How to Start a Newsletter Business

💡 How to Start a Newsletter

🗂 Overview:

Over the last few years, the newsletter business has exploded. Some newsletters have sold for many millions and this has sparked a huge interest in the business model.

Other than the huge upside potential, people are drawn to starting newsletters because they’re relatively easy to get started and require minimal upfront costs.

Newsletters can be operated with minimal time commitment. For many newsletters, it just takes one person to run and it can be done in their spare time.

But is it still a good idea to start a newsletter? Can you still make money with one? And if so, how do you do it?

I currently operate 2 newsletters, this one and Bootstrapped Growth meaning I’ve done a lot of research on this industry, so If you want to know the answers to the above questions, keep reading.

⭐️ Examples:

• The Hustle:

  • A daily newsletter on business and tech.

  • Sold to Hubspot for $27m

  • Launched Trends.co as a paid community

  • Here’s how they grew Trends.co to 15k subscribers.

• Houck’s Newsletter:

  • A newsletter about helping founders build, grow, and raise money for their startups.

  • Makes over $1m a year through sponsorships and a paid community.

• Morning Brew:

  • Daily email that makes reading the news “fun”.

  • Grew to 2.5m subscribers in 5 years with referrals amounting to 30% of their growth.

  • Sold for $75m to Business Insider in 2020.

  • So successful that they created a whole newsletter model (Morning Brew for X)

• Axios:

  • Sold for $525m to Cox Enterprises in 2022

  • 1.6m subscribers across their newsletters

  • They sell a pro subscription with industry-specific deep dives

  • They have a SaaS tool targeted at businesses to help them communicate better.

• The Peak:

  • “Morning Brew for Canada” with over 115k subscribers.

  • Sold $100k worth of ads within 1 year of launching.

  • Sold for $5m in just 3 years to ZoomerMedia.

• Exploding Topics:

  • A free newsletter that sends trending topics every week.

  • Pro membership gives access to more topics and their SaaS tools that offer even more features.

  • According to the founder, they are a $3.2m business.

  • Here’s how he grew the newsletter to over 91k people.

• Beehiiv:

  • A newsletter platform that has everything you need to start, grow and monetize your newsletter.

  • Grew to $16.5m in 2 years. Tyler Denk (the Founder) has turned down $50m acquisition offers.

There are so many success stories with newsletters. You can easily spend a few days going down the rabbit hole of successful newsletter businesses - and I highly recommend you do.

👎 Why Newsletter Fail:

It’s worth noting that we only really hear about the success stories in business but never about the ones who fail. As with any business, there are a lot more failures than successes (it’s what makes the successes so interesting).

Knowing why companies fail is sometimes a lot more valuable than learning about how they succeeded.

• Lack of Consistency: Perhaps the biggest killer for newsletters is a lack of consistency. If you want to be successful in any business you need to stick to it for a long time. You won’t see success overnight - maybe not even over a year. Pick a topic that you enjoy researching and writing about and stick to a send frequency.

• Frequency Issues: As mentioned above, you need to stick to a send frequency. A common reason for failure is that people choose daily newsletters when really it should be weekly (or even monthly). Daily newsletters are hard and require a lot of dedication and systems. Start with a weekly newsletter and slowly increase the frequency over time.

• Boring Content: Sometimes the content just isn’t very engaging. If you’re getting low open rates or a high number of subscribers unsubscribing (churn) it’s likely your content (and headlines) aren’t very good.

• Little Value: What value does your newsletter bring to your subscribers? Why should they subscribe? Why should they stay subscribed? And why should they read it every time? Focus on providing as much value as possible every time you send a newsletter.

• AI-Generated Content: AI has been around for long enough that people can quite easily tell when something is AI-generated. If your whole newsletter is just AI content, you’ll likely see lower engagement and growth.

👍 Advantages:

• Own your audience: With social media platforms, all it takes is a change in algorithms and your whole business can be crippled or the platform you’ve spent so long building your audience could shut down or lose popularity. With newsletters, this isn’t as big of a risk. You own your audience and have a direct line of communication with them.

• Audience Segmentation and Personalization: They provide opportunities to segment audiences based on interests, demographics, or behaviours, allowing for tailored content that increases engagement and satisfaction.

• Lack of Personalization in Mass Media: Unlike broad-target media, newsletters can address specific interests or professional needs, which is highly valued by readers looking for specialized information.

• Cost-Effective: Compared to other media forms, newsletters are relatively inexpensive to produce. They don’t require extensive infrastructure or resources, making them accessible for individuals and small businesses.

• Monetization Flexibility: Newsletters can be monetized in various ways like subscriptions, sponsorships, affiliate marketing, digital products, SaaS and services. This versatility makes it easier to find a suitable business model based on the creator’s goals and audience size.

