This is the full transcript of an interview between SOFX founder Sam Havelock and Washington, D.C.–based tech and media journalist Simon Owens. In this conversation, Sam offers a complete rundown of how SOFX began, starting with succinct combat reporting for special operations insiders in Iraq, and how it developed into the network it is today. He also shares his vision for the future of SOFX, including a new membership program that’s currently in the works.
If you prefer to watch or listen to the full interview, you can find the video and audio versions here.
For more insightful commentary on modern media, technology, and the creator economy, we highly recommend subscribing to Simon Owens’ Substack.
[Simon Owens]
So, I remember talking to you, you know, months and months ago, and you were talking about kind of the genesis of this media company you started, and it started while you were still in the military, I believe. Like, you started sending some kind of daily email to other people in the military, and that’s how you kind of built that kind of writing muscle. What were you doing at the time?
Tell us a little bit about your military background.
[Sam Havelock]
Well, to make a long story short, I was a career Navy SEAL, and with regards to my earliest attempt at newsletter operations, let’s say, I was basically composing sort of a daily summary of the highlights of what was happening overseas in Iraq. At that stage of the game, I was the deputy commander of basically all the theater special operations forces that were operating in Iraq. But there were people stateside and whatever by the time…
You’d think that there’s very well-established methods of giving sort of the intelligence of the ground situation, let’s call it. It wasn’t necessarily intelligence, but the ground situation of what’s happening on the ground in a more real time format. But these people are many different chains of command removed from the operational infrastructure of what was happening on the ground.
And so, what I was doing wasn’t… This was all on… Let me preface that by saying everything that I was putting into a daily newsletter, for lack of a better term, was on what’s called a particular classified communication system.
It wasn’t like… It wasn’t like it was blasting out.
[Simon Owens]
It’s not a signal gate.
[Sam Havelock]
Everybody that would receive sort of the updates. And I just noticed every single day, there would be 10, 15 new people that were like, hey, can you add me to the list? Could you add me to the list?
And so, there was this thirst for, let’s call it, recent, relevant, extremely bulletized reporting. Because most of the time in a military construct, you have in-depth analysis and so on and so forth. Let’s call it long form journalism packaged as intelligence products, which just takes a lot of time to get through.
And so, I think that from my sort of start as a Navy SEAL officer by day, but sort of journalist by night, began with this intuition that people don’t have time to read the long form stuff, but they do want the facts. And it was a very matter of fact type of thing regarding what was happening on the ground and which units were doing great things and so on and so forth. And it just sort of took off from there.
[Simon Owens]
And the way that it worked the service you’re providing is like there were people like constantly rotating into Iraq and then other people coming home. And so, there was all this kind of institutional knowledge that was being lost every time the people who had been there for however long, six months, 12 months or whatever, were leaving. So, you were trying to basically kind of like shorten that knowledge curve or whatever.
[Sam Havelock]
I was trying to create in my mind’s eye from the perspective of supporting the mission, I was trying to create intellectual continuity with regards to what was happening on the ground in a format that I knew that the people actually doing the work, i.e. the enlisted men, so on and so forth, the bulk of the force could digest. It was in a punchy sort of quick format. It wasn’t overly wordy, but I knew that people could sink their teeth into it.
Your average SEAL or Green Beret operator would read it, and they would build a knowledge base before showing up to theater, which in my mind’s eye, it would certainly help them do their job better, but it would probably also help them save their lives. To me, there was obviously no economic basis at all. It was just what I thought needed to be done with regards to sort of a daily reader on what just happened over the past 24 hours.
[Simon Owens]
And when did you leave the military?
[Sam Havelock]
I left in 2012.
[Simon Owens]
And then I know you did a few things after that, like you worked for like a manufacturing company. But when did you get like kind of the germ of the idea for some kind of daily newsletter product?
[Sam Havelock]
I don’t think it ever stopped. When I left Iraq, this notion that information and continuity was vitally important to the community and not in the way that it’s represented by big media. So, what do I mean by that.
The public’s perception of the special operations community is largely defined by the Hollywood media depiction of that community and nowadays, influencers, with a handful of influencers who depict what that community is all about.
But if you really know the community, it’s much more interesting than that right? In terms of the breadth of capabilities, in terms of the scope of the work, in terms of just the richness of how these young men and women are doing essentially the work of a nation around the world in extremely hostile environments, putting it all on the line.
