Anis (00:00)
the benefits of newsletters over let's say social media is that there isn't a between you and your audience.
the owned audience, you send out that email, everyone gets it. There's no, there's no algorithm, but on social media, something like five to 20 % of your audience at one time will, will see that post. So it's a lot more effective for getting that across.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:19)
Welcome to a new episode of the Science Marketer Podcast. Today on the show, I'm welcoming Anis Fahandej Sadi to talk about newsletters in biotech. Hi, Anis.
Anis (00:30)
How are you?
Joachim Eeckhout (00:31)
I'm good. Thanks for joining. So
Anis (00:32)
Wonderful. Thank you for the invite.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:35)
go into the topic, if you could introduce yourself, your background, what you have been doing up until now.
Anis (00:42)
Sure. Yeah, so my name is Anis Fahandej Sadi. I am the founder and head editor of TLDR Biotech, which was until very recently a daily newsletter that compiled all the top news in the biotech and pharma space. I recently got into life sciences kind of circuitously. So I started as a master's in chemistry and I didn't like the lab at all.
And I really wanted to get out as quickly as possible. And so I made my way into sales initially. I did about four years of sales first selling bench top liquid handling systems, and then moving on to larger GMP scale aseptic fill finish systems for liquid injectables. And then finally did sales of the Cell and Gene Therapy CDMO based here in Canada. And then from there, I wanted to jump into
somewhat foolishly into entrepreneurship, try and take my chance at that. And so I started another company called Science to Sales, which was supposed to scientists move into sales roles, which is what I had kind of done. That didn't really work out after around six months. And then from there I moved on to TLDR Biotech. And that was going pretty well until about a year in where I realized it just wasn't really scaling as quickly as I wanted. And so I ended up...
winding that down and I'm moving on to different opportunities currently. But I'm still a big believer in newsletters, maybe not exactly the way I did it, but as a medium to continuously engage with your audience. And that's kind of what we're, I think that's what we're going to be discussing today is how you can utilize newsletters as a another tool within the marketing toolkit.
Joachim Eeckhout (02:15)
Yeah, exactly. I think you started in April 2024, the newsletter. ⁓ And yeah, like I've been also following it, I think, quite early. Myself, I'm very interested into the newsletter as well. I've been in the media, biotech media industry for 10 years, so it's also my background.
Anis (02:20)
Yes.
Joachim Eeckhout (02:36)
I think you're very brave first for starting this. That's why I think it deserves some attention to just show what you have done. Doing a daily newsletter isn't easy. I know it. People can guess the amount of work it is. Just having done this is already incredible. Maybe before we move on to...
your more recent activities and what you plan to do in the future. Let's look a bit into TLDR. you go over your experience with it? Why you started it, and then what you have learned along the way?
Anis (03:08)
Sure, so it started kind of where I feel like most things start these days, which is on LinkedIn, at least in our little sphere. So I think it was probably mid-23. Yeah, mid-2023, I was starting to kind of toy with the idea of starting my own thing.
But I knew I needed to have an, like, knew conceptually that I need to have like an audience or I needed to kind of be more visible to my network. And I knew that LinkedIn was kind of the best platform for that, especially in a professional environment still is for life sciences. I avoid Twitter, even though I know things are happening on Twitter, but LinkedIn's kind of a little more civilized. I'll take it. And I thought, okay, what's one way that I could.
kind of get attention, but still be useful. And just one day I was thinking good, bad, and ugly, like the movie, which I haven't seen, but I've seen clips of and it's a classic. And so maybe I should probably see it to kind of rectify that, that's where it all started. And I thought, OK, this is an interesting idea. Maybe I can compile news into this format, because a lot of people kind of focus on the good news. And there is some mention of the bad and
We'll call it ugly news, which is a pretty subjective term. But I thought this could be a little bit attention grabbing, a little bit cheeky because biotech and life sciences is quite formal. I think now there are some companies that are a little less so. Your article on plasmidsaurus I really loved like covering how they're doing a lot more unhinged marketing and they have a lot more personality. And so I thought, okay, let's just do this. So I ended up posting, I think once or twice a week where I would have.
like the cover art of that movie where you had like the three cowboys and then logos of the companies and then intentionally funny or by attempt at being funny, headlines for each new story. And that caught some decent traffic that was doing quite well. But I didn't put two and two together and I didn't think of spitting that out into its own newsletter. And so that's why I initially did Science to Sales.
