbors.

Pete (32:38)
That's a great mission. I love it. And just for, if you're listening to this, what I, the takeaway here is ⁓ look at your publication, look at what you're producing content wise and see if you can repurpose your existing content in another way. Because I think what, what Travis has done here for Mexico news daily is really a stroke of genius to take the content that already exists and use it in an educational way to learn Spanish. It's really pretty fantastic.

Travis (33:06)
It felt like

a very logical but also very important extension that we could do of our content for kids.

Pete (33:13)
Yeah. I love

it. I love it. All right. Now tell me about your podcast. You're running a podcast. You're a publisher. What's going on here?

Travis (33:22)
in the ⁓

interest of feeling every second of every day. ⁓

I, ⁓ you know, we've since we bought Mexico News Daily, we've been approached constantly about a podcast. So people always look me up and say, hey, I can do a podcast for you guys. And I was really, you know, I would always say, I don't know if the world needs another podcast, right? I mean, there's there's zillions of them. And the other thing we were worried about was really protecting our brand, right? We didn't want to just have, I mean, if somebody said I'm an expert on Mexican politics,

You know that that's not what we're trying to do and or if someone was like, know I've been an expat here for 10 years and I can tell you the bottom line of this country, you know, that's that's a little bit dangerous as well. So we said no over and over and over again when we got those pitches. But ultimately just recently we settled in on what I think is the right sort of topic and what the podcast is called is confidently wrong. So part of

Pete (34:14)
Mm.

Travis (34:27)
the name came from the fact that my wife always calls me a confidently wrong person about directions, you know, or about, you know, where I think the restaurant is or something. It is for sure. So we're, we're actually going to get merchandise made up that says, you know, my husband is confidently wrong. then at the Mexican daily, we're going to do that. But what we, you know, it's really consistent with our brand in the sense that so many people are confidently wrong about Mexico.

Pete (34:37)
That's a guy thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm in. Sign me up.

Travis (34:57)
right? You know, can I drink the water? Is it safe? Can I drive there? Is Mexico City, you know, a hellhole or a wonderful place? And so we base it on our written content. And we educate ourselves on our content. And then what we do is we have a podcast each week for about 30 minutes where we pick one topic and review some of the confidently wrong things we've seen and heard from others or on social media.

and we talk about them in the podcast. You know, just to use like water as an example, right? If you tell someone you're going to Mexico to this day, people say, don't drink the water, you know, or don't touch the ice or don't eat lettuce. And there's just so much confidently wrong ⁓ information out there that we started a podcast called Confidently Wrong by Mexico News Daily.

Pete (35:51)
It's awesome. a, I love it. It's almost like a, like a, a FAQ for the country and in a funny way, right? And then, so if you're interested in Mexico, it's like, and you're, yeah, like you said, if someone's considering moving there, you're probably on the, on the search for as much information as you can get about what's the quality of life actually, you know, there. So that's.

Travis (35:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's not meant

to be a promotional ⁓ piece for Mexico. It's meant, again, just like our website, to inform and educate people. And so check it out. We have ⁓ a YouTube channel called Mexico News Daily TV. ⁓ And then we also have, it's also on Spotify. So check that out. We do have a website where we put, ⁓ sorry, the YouTube channel, we do ⁓ cover some of our news articles.

as well. So check that out.

Pete (36:46)
put those in the show notes for sure. All right, so we're kind of getting to the end here. I just want to wrap up with a couple of questions ⁓ that I've written down. So here's one. What do you know now that you wish you'd known ⁓ when you bought Mexico News Daily? Is there something that you've learned along the way that you that is there one thing that you were absolutely sure about when you started?

Travis (36:52)
Okay.

Of course, you don't even need to ask me. could, yeah, absolutely.

Pete (37:15)
that today you're like yeah you know what i was confidently wrong

Travis (37:19)
For sure. First of all, there's many, but one I would share is, and I guess I should have known this from the name, but when it's daily, that means every single day. And so... ⁓

Pete (37:28)
Mm.

Travis (37:32)
You know, we do publish new content 365 days a year. We probably don't have to, but we're just committed to it. And so that does mean every single day we've got stuff going on. and when you're part of a big company and there's, you know, lots of overlap of responsibilities, that's one thing, but when it's a smaller business, it's, it's intense. And, ⁓ you know, I don't mind the intensity. actually like it, but, but

It's been very intense. guess the other thing I would say I grossly underestimated was just how precarious and dangerous and important the back office is, right? So everything from your server to your paywall to everything in between, your hosting.

You know, that's, I don't have experience in that area. ⁓ And so it's hard as a small company to get all that right. You know, we have tens of thousands of people every day hitting our site and there's, it's constantly changing. And, you know, we had a cyber attack recently and it's just, it's that part, you know, you never can totally relax because there's always something that could happen. And again, we're not, you know, we're a site

is people are looking at 24-7 so it's it's not easy for us to just say for a day you know the site isn't live ⁓ you know that's that's our bread and butter.

Pete (39:04)
In Dovetail with that, what would you say your best failure was in this journey? And what did you learn from that failure? Do you have anything that particularly stands out? Where you went a direction, crashed into the wall, and then, oh, wait, no, that was wrong. This is what I learned. Anything specific?

Travis (39:26)
Yeah, I would

say our best failure. Wow, I wasn't ready for that question. I mean, we've made a lot, right? So, you know, again, I think we underestimated the importance of some of those people in that back office area. And ⁓

Pete (39:30)
Yeah.

Travis (39:45)
You know, at the beginning, we trusted some people that were, you know, legacy from the previous owner. And that turned out to be a failure and we had to make decisions. You know, basically we got rid of those people and had to bring in new people. So I think just the people side of things, you know, we had, again, being a smaller business, you, you really count on some key people. And, ⁓ and I think, you know, again, because

we're not from this industry we probably over relied on some of those key people and held on to them too long instead of just making the change and so we've made you know a lot of changes in the team to make sure they're aligned with what we're trying to do and what the mission is and you know get along with everybody else on the team.

Pete (40:38)
That's awesome. Yeah, you gotta make the change when you need to make the change. It's hard, but you do have to do it. ⁓ Well, I was gonna ask you what's next for Mexico News Daily, but we talked a lot about what's next with, yeah, yeah. So just gonna wrap up, where can people reach you? Where can they get the news and where can they get the kids and the podcast? Can you repeat that?

Travis (40:50)
We got a lot going on.

Sure. So I mean,

hopefully if you go in Google and write Mexico news will come up first. But mexiconewsdaily.com is our site. MND, so Mexico News Daily, MNDkids.com is our kids site. And our YouTube site is Mexico News Daily TV. So we'd love to have you check us out. And what I tell people always is, ⁓

You know, if you're tired and fatigued and depressed with the news in your home country, it's not necessarily like that everywhere. And there's a lot of wonderful things and inspiring things happening in a country like Mexico. And so, you you may say, you know, the last thing I want to do is read news about another country, but you may actually find it, and many of our readers do find it inspiring to read about good things going on in this

So check us out.

Pete (42:01)
Thank you so much. This was super fun. Let's do it again. Stay warm in the South.

Travis (42:03)
Thank you for having me. Great.

Thank you, Pete. Take care.