And it’s not just your Hollywood depiction is, oh, six-foot three Navy SEALs or Green Berets jumping out of helicopters, fast roping on top of roofs, stuff blowing up, gunfights, this, that, and the other thing. The more nuanced reality of special operations is that you’ve got extremely talented teams of people that occur everywhere up and down sort of the human ladder, right? And it’s demographically as well, It’s men and women, it’s multiple different types of assets that are all required to do the job, right? It’s not all six foot plus muscle bound white guys, frankly. It’s not the real community.
[Simon Owens]
I was just gonna say, so you’re saying that there’s just a huge bureaucracy that you need to keep informed of the left hand, what the right hand is doing, and all that kind of stuff, like you felt like there was an information vacuum there that the media wasn’t really filling.
[Sam Havelock]
Well, on two different dimensions, when I thought about creating SOFX, because there had been a very successful newsletter out there. It wasn’t a newsletter; it was more of a media company that probably went a bit sideways with the community. I’m not going to point any fingers or anything, but they focused on reporting on the community, which rubbed a lot of community members the wrong way.
And what I thought was a valuable product to create was at first an aggregation platform that would take all the world’s news about the special operations world and then bring it into one place in the form of a morning daily reader. Again, rinsing and repeating sort of the same model I’d done in Iraq. And the lift that that was doing was to inform people within the community what was being said about them.
And so it was, I’m not reporting on the community, I’m basically scanning all the global wires, truncating that information into digestible formats, again, a movie I’d seen before and knew worked well, so that the community could understand what the world was saying about it.
With also the thinking that eventually this thing would be more broadly interesting to a wide variety of people that were curious about the work of the community. And so there would be almost like a market effect, hugely valuable to your average special operator.
And because they were reading it, eventually other people would catch on and feel closer to the community. Because that’s what I think, you see a lot of proximal sorts of association which drives much of the special operations that’s called creator market, where there’s folks that are selling books or courses and things like that. And it’s all fine and well, not taking anything away from that.
There’s this desire by a broader public to harness, I suppose, the magic or the capabilities that are resonant within special operations. Like what’s the magic sauce? How do I learn to be more like that?
So on and so forth. And I say by storytelling, and then showing the great work, not just of the fast rope, direct action operations, but all the other stuff, we’d get to tell that story. But then there was a deeper thing as well.
Back to your point with regards to when a unit leaves the theater, many times they’d be pouring and taking enormous risk to train a partner force in Iraq, for instance. And they would never really see the benefit necessarily of where these guys and gals eventually. So nowadays, if you look at the Iraqi National Counterterror Force, special operations guys 10, 15, X number of years prior had all been working diligently to bring that capability to life.
And nowadays, that Iraqi counterterrorism force is doing its own operations without American support. And so, you’re getting to basically see, hey, you poured your life into these people, X number of years later, look at what they’re capable of doing, and you played a part in that. And I thought that that was important to give people a sense of mission accomplishment.
[Simon Owens]
So it sounds like your initial idea was just some kind of news aggregator platform slash website, but it eventually became like a newsletter, right?
[Sam Havelock]
It always began as a newsletter first operation. And the way I’d kind of organized it, I’d never forgot about the idea. From the time I retired, it took me two years to get my act together.
And again, the whole thing’s been bootstrapped the whole way. So when we first published the first issue, I think it was July 11th, 2014, I just had to put the infrastructure in place to do this. And what’s interesting is that I’d made a mental commitment to do it every day.
So I had to be ready to do it every day from that start point. And I think with two exceptions that were all technical problems on WordPress or something, we’ve published every single day since July 11th, 2014. With a shoestring staff.
We don’t have this big newsroom or anything.
[Simon Owens]
So it’s called SOFX, Special Operations. What’s the FX?
[Sam Havelock]
So interestingly, the military acronym for Special Operations Forces is SOF. And then the X, I like to say I’ve been using X as sort of a denominator for whatever’s next for longer than many have been using it in modern time, recently. But let’s, SOFX in and of itself, the newsletter is called the SOFX Report.
Then the website itself is sofx.com. And where it has come from, where it started is we eventually bumped up against the ceiling on the number of internal special operations people that would read it.
And then the other thing I didn’t quite understand is that the community is so, my belief was that we would eventually be able to support the operation with advertising revenue, companies that wanted to sell things into the Department of Defense or the Special Operations community because it’s a very tough audience to get to.