And then on the side, I was doing this LinkedIn posting thing around the good, the bad, and the ugly news compilations. And it wasn't until the science to sales things wasn't really scaling as much as I'd hoped that I thought back on that. And then from there, I started listening to Morning Brew daily, which is they have a podcast and they have a daily newsletter. And I was reading that and then Beehiiv, think, launched or they were gaining traction around that time.
And so I was becoming more more aware of the idea of newsletters as a standalone business. And the metrics are pretty appealing when you think about it, because you can do the same amount of work essentially. But if your audience is big enough, your revenue just increases exponentially. So that was a really attractive feature for me. So that's when I started TLDR Biotech.
And the idea was I was just going to expand on that good, bad and the ugly format. was going to be good news at the top, bad news in the middle, and then ugly news at the bottom. Good news is... Well, I tried to make it as objective as possible. We can get into that, but there were like some stories that sort of, depending on your angle, were in good or bad. And then also same thing with bad and ugly. I copied a bit of the format from a stock Twits. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they're like one of the biggest communities.
Joachim Eeckhout (06:14)
Mm-hmm.
Anis (06:15)
for stock news and commentary, have sentiment analysis and stuff, and they have a daily newsletter that's a bit cheeky, so they have a GIF at the top, they make jokes in the headlines, et cetera, and that's kind what I was trying to emulate, plus kind of the morning brew daily style of newsletter, which...
Yeah. Looking back, trying to do morning brew anything is kind of like not the best way of going about it because you are copying a template, but I thought I'll give it a shot and there was no one really doing this. and it was scaling. was going well. You know, I, I got up to 2000 subscribers, but ultimately, and there were advertisers coming in, there was a bit of revenue coming in. but ultimately the way I had positioned it, and this is the lesson you learn, right? As an entrepreneur.
as someone that starts a business, right? You're not gonna get it right the first time, you might not get it right the second time. And there were other things going on that kind of tied up my.
I guess the best way to say it is my ego and my like sense of self were almost tied up in the business. so, and I had like a, and when I came to realize that this was not working, I did have a fear of like, what happens if I, if I shut it down and I'm honest with people about, you know, it not working, had I just spent, had I just wasted the last year and a half of my life working on two different things that didn't work out, right? That was the deep fear I had, but it ended up.
It ended up being okay. I ended up writing kind of a last last ish post saying like, Hey, this isn't working. Here's my, here's my honest takeaways takeaways from why it's not working. And I got such an overwhelming positive response from people. And I feel really grateful for the community, the biotech and life sciences community on LinkedIn for that response. And so for now I am taking a bit of a step back I'm not doing any more of the daily postings.
And that was a conscious decision. And there are so many other businesses that are doing really good stuff in terms of data Intel. There's a tool called InoReader, like I N O reader. They do sort of similar things where you can customize a newsfeed. Right. And like anything, anything like that sort of template is going to be automated by AI. And that's what I was trying to do with, with my partner. were trying to build a
an AI tool to kind of automate parts of the newsletter and which is doable, but it's just a lot of work. just not feasible for where we were at. So I'm moving more into a long form content version of the newsletter where it's now deep dive, deep dives on topics, but keeping the voice that I have built in terms of not being too serious, trying to make it little more entertaining and casual to read. think that's where the differentiator is for the newsletter moving forward.
So yeah, that's where we're at now. That kind of brings us to the present day.
Joachim Eeckhout (08:48)
Yeah, I've read your last post. I think it's really interesting because we learn from your experience. So I will also link it in the show notes. think people should read it.
when are you planning to go back to it, like with this new long form format? Do you know already?
