Welcome to the 2nd edition of Aria’s Browser History! 🐛

I went to some gatherings this week with friends, and we were trading stories about dating in the age of dating apps. It’s pretty hit or miss. (In general), for my female friends, they have many more options and are selective about who they send a first message to. For my male friends, they have to REALLY think about that first message because that can make or break a reply. For those in between, many of them filter their “person” to see if they can handle an unhinged first message (ex. if you play Kong in Super Smash, we can’t continue messaging).

But if you get through the barricade of that dreaded first message, you’re not going straight to “Hey, wanna go on a date?” That’s a lot of commitment from a stranger! You’re budding conversation, trading banter, gauging similar interests/values.

You’re building trust before you ask them on a date.

Likewise, building a brand or company, you’re not going up to everyone, introducing yourself, and going “Hey, wanna invest/buy/sell your soul to me?” It’ll take a couple of interactions for them to gauge your offering, whether or not you are doing what you are claiming, and if you deserve their time/money/energy.

This edition focuses on things I found across the internet on nurturing mutually beneficial relationships. I don’t believe that there’s a one-size fits all for building relationships. Rather, I do believe there is a mindset you can cultivate of collective tools from different industries you can utilize for complex situations.

From my browser to yours, Aria

⏰ TL;DR

• Installing brand deals that give money/gifts for your subscribers/customers instead of just asking them to go click on this link that might be irrelevant, builds trust and nurtures a vibrant community that becomes invested in you.

• If you can get someone in the door after that first deal, deliver them true value, and make them day dream about it everyday after — you’ve got real opportunity to scale that feeling.

• Too much obsession and money spent on leads, instead of QUALIFIED leads (which is a shorter but MORE efficient list). We need to be looking at the entire journey of someone who interacts with your brand/persona/organization, not measuring our cucumbers by how many people joined your waiting list.

🔖 Bookmarks From Mine to Yours

• Set up Chat-GPT as your personal advisor to leverage more of its abilities

• Auto-reply to comments (maybe this would help a fellow content creator)

• Philosophical and technical tangent on building an AI “AGENT” (some fluff in the beginning but I think it’s worth the read if not just entertaining/blood curdling terrifying watching the embedded AI generated videos)

• AI-generated cat sends you daily need-to-know information about everything AI

• Save time & effort training AI employees instead of hires that stay on for less than a year

• Canva, Deloitte, and Omdia walk into a bar… and talk AI marketing on June 10th

• 2-day FREE virtual Creator Summit on building a creator business, think monetized newsletters, communities, etc. in the sea of this new trend

• CIC Massachusetts Social Impact Accelerator is open for applications

Upcoming Events I’m Hosting

• Health-Tech Funding Networking & Fireside Chat: I’m bringing together 1 VC investor, 1 angel investor, and 1 founder who didn’t take either to scale their startup for an intimate fireside chat. The goal is to bring knowledge typically behind locked doors out into the open where attendees feel comfortable asking questions and have more guidance on where to go next in their journey. This will be end of June/early July. I’m finalizing the details now — stay tuned for the lu.ma invite soon!

• Founders & Explorers Masquerade Networking: I’m making networking not boring and bringing masquerading and gamification into the mix. The event will bring together people from all facets of the start-up ecosystem and meeting each other in… _n__al masks. We’re working backgrounds, exchanging knowledge and value first, not names and accolades. This will be end of July/early August.

• Solo Founders ____c_i Dinner Night: No, we’re not going to a silly 5-star restaurant to exchange tidbits of info kept close to our chest. This will be unlike ANYTHING you’ve seen before on LinkedIn. If you know someone raising in pre-seed or seed as a solo founder looking for community support, share this newsletter with them! I’ll be sending details out shortly for this end of July shenanigan (and will be writing more about my experience as a 2x solo founder).

How to partner with brands without selling out your community — Creator Spotlight

The Creator Spotlight newsletter by beehiiv is a great way to see how different people in the newsletter space engages their community & supports them through brand sponsorships.

Melanie Ehrenkranz founded Laid Off to support professionals with resources and a community when they’re laid off from employment.

Instead of asking her subscribers to buy something when she inserts an ad brand deal, she gives them money to spend instead.

