Wall Street Oasis Update: How We Grew Sales 50% And Launched A Daily Newsletter
This is a follow up story for Wall Street Oasis. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 5 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi, I’m Patrick Curtis, and the founder of Wall Street Oasis, the largest online community focused on careers in finance with over 800,000 registered members and over 1 million visits each month.
Along with a vibrant online community, we offer:
- Courses on financial modeling,
- Live training to corporate clients looking to make their junior resources more efficient
- Help applicants prepare for private equity interviews, investment banking interviews, hedge fund interviews as well as the notoriously challenging management consulting case interviews.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
The business has grown sales dramatically (~50%) since we last gave an update a few short years ago right before the pandemic.
Part of this is that we were blessed with being in online education during COVID (one of the few industries that were helped by the pandemic) and the other was that we launched into the financial modeling training space in mid-2020 and started selling B2B in early 2021.
This includes courses in excel modeling, financial modeling, 3 statement modeling, dcf and valuation modeling, M&A and accretion/dilution, venture capital and real estate modeling, among others. While WSO has historically been known for helping prepare candidates for finance interviews, edit resumes for investment banking and private equity, by expanding our library of courses in 2020, it allowed us to approach businesses and leverage our brand and reputation in the finance community to more than double the training side of the business.
The third reason for our bump in sales is we hired a full-time sales team member to help us sell everything from financial modeling training to ad space in our new daily newsletter. This has helped the business be more aggressive in letting potential clients know about the services and reach we can offer them.
The team has almost doubled (close to 20 FT now with over 30 part-time instructors) and we are increasing our SEO efforts as well in 2022-2023 to try and make sure we are setting the business up for long-term success.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
We launched WSO Alpha (a service where subscribers can follow along with a successful portfolio with a decade+ track record) thinking that it would be a huge success but learned quickly that not many people will trust investing advice unless you can put a face on behind it. As such, growth in that service has been slower than expected.
On the other hand, we were pleasantly surprised with the launch of our Daily newsletter, The Daily Peel, and how easy it was to sell ad revenue in that space since we already had a built-in audience for it. Of course, already having a large online community and large newsletter audience helped, but we were quickly able to generate an additional $10-15k/month in revenue once we invested in the team to consistently deliver a quality daily newsletter.
To help get our first anchor ad partners, we found the best place to look were similar newsletters written to a similar demographic (young audience interested in finance). With a list of over 90,000 subscribers and a very healthy open rate of 45-55%, we found many brands are receptive to sponsoring the newsletter. In terms of pricing, the typical range is $30-40 CPMs which was enough for us to cover our costs and still have decent gross margins.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
This upcoming year we have our heads down executing for our new B2B clients to make sure we deliver exceptional service when training their employees.
We also plan to continue to be aggressive with our sales outreach for both ad sales, our talent recruiting business which is growing as well as our financial modeling training business.
On the product side, we plan to continue expanding our library of courses offered and expand our offering by licensing or partnering with proven training providers in the exam prep space (CFA, GMAT, CAIA, licensing, etc) and keep building a larger team to help us rank better on highly competitive keywords that are important for our business.
Spend some time talking to your potential customers to make sure that the pain is high enough that they will buy from you when you have a solution or service ready for them.
Over the next 5 years, we are confident we can continue to gain market share in the financial modeling training space and become even more competitive on the SEO front. WSO has the benefit of being a forum with thousands of long-tail keywords (= free content) but also the curse of having large numbers of URLs under our forums which can hurt our rankings on critical keywords.
More specifically, Google has notoriously emphasized the importance of E-A-T - expertise, authority, and trust…as you’d expect, a forum filled with anonymous members, often referencing something about bananas and monkeys isn’t the best way to get into Google’s good graces.
For these reasons, we’ve embarked on a very large site restructuring effort primarily around site architecture. This way, Google more efficiently crawls the site, can better understand the site hierarchy, and understand where the richest and highest quality content is located. This process is already well underway!.
Have you read any good books in the last year?
Who - The A Method For Hiring.
As the team has grown, I’ve found this book helpful to help us systematize how we are bringing on new team members, but we’ve also found our growing intern team to be a great place to source talent.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
I think when you look at what you CAN do, it is tempting to try all of it, but that often leads to not succeeding in any of your new initiatives. Try to focus on 1-to 2 main goals /product launches or services each year and spend some time talking to your potential customers to make sure that the pain is high enough that they will buy from you when you have a solution or service ready for them.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes, we are always looking to add to our talented internship team. While it’s unpaid, the benefits are significant which is why we’ve already had 100 interns in the program in a few short months (free relevant financial modeling courses, relevant work for your resume), especially if you are looking to have a career in finance.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