What I know now that I didn’t know then is that it’s so allergic to marketing that that segment of the industry doesn’t believe in marketing. So it’s almost impossible to sell ads to companies that do business with the Special Operations community because they were typically started by former special operators, quiet professionals.
Hey, marketing is not what we do, we don’t market, unless you’re Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen, so on and so forth. To make a long story short, as an operator, at the end of the day, you can’t keep bootstrapping things forever. At some point, you’ve got to generate some revenue.
Where the SOFX report is nowadays, there’s still a bit of a focus on Special Operations community, but it has a much stronger content arc that is focused on reporting on armed conflict and the impact of technology on the battlefield. And why does that matter? It’s because your minor armed conflicts always can be seen off in the distance, way off in the distance before these things blow up into big things.
And technology in the battlefield, you will see what the Department of Defense is going to be using in five to 10 years on the battlefield now with Special Operations Forces. And so, the lift that the report does nowadays, I think we closed last week around 39,000 subscribers. They’re hardcore decision makers in the industry, aerospace defense, government services, private military contracting, private security, Special Operations.
They use it as a daily reader to inform business decisions. It’s really a B2B platform nowadays with a trajectory that our objective is by 2030, December 31st, 2030 to be the most important media organization covering armed conflict and the impact of technology on the battlefield in the world. That’s the vision.
[Simon Owens]
When you launched it in 2014, publishing it as a daily newsletter, it was just you writing it back then, right?
[Sam Havelock]
No, I had organized a team. A very small team, but yeah, I was writing alot of them, but it was me and two others.
[Simon Owens]
And like you said, it was kind of like a tightly curated, just the facts type of publication. These weren’t like long features or editorials that you were publishing. You probably had some contacts in this entire space, obviously having worked in it.
Was that kind of like your initial readership? Just people who knew you professionally and personally through all your years in the military?
[Sam Havelock]
It was that let’s call it that, me and the first 300 people that I really know and love me. But then it was just brute force. We were inviting people one by one by one on LinkedIn, like personalized outreach.
Hey, we’re publishing this thing. We think it can be valuable to you. Would you like to join?
That was the first, let’s call it the first 15,000 subscribers were just brute force invites.
[Simon Owens]
And then it started to, the flywheel started to turn. Were you going to like defense contractor conferences and stuff like that to network and stuff?
[Sam Havelock]
Yeah. And it was such a, if you look at it from a CPM or cost per thousand impressions basis, that’s absolutely the most expensive and worst way to collect subscribers.
[Simon Owens]
But it’s a great way to build your brand, I feel like.
[Sam Havelock]
Yeah. But I was having to do stuff like crazy stuff like, hey, enter to win this AR-15. Put your business card in a fishbowl.
You’re going to wind up on my newsletter, but it’s a great shot to win an AR-15. It was crazy stuff like that. But yeah, that was for years and years and years.
That’s what we did.
[Simon Owens]
And so you said that you initially were thinking companies that sold into the special forces, but it sounds like you’re a little bit broader now to where anyone, any company that touches the defense industry whatsoever could be a prospective buyer of ads on it. So, when did you, how far along did you start monetizing that audience?
[Sam Havelock]
I mean, I think there was a bit of a nuance too, in terms of what originally the newsletter wasn’t as consumptive in terms of time, because we were basically just backlinking out to doing a short summary and then linking out to the original source article. But as time marched on, what we wanted to do was actually more thoughtful summaries that are original work on the website. So, we could basically create more of a media company and not this random newsletter that can do sort of what eventually what Google started doing with regards to doing a news feed.
I was thinking this isn’t going to be a thing in a year or two if we don’t expand our written coverage.
[Simon Owens]
So instead of sending someone to the New York Times or Reuters, you were writing up a piece on the website and the newsletter was linking to the website. So you were capturing a little bit more of your audience, your email audience to get them clicking around the website and maybe sharing those articles and stuff like that.
[Sam Havelock]
That’s exactly right. But with regards to monetization, I think there was just focus on content, let’s call it the first year and a half. And then we started to try to, in earnest, try to sell ads and sponsorships and things like that.
In about the 2015-ish time frame, well, let’s call it maybe probably ran it for about a year before we asked anyone, hey, would you consider sponsoring?