Anis (09:05)
I say it in the, in that final post, I'm like very blunt about, you know, this was not generating enough revenue and I was treating it like a full-time business, which it was, and that was probably not the smartest thing to do. So right now from that post, I had a couple of opportunities come in that are
You know, revenue generating at least, is, which is a nice thing. So my time to actually work on the long form content is limited, but I'm being a little more disciplined on that. Cause it's, going to take some time. I have to set aside time to research and then write and edit and all of that. So it might take a couple more weeks.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:39)
Okay, and maybe this is a good introduction to what's next for you. So you told me one of the things you want to develop is also creating newsletters for life sciences companies directly as a marketing tool, basically. Can you expand a bit on this?
Anis (09:58)
Yeah, sure. So I think the first thing to kind of address here would be what we call a newsletter. and then what people think goes into it and then what actually should go into it. So, and then there's a few other nuances there. So when I think of newsletters, this is specifically an email that goes out directly to a list of people that have opted into probably marketing communications or have.
downloaded a white paper and they checked a little box saying, opt into marketing communications. And typically when people think of this, maybe the sentiment's changing, but it's usually just, Hey, we've announced it's, it's an email that's just focused on the company. And it says like, Hey, we've announced this thing. We've hired this new person. Like, here's all of this. Things that are about us. And for the most part, those things get trashed, right? Cause you're going to see that on social media anyway.
And I guess one more thing to kind of go around to not talk about this linearly, but the benefits of newsletters over let's say social media is that there isn't a algorithm between you and your audience. I might mess up the terms here because, and I'm sure you know the exact ones. think it was probably one of your blog posts, but like social media is a rented audience. Is that, is that correct? And then like newsletters is a
Joachim Eeckhout (11:07)
Yeah.
Anis (11:08)
I think bought, no, not bought, bought is paid. There's another term for owned audience. Yeah. So the owned audience, you send out that email, everyone gets it. Right. There's no, there's no algorithm, but on social media, I think something like five to 20 % of your audience at one time will, will see that post. Right. So it's a lot more effective for getting that across. And then also with a newsletter, it's longer form. You can fit more information into it.
Joachim Eeckhout (11:11)
Owned. Owned channel. Yeah.
Anis (11:32)
So going back to what you probably should include in a newsletter, right? It's an email, people get it to their inbox. That inbox is flooded with other things that they need to focus on. So you need to have something that is a value add to their life, to their professional life. So there's two ways to go about this. One of it is you have the company branding as the newsletter, and then you include content.
that is related to your organization, but that should be kind of padded within the middle or just the branding. The majority of the content should be things that are industry news, industry analysis, maybe some trend analysis, things that people will open your news, the newsletter for, or to learn about what's going on. So if you're a CDMO and you have a newsletter, it's probably useful to talk about.
different news within the CDMO space. It's probably useful to talk about topics that are interesting to people that are considering outsourcing, like how to choose a CDMO. What are some of the things you should look for in a selection process? What are some of the red flags? Just things like that that people will find interesting or evaluate. So that's one way of doing it, where the business is the newsletter. The other way, which I've seen done a couple of times, is the newsletter is a separate
entity, but then the company is like the sole sponsor of this newsletter. So the two examples that I've seen out there are Beehiiv. So they have the, like they're a big newsletter platform similar to Substack or Ghost. They have a newsletter called Creator Spotlight,
Where they focus on like a specific person that's a creator in the space that has built up a business focused on a newsletter or community. And they kind of go in, they do a podcast, they do a deep dive on them. And that newsletter is run by Beehiiv and sponsored by Beehiiv. So on the front end, looks like this original thing that provides like really deep value ad content for people interested in the newsletter space. But on the back end, it's sponsored by Beehiiv. Another one, at least in Canada is called.
Coincidentally, it's called TLDR, similar to TLDR Biotech. It's a popular name. And this is an investment and banking focused newsletter that is also equivalently casual and funny. And it's put out by a bank here called Wealthsimple, which is one of these remote only banks. They don't have offices. so all the branding on that newsletter is TLDR.
Any sponsored slot in the middle of it is from Wealthsimple. Basically saying like, Hey, this newsletter is brought by Wealthsimple. So they kind of like gorilla market in the branding. And so those are the two ways that you can kind of think about the newsletter. And the advantage again, as we, as, as we mentioned earlier, is that this allows you a direct channel to your customer base or your prospect base. Because anytime you send that email, assuming your, your email client is delivering correctly and that's all set up.
which is what Beehiiv and those sorts of platforms do is they help you with the deliverability. Every single person on your email list is gonna see this content as opposed to social media where there is that algorithmic filter, we'll call it.