The gift is financially small (and you’d support larger corpo coffee chains rather than small business owned), but the benefits are threefold:

• For readers: The newsletter is no longer something you’re just reading for information, but also the opportunity to grab some coffee. The reader-writer relationship becomes more personal, rather than the writer speaking into the void with a 70% open rate.

• For brands: They’re supporting an engaged community with mission-aligned values. I always gloss through ads on a newsletter, but if I was receiving something from the ad, then I’d definitely spend at least 3.005 more seconds reading it.

• For the writer: A revenue stream with brands that align with the writer’s values, so you don’t feel like you need to sell your soul to buy some bread.

How to steal this methodology

Whether you’re a marketing manager, just dabbling in the newsletter space, or a neuroscientist here for learning new things, this idea of transparency and sharing something (instead of purely transactional) is applicable to everything. How can you leverage sponsors and/or partnerships to support your community? Design experiences that feel generous, relevant, and real:

• For job seekers, it's coffee (I don’t drink coffee personally)

• For new parents, gift card to buy baby clothes

• For students, the new fun thing is a 3-month pro plan for different LLMs like Perplexity and ChatGPT

In a technological landscape when people are constantly being sold something everywhere, humans are seeking relationships. Genuine relationships instead of transactional “follow my free newsletter so I can sell you this monthly academy subscription!”

If you can add any type of value through relationship building (in whatever sector you’re in), you’re ahead of the game.

I read 134 pages of a lead-gen fundraising report so you don’t have to… (and it was p worth)

I relented and clicked on a lead-gen downloadable from Delve Deeper, a performance media consulting firm (yes they got my email).

This report was grounded in insights for the nonprofit sector, but I found a lot of the information relevant to the for-profit world as well (as most things are often interchangeable between the two industries).

Here are my most important reads that I think you’ll find valuable to know:

1. With targeted acquisition and then proper engagement strategies, donors with modest initial contributions can become significant supporters - over time.

What does this mean? Perhaps VC and angel money isn’t what you should be chasing/be infatuated with; but rather build a brand and product experience that converts a skeptic to a life-long enthusiast (the equivalent of that early-adopter, if you will); i.e. revenue, lol.

Research indicates that it can take 18–20 points of contact to reach a new donor, underlining the importance of a multi-channel, consistent marketing approach.

2. Trust in all institutions is on the decline, including in NGOs. That declining sense of trust, leads donors to care more about causes; less so about charities.

So what do you now? Build your brand, build your image. Do people speak highly of you when you’re not in the room? Are you someone that leaves something on the table, always giving more than you take? Do you have an origin story other people can cite when they explain why you’re THE person to go to for XYZ?

I know everyone gargles out trust when we talk about building relationships. And the core understanding that I think people need to understand is you need to know what you’re building. Why you’re building it. Why you’re going to keep going no matter the bullsh*t.

Because if you don’t trust yourself to doing the right thing (not always necessarily at the right time because we’re not perfect), how can you expect other people to trust you?

3. Traditionally, brand efforts generate top-of-funnel awareness, while performance tactics drive conversions. This separation often leads to a lack of tracking of the impact from brand investments, across the whole Giving Pyramid, even though recent industry insights emphasize the merging of these disciplines.

Those who embrace AI are seeing exponential growth, increasing engagement, and optimizing resources, while brands that hesitate risk falling behind in an increasingly competitive digital landscape. However, people are too obsessed with getting 1,000 set-ups, and not even thinking about keeping those 1,000 people or making sure the leads are even QUALIFIED!

It’s hard to set up a whole customer/donor journey and really map everything out like you’re the Oracle of Apollo. But someone said to me recently, we’re in an era where there are minimal consequences of trying something and failing.

So fail, fail, and fail some more. Or read other people’s failures. Make failing a comfortable part of your life.

Because 1,000 failures will make your 1 success, flourish.

📰 Random Recommendations

• That YouTube video promising you can start a business from just ChatGPT and bolt.new is most likely a grift 

• Got a recommendation from a newsletter that referenced a blog post that recommended this book on how to become indispensable

• Currently reading this as I navigate what it means to make money ethically

Closing all tabs, powering down ✌️