Our 2025 Plan

15 months ago, I pressed send on an email to 45 HVAC contractors. It was mostly a roundup of news stories from across the web, and my logic was simple: There’s a need for industry news and information, and email is a good channel to deliver it. It’s a direct path to people’s eyes, intimate, easy to read on mobile phones, and, if done right, can save busy execs time by being consumable in just a few minutes. Plus, it’s free. 

Since then, I’ve brought on a few part-time writers and a lot’s happened. This year, our content has been seen a total of over 350,000 times across the web and on LinkedIn, we worked with eight advertising partners, were the first to publish online that Goldman Sachs was acquiring Sila Services for over $1 billion, and I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know a lot of cool people in the space, including many of you, our readers.  

We’re still a very early-stage startup, but we have reasonably aggressive plans for the next year, and I’d like to share some of them. Here’s a peek at what’s happening in 2025:

Starting in January, we’re moving the newsletter from two to three days a week — Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. If something big happens on Tuesday evening, we no longer have to wait until Friday to ship it to your inbox. We can get it to you the next day. I’ve learned that in news media, frequency itself is a growth lever, just like PPC or radio in contracting, so the move will enable us to grow our audience faster. In my belief, three days is the sweet spot between being frequent enough to scale without being overwhelming — five days would be too much.

We’re making each email about 10 percent shorter. Right now, our emails average around 1,000 words, and we’re cutting this down to around 900 (by merging two existing sections into one — the rest will look the same.) The idea? To make it quicker — and give you a little time back. By adding a third email, we’re delivering you 50 percent more information on a weekly basis, so we’re compensating by lightly shaving the time investment needed per email. 

We’re adding a second, smaller sponsorship placement in each email. Simply speaking, adding another placement allows us to generate more revenue, and generating more revenue enables us to reinvest more into better content (hiring writers, traveling to events, etcetera.) The existing sponsorship will stay the same, and the new one will be half the word count with no image. By adding it, given its format, we’ll be able to achieve our business goals without negatively impacting the reading experience.

We’re evaluating launching a plumbing newsletter later in the year, along with launching or acquiring a podcast. For us to succeed in the long run, we need to be “multi-platform” — that is, where the audience is. If someone prefers news emails, we want to meet them there. If they only listen to podcasts, we want to meet them there. If they only consume content in 30-second Instagram videos, we want to meet them there. Our plan is to produce content on each of these different “platforms” — and then do it in several home services, starting with plumbing. 

Additionally, we’re gonna experiment with a small event. Events are also a “platform,” giving us another way to add value by bringing you all together for networking, education, and fun. Over time, they will become an increasingly important part of our business. Most industry events are generalized and held in hotel ballrooms. Events we plan to host will be summit-style and tailored to specific topics (M&A, policy, technology), relatively small, and held at cool venues — hopefully with live music. 

Finally — and most importantly — we’re gonna continue blocking and tackling. Our business is simple. We need to cover interesting and relevant stories — and do it over and over again. Talking to all of you helps us hone in on what’s interesting and relevant, so keeping an open line of communication and chatting as frequently as possible is priority number one — along with showing up and doing the work every day. 

I hope this helps give you an idea of what we’re building. Shoot me an email with any thoughts or comments. I’d love to chat, speaking of chatting. 

I’m very thankful for all of you, and I’m excited about what’s ahead for the industry in 2025. 

Have a great holiday and a Happy New Year. 

— Alec