Joachim Eeckhout (14:27)
people should think about this model really for the marketing, for the communication. I think it's really part of building a funnel, and this is really top of the funnel.
You create a newsletter because you want people to associate a niche with your brand potentially. That's kind of the idea behind it. And in SaaS companies, in tech, that's a model I think that has been really kind of successful and a lot of examples are existing, but yeah, in life sciences, we don't see it. I think in life sciences, what I've seen so far,
is more like a podcast. So basically you will have the CEO of a biotech doing a podcast, interviewing other people in the industry. And this is kind of the top of funnel and they use it also like as sales engine, as partnership development tool, et cetera. But yeah, I completely agree with you. I think you can do a similar thing.
with the newsletter. What's important, I think, finding a niche you want to be linked to and really build your content around that. So again, just to stress the point, because I think companies often think like newsletter is this kind of transactional email you send to your list and no, it's not. This is something you should not do.
People don't engage with it. It's almost spam. So you have to build value in your newsletter, like a real value, something people want to read.
now, what's your vision for this? You want to build it as a service for companies?
Anis (15:56)
Yeah, that is part of the vision. So in terms of the range of services, what I'm envisioning are anything from a high level consulting engagement where we kind of dive into what your organization is selling, what your overall marketing strategy is, and then how a newsletter could kind of fit in there, content calendars, et cetera, all the way to essentially doing it all for you.
So you provide us some marketing materials, you provide us the vision, and then we go ahead and actually put the thing together on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. And the nice thing about newsletters is that it's this thing where you can take existing content and then you can kind of put it, you could put it all in one place and you can flesh it out.
So if you have marketing material, if you have some industry analysis or white papers, there are ways in which you can rework that content to fit within the newsletter. And going back, you can also take original content that we put together for the newsletter and then repurpose those for social media and content marketing as a whole. Right. And like all of this, especially with the advent of AI, like the ability to recycle
and rework and remix assets is just, it's just so much easier now, right? If you have a podcast with a CEO, right, there's probably a whole bunch of insights and nuggets of wisdom that you can now parse out and either put into some sort of long form narrative, or you can clip it out and put it into content marketing on social media, or you can clip it out and put it into the newsletter. Just so many different things you can do.
Joachim Eeckhout (17:27)
Yeah, I totally agree. You have to see it, think, as an overall content marketing strategy. I've been doing a bit of this with the clients. We started working on every month creating a blog post. That's kind of the...
the basic blog we have. They didn't have this in the past, so the idea was, let's start writing a blog post. But it's not just having a blog post because behind this, they had a similar issue. The newsletter they were sending was mostly transactional, so product updates, and wasn't consistent. So it was like, when something happens, let's do a newsletter.
And I see many companies like this. The newsletter is kind of like the last thing they think about. Why it should be the first? Because they have direct access to their clients or potential clients. It's really the most valuable thing. When you send an email to, I don't know, you can easily get a list of thousand emails if you're a company in life sciences
You send an email maybe with 30, 40%. You have several hundred people actually reading your email. When you post on LinkedIn, if you have a hundred people already really reading the post, that's good. So the delivery value is really amazing. And so to come back to this example, what we do now is every month we write a blog post.
This blog post is then feeded into the newsletter as kind of like the featured article of the month. And below this, we go with product updates, whatever, like where I can meet the team at different conferences. And we also link to the social media content because at the same time, we're also building social media content that is kind of...
that has the same idea of creating value in the content and is not only transactional and promotional. So yeah, for me, the newsletter strategy is really central to B2B marketing in general. So I really like your idea of building this for companies. I think it makes a lot of sense and companies can benefit from it. So for you, what's the...
What's the most important when you build a newsletter like this? Kind of the criteria you have to keep in mind.
Anis (19:42)
I guess before we address that in terms of the, you were just talking about, like the engagement and things like that, there's one strategy that it's not my original idea. it's from a friend of mine that's in this space is, cause right now when you think about, let's say LinkedIn as an example, there's kind of two ways in which you can post content, right? There's one where it's the company page post that content.