[Simon Owens]
And was that just like cold outreach? Was that noticing someone from Lockheed Martin signed up for the newsletter and grabbed their email address and using that as a segue into talking about it? What was your kind of strategy for the advertising?
[Sam Havelock]
You know, it’s, and ask any newsletter operator, which you know, it’s always a struggle. It remains a struggle. We live in an era where everybody wants to launch a newsletter, and they think it’s sort of easy.
And it’s not, and it’s still not. Now the tools are great. They are.
But at the end of the day, the business of monetizing newsletters is hard. Right. That’s just, that’s just the way it is.
But to answer your question, it was a bit of a, sort of a going, going to the trade shows and then walking, basically walking the floor with a media kit, handing out the media kit. Hey, I’m the proprietor of this thing. I think it’s, you know, you can, you can reach out to, you can reach this audience.
You can do much less expensive, this trade show where most of the people are ignoring you, blah, blah, blah, blah. You can be, you know, one of only three advertisers that day. That’s a lot better than one of 700 booths here to reach the same audience.
At that stage of the game, our numbers were easily the same numbers of people showing up to one of the major trade shows. So it was, it was a fairly easy conversation to have, but people still weren’t necessarily comfortable with newsletter advertising because newsletters weren’t too well known, until the morning brews, the skim and the hustle. People didn’t quite recognize newsletters even though newsletters have existed for decades, you know, especially financial ones. They don’t talk about how much they make, but they make a lot of money.
[Simon Owens]
So you launched in 2014, you said like up to your like first 15,000 subscribers, you were basically just blocking and tackling and just like getting them one by one. What kind of growth trajectory and how did you find more scalable ways of growing after that first 15,000?
[Sam Havelock]
I started to just sort of grow by word of mouth. And then there were different, and you know this, basically what you had to do was email send platforms typically stop working at certain sort of, they don’t stop working, but they work less well at different audience levels. And then you wind up having, once the dashboarding tools that would measure delivery, deliverability, open rates, and all these other things came to the fore, we had to do a bunch of list cleanup.
And I think I’ve, I don’t know if other operators have felt the same thing. I absolutely am committed to the belief that large tech companies like Google, Yahoo, and Outlook automatically unsubscribe readers that are active readers. I have been unsubscribed from my own newsletter without any, and I know not to hit unsubscribe on your, like I know this.
Then our growth strategy lately has just been meta-acquisition. It’s been working well.
[Simon Owens]
And meta, you mean like some kind of call to action that’s run as a promoted post?
[Sam Havelock]
Yes, exactly.
[Simon Owens]
And are you, how are you targeting that just based on employer or?
[Sam Havelock]
Look like audiences typically. I guess we basically develop a composite sketch of sort of our typical reader is this, that fits into this economic demographic, is interested in like outdoor sports, interested in firearms, the usual odds and ends. And that’s been quite successful.
It’s a lot less expensive than giving out AR-15s at trade shows and waiting for 300 business cards to show up in a fishbowl.
[Simon Owens]
Yeah. And is the lookalike audience, is that from you uploading your email list and then letting Facebook kind of just find lookalike audiences or?
[Sam Havelock]
No, we don’t do that because we have an implied obligation to, we take privacy extremely seriously. So we developed sort of a synthetic list of typical suspects using, basically using some different software tools where you can, you can basically, as you know, nowadays you can use different tools to select, to find people’s email addresses by title, by company, by industry. And so we develop a composite list of, hey, if in an ideal world, these would be our subscribers.
[Simon Owens]
So flash for today, you said you had like 39,000 subscribers. If you had to guess at like a pie chart of who those readers are, what’s that kind of breakdown of people who are currently, you know, in special operations forces versus more general military versus just working at, you know, the department of defense versus working for like the Lockheed Martins of the world.
[Sam Havelock]
Sure. I’d say probably of the 39,000, we have got in our media kit, a very good demographic pie chart to include sort of by number, the number of CEOs, directors, and key influencers that are senior VP or above. I think that the number is around a little bit under 4,000 subscribers or hold a C role or a senior VP role, something like that.
I would say probably 15% are middle-level managers in and around the department of defense, aerospace and defense, their program or project managers within the government, product developers within some of these companies. I’d say probably 25% are either active duty or recently separated, up and down, not just in special operations, but more broadly. Let’s call the other, what am I up to around 30, 40, I’m up 40%, probably 20% are just people super interested in the content that we publish, they’re civilians.