• Brand Building and Authority: Regular newsletters help build brand recognition and establish the author as an authority in their niche. This can be beneficial for personal branding, professional consulting, or academic influence.

• Feedback and Analytics: Tools used to manage newsletters provide valuable analytics on open rates, click-through rates, and engagement metrics. These insights help in refining content strategies and improving reader satisfaction.

• Lead Generation: For businesses, newsletters can serve as a powerful tool for lead generation and nurturing, gradually moving subscribers down the sales funnel with targeted content and offers.

• Information Overload: Newsletters can curate and simplify information, helping readers stay informed without the need to sift through vast amounts of data online. This is especially valuable in niches where developments are rapid and plentiful.

• Ad-Blocking Software: With the rise of ad-blocking technologies, traditional online advertising has become less effective. Newsletters that offer integrated sponsored content or native advertising can bypass these blockers, providing another channel for advertisers.

🧐 Opportunities:

Opportunity #1: Start a Newsletter

Starting a newsletter has never been easier - but the market has become very saturated and growing one to the size of Morning Brew or The Hustle is much more difficult than it was even 2 years ago.

Typically, the newsletters that do well are niche newsletters targeted towards a high-income/high-value audience (business, marketing, finance, investing, startups, etc). That’s not to say other niches don’t work, it’s just a lot harder.

Here are some ideas for starting a newsletter:

• Subreddits to Newsletters - Find trending or popular subreddits and build a newsletter around that niche. Popular or growing subreddits mean that there is already a community and interest in this topic.

• Curated for Niche Investments - This newsletter is for sale for $130k and curates daily content about Gold. As they mention in their growth opportunities, you could repeat this model in other industries like Carbon credits, oil & gas, uranium/nuclear and use something like Feedly to help curate the daily content and then use AI to put it all together.

• Newsletters to Services - If you’re a freelancer or agency owner (or want to be one), starting a newsletter giving free content for your niche is a great way to get warm inbound leads. Nice Ads and Newsletter Operator are great examples of this. They give free content (Ad Breakdowns and Newsletter Tips) and position themselves as authorities in their industry. They’ve built up fairly sizeable lists and can then upsell to their agency services.

• Newsletter to SaaS - Similar to the above and to what Exploding Topics have done. Create a SaaS tool and then give out free content in the form of a newsletter to help acquire users at a much cheaper rate.

• Newsletters to Digital Products - Again, like the above you can create a newsletter to help sell your digital products.

Opportunity #2: Buy a Newsletter

If you don’t want to start at zero and have some cash you want to invest, buying existing newsletters can be quite lucrative.

This is especially true if you have an existing business and want to access a large, engaged audience in your niche.

Buying a newsletter means you don’t risk spending time or money on something that isn’t validated. It also likely means you can start making money immediately.

You can find newsletters for sale at marketplaces like Duuce or aqcuire.com.

Opportunity #3: Flip Newsletters

Flipping houses has been a thing for a long time and likewise with flipping domain names and businesses. And like any other business, you can flip newsletters.

If you’re good at growing audiences (especially if you can do it organically) you can start a newsletter, monetise it and then sell it for a profit.

One thing you could try is to build a sizeable audience elsewhere like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter or even another newsletter and use those channels to funnel your audience towards a newsletter that you plan on selling.

You can also grow it organically via SEO, Reddit, Twitter and by posting on relevant forums.

Monetise them quickly via boosts, ads, digital products and pro subscriptions and then sell the business via Duuce or Acquire.

Opportunity #4: Build Products/Services for Newsletters

As the saying goes: “In a gold rush, sell shovels”.

Newsletters have become an immensely popular business model with thousands of newsletters being started every week.

This has presented an opportunity for people to offer products and services for newsletter operators to help them succeed by helping them start, grow and monetize their newsletters. Here are some examples:

• Lettergrowth provides a platform for newsletters to find cross-promotion opportunities with other newsletters to help each other grow.

• Matt Mcgarry runs Newsletter Operator and Growletter and has helped newsletters like The Hustle, Milkroad and 1440 grow their audiences. He provides marketing and growth services to other newsletter operators.

• Swapstack (now owned by Beehiiv) was a sponsorship network that helped newsletters find sponsors and monetize their newsletters.

Here are some ideas for this opportunity:

• Newsletter Growth Agency

• Sponsorship Agency

• Community Management SaaS Platform that links directly with Beehiiv and Substack subscriptions.

• Community Management Agency

🛠 How to Build:

Research

Choose a topic, niche and industry you’re interested in (important as you need to stick with it for a long time) and ideally, one that has a good chance of being monetised.

As mentioned, higher-value newsletters tend to focus on business, investing, finance, etc as the advertisers and audiences are willing to spend more.

So a music newsletter might get a lot of subscribers but you might struggle to monetise with ads and pro subscriptions.

Content Format & Frequency

Determine how you want to format your content. For example, short curated news updates or long-form breakdowns (like this). This will typically also determine your frequency.