And then you have the individuals within the organization that post that content. So we already know, I think most people do. It seems common sense that if you have an executive within your team posting that content, it's a person. LinkedIn favors the algorithm and then people also trust people more than a brand or a company. So that content usually gets spread out and, and engage with a lot more effectively on the flip side of that.
That's also an additional strategy that you can consider for a newsletter where instead of the, let's say, instead of the company sending the newsletter, right. And you can do this manually or you can, I think there are ways in which you can do this with AI. You segment it out. So there's somebody from your team with a similar job title or job description. You segment out your audience to only be those individuals and then they send out a specific newsletter for them.
Right. this can be, depending on how many segments you have, this can be automated or you might be able to filter it out with AI and kind of build out an automated newsletter. So as an example, if you have, again, if you're a CDMO and you put together a newsletter, that's like mainly CMC or like MSAT issues or like quality issues, and you have someone from your team that is that they send the newsletter as like a forward to these people. So it looks.
It looks like they're sending it to you individually in a way, but it's actually the news that you've put together. So it of adds that additional, it adds that additional layer of, of, of personalization that was still doable. when it came to doing this all manually, but now I think with AI it's a lot easier.
Joachim Eeckhout (21:29)
It's a really good idea. Yeah.
Anis (21:41)
because you can now build these kind of custom newsletters using AI a lot more effectively.
And I forgot your original question because I wanted to, I really wanted to hammer that point. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (21:49)
No, it's a really
great point. Adding a personal voice to a newsletter, think it's something also undervalued completely. combining good value, good content, plus a personal voice, plus segmentation, I think you have a really winning combination. It's a really good idea. My question was...
What are the most important things to keep in mind when doing a newsletter?
Anis (22:10)
so there's three things I can think of right now. One is like the audience that you're sending it to. The second is the content. And the third is like how you're assessing success, let's say. The first is the audience. So you should look ideally if your audience list isn't too big. Maybe it's a couple of thousand people and you've access to like an Apollo or a zoom info or something like that.
you can kind of go through and at least with the work emails, you can figure out who is in your audience. You can figure out where they're based, what kind of company they're at, their responsibilities, and that kind of gives you an overview as to who you're really targeting here, right? And that works pretty effectively with work emails. Gmail, I think maybe you could make it work if you do it manually, but that's important to understand is like who you're actually sending this to, who's actually opting in.
Related to that, guess how you're planning on growing the newsletter. Is it? Are you going to be specifically marketing it or is it going to be something that is part of your marketing strategy and people just opt in when they download a white paper, they attend the webinar or something like that. That's also important to consider. And that relates to whether or not your newsletter is its own existing thing that has company sponsorship or if it's company branded.
because those two will have different strategies when it comes to actually building up the audience and building the value. The second piece is the content, which we touched on earlier. You need to make sure that it's not just here's our company, here's all the stuff we do, here's a new product we have, here's a white paper. Like it has to be a value add beyond just your organization. Cover industry news.
provide opinion pieces from people within your organization or even outside the organization, like partner companies or other adjacent organizations in your space that aren't competitors, but kind of have a supplementary offering. Analyses, if you have white papers or reports that are industry wide, things that people find useful, include those. All of those things, I think, are quite important for content. The third thing is...
I guess, assessing ROI. And this is something that I'd be curious to hear your opinion on. Because with a newsletter, right, it used to be the case where you could trust open rates, but I don't think that's the case anymore. So it's hard to assess from that standpoint how well your newsletter is doing and how quick and how many people are actually going through it. Click rates are a little more reliable.
I think in a way the most effective way would be to have something that people can get again, like a white paper. And so they would click through and you could see where it was coming from. And then they download it. And that's how, you know, people are engaging with the newsletter. but beyond that, I even struggled to think about ROI from a newsletter standpoint, cause it almost seems like more of a vibe thing where it's just part of your
It's the, you know, it's, it's the best I can, I can name it. It's like, it's a vibe. It's like, is this helping our, is this helping our overall marketing strategy? Is it engendering trust and familiarity with our audience? Right. That's kind of the, that's the way I see it. I would actually love to hear your perspective on this.