And then I’d say the other 30 to 40% are, there’s probably, let’s call it 10 to 15% are foreign military special operations and what’s called the MOD or ministry of defense participants. So different people that have worked closely with us and they’ve typically found out about the newsletter through working with special operations people. And then another 10 to 15% that would sort of close it out would be business owners and entrepreneurs.
The math is probably a little bit off, but you get the point. Yeah.
[Simon Owens]
And like, what’s your company like in terms of staffing now?
[Sam Havelock]
Yeah. I mean, I’ve got a full-time staff of about 10 people.
[Simon Owens]
Is that mainly editorial or?
[Sam Havelock]
No, no. I’d say on the content team is around, is four people. I’ve got a recruiting team of around three.
So, one of the ways we monetize is plain old head hunting. Oh, yeah.
[Simon Owens]
Because that’s not super scalable, but again, per client you’re making or per recruitment, you’re making a decent amount of money.
[Sam Havelock]
Right. And to be honest, the recruiting paid for the content operations for years. Like there’s no question that we were doing full stack recruiting.
Like it wasn’t just job postings. Yeah. Like it was real recruiting.
[Simon Owens]
But are there any synergies there where you can run an ad in your newsletter saying we’re looking for this position? And so, you might have a leg up over a standard recruiting agency who must go and do cold messages through LinkedIn and stuff like that.
[Sam Havelock]
Oh, absolutely.
We have leveraged the distribution of the newsletter since day one to find very odd capabilities. And let’s say as an example, we had one client who needed to find us pilots with a security clearance that have been type rated on Russian hind helicopters that were willing to fly in the Congo. Like that’s the type of stuff we get.
Like right out of soldier of fortune.
[Simon Owens]
Yeah. So you got four editorial, three recruiters. What, who else, what else?
[Sam Havelock]
And then I’d say, yeah, I’d say the other three are just general, you know, finance and accounts, you know, just general operations and stuff.
[Simon Owens]
And what’s the content output looked like today? Is it like just the daily newsletter with the articles on the website? Are you doing anything else in terms of webinars, podcasts, video, anything like that?
[Sam Havelock]
Yes. So basically, the SOFX report each day has about nine articles. And then the report itself, as it arrives in the inbox, there’s just a short summary.
It links over to the website where there’s a typically a full article nowadays. And then if there were any sources to that article, we’ll link to the backlink to the sources of the thing, give credit were credit’s due. Um, so it’s basically that, we’ve not done any other kind of, uh, any podcasts yet.
We’re thinking about that. We haven’t done events or anything else. What we have done though is in terms of other monetization things, um, there’s basically three things that are all focused on helping companies grow, uh, in the aerospace and defense world.
It’s called ADGS, aerospace, defense, and government services. We can help a company quickly get broad market awareness through our marketing operations. We help them grow by finding, you know, specific talent to help them achieve their objectives with regards to breaking into the federal government or, in some cases we just do rudimentary recruiting for other positions that for companies that just aren’t necessarily government contractors.
And then in the third dimension of what we do is we have basically agency operations, which is where we’ll leverage the distribution of the newsletter to find specific pieces of talent that are subject matter experts on any project that people want to undertake. And so in the agency model, we’ve done everything from special project management to detailed projects that a company wants to have an outcome on but doesn’t necessarily want to be directly associated with. It’s, it’s all legal, but there’s a term called managed attribution, which is when, uh, the easiest way to explain that is if you’re Walt Disney and you want to buy a thousand acres of farmland or swampland in Florida, but you don’t want anybody to think it’s Disney Corporation that’s doing that.
You hire guys like us that can put together a special project team, understand what the objectives are, put together a plan of action, execute it against those objectives, but obfuscates who is actually behind that. In that model, you know, I think it was Robert Dulles who once said that every media organization is an intelligence agency hiding in plain sight. That’s what SOFX is.
[Simon Owens]
So like, are you assembling a project management team that’s doing that? Or are you like, you’re just helping them find those people?
[Sam Havelock]
Typically, we’ll assemble the project management team and depending on the level of complexity or depending on the level of involvement of the client, either their project manager will manage the thing, whatever that thing is, or they will just assign it to us. We’ll determine, you know, what the outcomes are, what the deliverables are, consolidate that into a statement of work, and then I’ll either go and find the team and then we’ll lead it through our operations department or whatever the case may be. So, it really depends on what the client wants.
