We were lucky to catch up with John Wetter recently and have shared our conversation below.

John, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Since a young age, I’ve always been fascinated with financial markets and investing. The markets have been a part of my daily routine for years now. However, over the years, I’ve noticed a systematic issue related to the intersection of media and markets—traditional financial press is biased.

According to a study by Marina Niessner at Yale University, “a news story is approximately 22% more likely to be covered if it is negative.” This is because a study by Outbrain found that “headlines with negative superlatives (e.g., ‘never,’ ‘worst,’ ‘stop’) had a 63% higher click-through rate than those with positive or neutral language.”

This led to the creation of Black Swan Street. The goal of Black Swan Street was to create an unbiased, reliable news source for investors. I made it my mission to cover the good, the bad, and the ugly in financial markets with no underlying agenda. Due to the unfiltered authenticity in our coverage of financial markets, we created a cult-like following of investors.

In under a year, Black Swan Street grew from an idea to 5,500+ weekly readers and ultimately to an exit through an acquisition.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m John Wetter, a 23-year-old who loves the sport of business. My obsession with business began as a teenager when I fell in love with the show Shark Tank. Shark Tank led me down the path of entrepreneurship and starting multiple companies throughout my teenage years—all of which would go on to fail.

But this continuous trial-and-error approach I took to business led me to find success in my freshman year of college when I started a moving company. I founded a moving company called ‘The College Moving Company’ that would cross five-figure revenue and employ 10+ part-time employees. However, I eventually shut down the moving company as I didn’t see long-term potential for myself in this industry and was starting to fall in love with another field—finance.

After the moving company, I completed an internship at Charles Schwab, which exposed me to the financial services industry from the inside out. This internship led me to apply to and be admitted to graduate school, where I completed an MS in Finance.

During my time in graduate school, I founded Black Swan Street. I was captivated by all things finance and began blogging about financial markets, investing, valuation methodologies, and much more. This blog evolved into Black Swan Street’s flagship product—the newsletter. Our newsletter garnered an audience of 5,500+ weekly readers who came to read our analysis of news flow, economic data, and overall trends in the market.

After about ~9 months of running Black Swan Street, I was approached by an individual who was rolling up media companies in the finance space and was interested in acquiring Black Swan Street. The acquiring firm was an undisclosed startup studio with a portfolio of 5+ SaaS products, 100k+ newsletter subscribers, 1.2M+ social followers, and a content and advertising agency. After some due diligence from all the parties involved, we eventually agreed upon a deal that led to me exiting Black Swan Street through an acquisition.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media can be one of the most effective tools for any business and is crucial for building loyalty with customers. Social media allows businesses to reach potential customers easier than ever before. But because social media and content creation have such low barriers to entry, it creates an incredibly competitive landscape.

When looking at building a social media presence, it is typical to see many brands within an industry copying each other’s strategies. This doesn’t work. Success on social media is directly correlated with originality.

My strategies and success with growth through socials was rather simplistic. It began with analyzing the niche I was in and seeing what my competitors were doing. In my case, everyone was focused on short-form content, as this was what was popular at the time. However, I thought this was obsolete for Black Swan Street and our growth.

We were focused on growing our blog and newsletter. Our blog and newsletter were centered around text-based content. I didn’t think the conversion from consumers who watch short-form content would translate well to text-based content. Because of this thesis, I focused on platforms that revolve around text-based content—Reddit and Twitter (now X).

This proved to be an excellent strategy. When compared to competitors, we were achieving a much higher conversion rate from social platforms to readers of our digital content. These readers also had a much higher engagement rate as they were already accustomed to text-based content, making the transition seamless.

My success with digital content and building an audience through socials can be summed up in one quote: “When everyone zigs, you zag.”

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Most people believe customer acquisition and sales are the most critical aspects of any startup, and while I agree they’re important, I believe they’re only half the battle. Retaining customers is the other half.

Customer retention is incredibly important and often overlooked by startups. It’s crucial not only because it’s generally much cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, but also because it helps you refine your product or service.

The best way to improve your offering is by talking to actual customers and getting their unfiltered opinions on your product or service. As the CEO of a company, it’s easy to develop tunnel vision, but the ability to gain outside opinions from actual customers provides invaluable insights.

Contact Info:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-wetter/
• Twitter: https://x.com/thejohnwetter
• Other: Email:
  [email protected]

Image Credits

N/A