It’s important to choose a frequency you can stick to (so daily long-form breakdowns are likely not possible) whereas, daily curated newsletters are much more feasible.

Choose a Platform

I highly recommend Beehiiv (it’s the platform I use) and it has everything you need to start, run, grow and monetize your newsletter. But there’s also Convertkit and Substack as well.

Consistency

You likely won’t grow to a million subscribers in a year or maybe even 10k subscribers. You need to be consistent and be willing to stick to it for a long time before you ever see a return. For example, this newsletter launched in June and has only recently become profitable.

You never want to miss a send and you always want to make sure your content is up to standard - this is why it’s important to choose something you’re interested in. I’m very interested in this newsletter and even I struggle to not procrastinate some weeks - but I’ve never missed a week.

🚀 How to Grow:

Reddit

Posting valuable content related to your newsletter on Reddit is a great way to get free subscribers.

This strategy revolves around providing high-value content directly related to trending topics discussed within specific Reddit communities. This can be either via comments on posts or by creating your own posts.

There’s a bit of an art to this to do it successfully - follow this strategy.

Twitter

By building an audience on Twitter you not only help develop your personal brand but you can also funnel your followers into your newsletter.

You can repurpose your newsletter as content for Twitter and then promote your newsletter under each post when it gets a certain amount of engagement.

SEO

Post your newsletters to your website (Beehiiv and Substack do this automatically) and make them SEO-friendly.

People searching for content like yours will then discover it for free and be promoted to subscribe with a popup or embedded sign-up form.

Here’s how the founder of Exploding Topics got 400k monthly visitors and here’s his formula to rank number 1 on Google.

Social Content

Posting on YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and IG can be a great way to get subscribers for free.

Ali Abdaal built a massive audience on YouTube and has funnelled a significant amount of his YouTube audience into his newsletter.

Free Tools & Lead Magnets

You can create free tools (like Exploding Topics or these guys) to find subscribers for free.

These free tools can rank on Google, be shared organically on social media, be launched on Product Hunt, shared on Reddit/IndieHackers/HackerNews.

They might cost a little bit to build but they can help you go viral and acquire subscribers very quickly/easily.

I wrote a business idea breakdown on this previously if you missed it.

Cross-Promotion

You can use Lettergrowth to find cross-promotion opportunities with newsletters in a similar niche/industry. This is a completely free way to grow and helps you get in front of like-minded audiences and build relationships with other newsletter operators.

Paid Ads

I’ve grown this newsletter almost exclusively through paid ads. It costs me about £0.3 per subscriber on Meta ads (Facebook/Instagram).

This is the best channel if you want to grow fast and with minimal effort.

Boosts

You can get paid to recommend other newsletters and every time someone becomes an active subscriber you get a $1-5 commission per subscriber. Likewise, you can pay others to recommend your newsletter. Learn more here.

Repurpose Content

Once you’ve written your newsletter, you could create a YouTube video on the same topic.

You could then turn that YouTube video into short-form videos for Reels, TikTok and Shorts.

You could then turn those short clips into Twitter posts/threads and IG static posts/carousels

You can also repost your newsletter (or just the highlights of it) to Reddit or to relevant forums like Indie Hacker or Hacker News.

You could also create a podcast for the newsletter that goes into even ore detail.

🧰 Resources

Here are some great resources to help with starting, growing, buying, monetising and selling a newsletter:

• Matt McGarry’s Newsletter - Newsletter Operator (he also has a YouTube channel)

• Gunner S Holm’s Newsletter - Newsletter Deep Dives

• Send and Grow Newsletter and Podcast - by SparkLoop

• How Michael Houck would make $50k with a newsletter - watch here.

• How one guy made $50k with 50k subscribers - watch here.

• 4 newsletters making over $1m a year - watch here.

• How to start a newsletter from scratch - watch here.

• How to make $200k a year with 10k subscribers - watch here.

• How writing online can make you a millionaire - watch here.

🗞️ Things worth checking out

The best businesses solve specific problems. I’ve created an ever-expanding database of problems that are begging for a better solution.

Are you tired of wasting time and resources on business ideas that just don’t stick? It’s not because you’re not smart or hardworking - it's because you’re not focused on solving the right problems.

This database takes the guesswork out of entrepreneurship. Instead of sifting through endless ideas, you’ll have access to a curated list of high-potential problems that are begging to be solved.

Here's what you get:

• Problems & pain points

• Potential solutions

• Competitive analysis

• Research to back it all up

Benefits:

• Focused Strategy: Direct your efforts toward problems with proven demand and strong potential for success.

• Time Savings: Cut down on research time with ready-made competitive analysis and research.

• Lifetime Access: As new problems and opportunities emerge, you’ll be the first to know, without paying a penny more.

🤯 Recommendations