In some cases, the client wants to have, you know, has their chief strategy officer or one of their operations people managing the team we would put together to augment their capabilities. Or they say we want you guys to just do this, that, or the other thing. Come back and brief us on the plan and what it’s going to cost.
It goes from there.
[Simon Owens]
Sounds like a heavy lift for a company with only 10 people.
Um, yes, unless you’re, you’ve got an army of, of 1099 contractors that are the most capable people in the world.
Then your average special operations people don’t want to be micromanaged and do an extremely good job if they’re just given a clear sense of direction on what the outcome is, what the mission is, so on and so forth. And so when we execute those type of special projects for special project management or sensitive activities, I’m only working with project team leaders who I’ve worked with for decades. So it’s not a case where, oh, we’re putting an ad out on the newsletter because company X, Y, or Z wants to have this outcome in Anadarko or in whatever, Texas or whatever.
And we’re not just throwing it out there and hoping for the best. We’re, it’s a, we’ve got a very specific process for sort of running those projects.
[Simon Owens]
And the articles on your website, are those like still kind of curate, curating outside sources, or is your editorial staff like, you know, you know, working with their own sources and interviewing people and doing like breaking news or at least doing some original reporting?
[Sam Havelock]
We don’t do like classical journalism, which is where we’ve got, you know, multiple reporters. We actually don’t believe in that model anymore. We think that that model’s dead internally.
We think that the most, let’s put it this way, you know, Robert K. Brown is the person who created Soldier of Fortune magazine, Colonel Robert K. Brown, you know, let’s call it 30, 40 years ago.
And he used a term back then called participatory journalism. And he was really several decades before his time. Because when, participatory journalism means that the people that are actually doing the thing are reporting on the thing.
You know, in the modern era of everything, everywhere, all at once is being recorded. Like, gone are the days where you’ve got, in our view, a reporter doing deep investigative journalism from the Diplomat Hotel in Kabul about some firefight that just happened in the Korengal Valley. Like, why don’t I just get the footage from the Korengal Valley and then examine the different social media reporting and then try to create a composite picture of what’s happening on the ground using the humans that are already there to develop the report.
Now, it’s not going to necessarily meet the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times’ bar for certainty, but speed has a value over certainty, right?
[Simon Owens]
Yeah. I mean, I certainly agree with your notion. Like, the good analogy would be, like, if, you know, Trump was pushing through some kind of immigration update, like, it’d be better to just get, like, an immigration professor, like, a law professor who, like, studies immigration for, like, that’s his entire career, for him to do the analysis of it versus a reporter just going around and calling a bunch of, like, immigration experts and then kind of, like, then coalescing all that information together when you have the person who does this full-time and that’s his entire career.
It’d be better to just have him write the piece. I guess I don’t, like, think that’s, like, traditional reporting is obsolete because I think there’s still a lot of value of a reporter, you know, who’s a little bit, like, removed from the actual thing, like, you know, pulling sources together and getting information that isn’t freely available on social media or recorded somewhere and, like, drawing that out. But, yeah, I get what you mean in terms of, like, the participatory journalism aspect and how the media is more focused, more reliant on that today than it was 30, 40 years ago.
[Sam Havelock]
Well, I think that, and I misstepped when I said that sort of traditional journalism is dead. What I meant probably was that within the context of reporting about armed conflict, it’s become too expensive and too dangerous. The battlefield is more deadly now than it has ever been.
And your traditional sort of news teams and footage, like, they can’t afford, even your Newsmax and the rest of them do a pretty good job of it, they find it increasingly difficult just due to the lethality of modern battlefields to get teams deployed. So, what we do is we understand who the usual suspects are province by province, city by city in the Ukraine. We know where to go and we basically are monitoring these different sorts of citizen journalists that are reporting on the thing and then developing with a sort of a rapid framework of creating a mosaic, so to speak, of what we’re picking up on these different open-source channels.
And what we’re finding is that we’re beating mainstream media by days just because we know where to look and then we’ve got a very specific process for doing the best we can do to try to put that picture together. And then we’re also able to illustrate it with the footage that these people are putting out on social media. So, if you go, you won’t see that in the newsletter, but if you bother to actually click the read more and then you go into our long form article on our website, it’s rich with content that other people have produced.
So, we think it’s as far as news reporting on armed conflict, we believe that we’re one the fastest in the business because you can’t deploy these big video teams and everything. It’s just too expensive nowadays.