Joachim Eeckhout (25:07)
Yeah, so let's talk about metrics because I think that's a really important point. So readability of open rate, click rates, I think it really depends on the platform you use. For instance, I've been using Beehiiv for some time now, and I can say I'm pretty sure the open rate is close to the reality because they have a...
a system of verification, you get kind of the generic open rate, but then you get the verified open rate and the same for the click rate. And it seems to be quite accurate. And I don't think they overdo it. I think it depends really on the system you use, if you want accuracy. Then, of course, it's still just open rate, so it means people can open it and delete it just after, so it doesn't mean they read it.
but it gives you an indication. I think you need to at least follow those numbers and make sure your open rate is somewhere above 40%.
Then on measuring the ROI of your newsletter, that's a really good question because for me, this particular application of newsletters, so in the context of a B2B company starting a newsletter, it's totally different from a newsletter as a business, as a media, right? Their intention is not to sell advertising or to sell subscriptions or stuff like this. It's really just part of their funnel
bringing clients down to the funnel and hopefully converting them into customers. So I think you can actually track this precisely if you use a system typically like HubSpot. HubSpot, if you use it for your CRM and your newsletter, it's really easy to track.
which one of your customers or prospect has been opening the newsletter, reading it, clicking it, and then leading maybe to a future conversion. You really have to implement something like this. I say HubSpot because I think that's kind of in B2B the easiest way. It's expensive, but it just works. But there are other alternatives. You can also build it with different tools.
But if you want really to track it, you can. And I agree with you, there is also kind of a subjective perception as well. You feel it when your newsletter is being read. I would take just the case of my newsletter, the Science Marketer. When I started, you just hear crickets. You just send stuff in the wind and nothing back.
But after a few months, you start hearing people just sending you emails saying, hey, I love your newsletter or connecting on LinkedIn, just saying, I saw your newsletter. I want to connect. And you see how this kind of touch points increases in time. that's something you can really appreciate. It's subjective because I'm also not tracking everything at this stage. But I see that there is a progression. And as you said, there is this vibe.
You can feel it's a bit similar to actually posting on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, you can check your impressions, number of likes, et cetera. That's one thing, but it doesn't tell you if people will reach out to you. It's a bit the same. After a point, you start really seeing those effects yourself and you start having this vibe, okay, it works, or it doesn't. Maybe that's also the case.
So yeah, I agree with you. It's a bit of both. You can implement real metrics, but there is also something to feel.
Anis (28:25)
Yeah. And you have a, you have a great newsletter. I'll shout that out here, even though maybe there's a decent number of people here, but I've learned, I've learned a lot from it, just from a, from a marketing perspective. Cause my, as I mentioned earlier, my background sales. So I've had to learn a lot about marketing in the, in the past little while and having something like that, that is. Niche down to life sciences and biotech has been really useful. So great job, Joachim Keep it up. Yeah. Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (28:28)
Thank you.
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, I'm doing my best. ⁓
But yeah, I think, you know, it's a good example because what I'm doing is I'm just sharing every week what I learned, right? Like I always try to go back to, what have I done? I don't know, like in the last 10 years related to marketing and that's how I find my topics.
when I don't have anything else, interview people to get their own expertise. That's another thing. I think that's how companies can see their own newsletter. Just share what you learn in your own industry, in your own specialty. Get experts also to talk about it. That's another way to source your content. Then your newsletter will just make itself. That's how I do it. Then if you need just help,
Anis (29:29)
Yeah.
Joachim Eeckhout (29:32)
Setting this up and having someone kind of motivate you, reach out to Anis, and that's how you can put it in place.
So thanks, Anest, for your insights. It's been really interesting to talk about it with you.
Anis (29:45)
Yeah, thank you, Joachim for the opportunity and yeah, looking forward to seeing what next week's Life Science Marketer has in store.
Joachim Eeckhout (29:53)
Thanks. So if you want to hear more about marketing and communication in life Sciences, don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. And you can also subscribe to my newsletter at thesciencemarketer.com. See you next time.