[Simon Owens]
So, when you flash forward to 2030, which I think that’s when you said you expect to be the largest media outlet in your niche, what will the company look like then? Like, what do you hope to accomplish between now and then?
[Sam Havelock]
It’s difficult to predict with any degree of certainty. And I think you would, you probably personally would hold the view that the breadth and speed at which change is happening in the content world because of the wholesale theft of intellectual property and content by artificial intelligence engines. It’s very difficult to predict what exactly will happen over the next five years and how that is going to force us to change our model.
So, I don’t have a strong degree of certainty with regards to, from a staff standpoint, what it will look like from a revenue model standpoint. How will that change? My belief is that we are going to have to pivot into a more specifically meaningful and human-centered relationship with our subscribers, even if that means far fewer subscribers with a much richer level of involvement in terms of a membership, in terms of almost a private intelligence agency for those people and companies that can afford that and that want to rely on humans in the system and not just on artificial intelligence engines that, to me, pose an existential risk actually to the future humanity, but certainly to the future of media.
[Simon Owens]
Well, I could see you building out a database project or something. Who at this company is the point of contact for, because obviously it’s a very intricate web of companies and private contractors and people on top level Senate staff and congressional staff who deal with this whole org chart. I could see there being some kind of database product that people who want to know who exactly what jobs and stuff like that does, there’d be value.
But you think you’d be building products? You think you’d be getting into events? Do you think you’d be a more holistic media company that’s maybe doing video and podcasts?
What do you see on that front?
[Sam Havelock]
Probably video and podcasts, but I think in the more near term, what we are launching really within the next few months is a private email service that we’ve had some of the leading experts that have built some of the most highly classified tech stacks for the government. I had them build us our own email server on an email system that we own and control. It’s basically an AI-free and privacy-assured environment, meaning we’re never going to let AI into it.
It’s for those people who are finally fed up to the point that they’re willing to pay a few bucks per month to be part of it. It’s a utility like any other, but we put the primacy of their data and their privacy first. And so I’m optimistic that there will be more people than just special operations people that will be interested in that.
That’s called SOFX Network. It’ll all be at sofx.net would be the email address.
[Simon Owens]
So you’re building your own service that’s connected to the open email protocol that people can use as their email, like basically their email address. Like I have a Gmail address, it would be like a completely private. So they can’t just send messages to each other, they could send it to any email address, but whatever’s coming through your system is like private and won’t be training anything.
[Sam Havelock]
Yes. For example, interestingly, Signal, people believe that it’s completely secure. Oh, okay.
So how did the editor of The Atlantic wind up like, okay, it’s not. People believe that Proton is completely secure. Okay, that was developed by CERN.
CERN is an academic institution in Europe, servers are in Europe. Okay, believe in ferries if you want. Believe that Proton is secure, that sounds great.
I think that people will believe in Sam Havlock and a technology team that’s made up of former U.S. Special Operations veterans managing a server that’s in North Carolina. This isn’t for criminals. Like we don’t, we’re actually not going to just broadly let anybody have the email.
We’re actually going to vet these people one by one by one to ensure that they are good humans. And it’s simple, but they are humans. No bots, real people, somewhat vetted as good people.
And I think that there’s a market for a high trust email service provider. So that’s the SOFX network thing that we’re launching really in the next month or two.
[Simon Owens]
Interesting. This is the first for me in terms of interviewing someone who’s developing something like this. That’s pretty cool.
Awesome. Well, Sam, those were all the questions I have for you. Where can people find you online?
[Sam Havelock]
Yeah, I’m super easy to find. You can just email Sam.havelock@sofx.com, if there’s any questions. But Sam Havlock or sam.havlock on Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook, it’s all the same. To sign up for the SOFX report, you just go to the home page www.sofx.com, and it’ll be immediately apparent exactly where to sign up for it. It is free. Its privacy assured.
We do not rent, sell, or share the names on that list with anyone. And it’s so easy to unsubscribe. It’s simple.
If you don’t want to be there, there’s no lock-in.
[Simon Owens]
Awesome. Well, this is a lot of fun.
Thanks for joining me.
[Sam Havelock]
Thank you. I appreciate it.
And I really support your work. And I love what you’re doing. And I think we’re kindred spirits.
So, I look forward to coming up, maybe grab coffee with you in Washington the next time I’m up there.
