How to Build a $220M Newsletter Empire

everyone wants to become an influencer and build an online audience forget law school b-school or med school 30 of American 10 year olds now want to create content for a living this is hardly surprising influencers like Mr Beast and Charlie demelio have proven that it's not just possible to make a living online but to actually achieve Global Fame and build generational wealth the great economy is booming and is now estimated to be worth more than 100 billion dollars everyone wants in on the gold rush and more than 50 million people worldwide already consider themselves to be creators but what if you're not willing to spend 50 hours buried alive or publicly show off your dance moves in a bikini to get in on the action email newsletters have become the go-to strategy for knowledge workers and thought leaders looking to build social and financial Capital online thanks to platforms like substack and convertkit they've become easy to create and distribute making newsletters one of the most effective ways to share knowledge with others and build an online audience why read The Wall Street Journal or watch CNBC where you can create your own media Empire the more you create the more powerful you become the more you consume the more powerful others become email newsletters are the new printing press and YouTube is a new TV the online marketing Playbook is constantly evolving new platforms growth hacks and social media kings and queens are crowned and dethroned over time but one thing has remained constant our obsession with email as a tool to communicate and engage with the world the first email was sent in 1971 long before the internet took off but it's still the main channel to communicate with customers colleagues and suppliers email as a service is incredibly sticky and an active email list is one of the most valuable assets in our Arsenal as business professionals I don't know if the creators really want to spend all their time within Facebook within Twitter within YouTube they seem to like kind of diversifying where their revenue sources are there are over 4 billion email users in the world but only a select few are rating in seven figure checks from this Legacy Media Alex Lieberman McCormick James Clear Daniela Pearson and this Anonymous Wall Street Professional are examples of people who are challenging traditional newspapers and stealing their launch of hours studying and talking some of the greatest newsletter entrepreneurs to better understand how they built their email infused Empires contrary to Common belief the newsletter industry is far from saturated but execution is key if you've ever wondered what it takes to make millions from newsletters this video is for you I've packed it with stories case studies and tips from the industry's very best so make sure to stick around until the end it's October 2014 at the University of Michigan Alex Lieberman is a college senior and he's recently gotten back from his summer internship at Morgan Stanley sales and trading division with an offer to come back full time after graduation he's got extra time on his hands and decides to help other students prepare for finance job interviews Alex quickly realizes that students have very few resources to read about business news The Wall Street Journal is informative but can be pretty dry especially for college students so Alex decides to create a more entertaining way to read business news via an email newsletter which would eventually become morning brew and I I started writing that newsletter which by the way at the time wasn't called morning Brew it was called market corner and I'll describe what that product look like in the beginning because again it was pretty mediocre but basically I wrote it because one selfishly I wanted to keep up to date with what was happening in the business world so that when I left college and I went into my job in finance I felt like my brain was on top of things and so the process of reading what was going on in business and Distilling it into these bite-sized chunks was almost like a force function for me staying on top of my game then the second part I would say was more selfless which was I just wanted to help these students keep up to date with the business world and to be the way to do it was just to start writing this thing and I had an abundance of time starting a newsletter is easy but how did Alex and his co-founder Alston grow morning Brew to 4 million subscribers they became obsessed with two things creating the best content humanly possible and growing it as fast as possible they realized that by getting the readers involved in the creation of news stories they could create something that was more than just a newsletter it was a shared experience so they recruited unpaid University students who would help them write content they built a Content creation machine and their own Newsroom of sorts which I absolutely love they even hired what they call a funny person a person who was responsible to make sure the business stories were actually entertaining meanwhile Alex and Austin focused on acquiring more subscribers by knocking on classroom doors we spent our whole second semester in about 150 club meetings or or classes pitching Club students on why they should read morning brew and so we'd go to a class we would give our two minute uh spiel about what boarding Brew was why this was the best business newsletter in the world how it was free so there was no downside you could sign up and if you didn't like it you could unsubscribe no hard feelings and then what we would do is we'd pass around a sheet of paper with a pen and we would ask students to write down their email address we would take that notepad after the class and we would type in manually all of their email addresses and the reason we passed around a pad in a paper is because the conversion rate of people writing down their email on a pad was significantly higher than us getting in front of the class and saying pull out your laptop go to morningbrew.com and put in your email address because there were far more steps once the University of Michigan student pool had been saturated they repeated this process using College ambassadors across 200 additional schools working with local ambassadors is a similar strategy that Uber used when entering new cities Alex and Alston eventually sold morning Brew to Business Insider for 75 million dollars in 2020. you might be thinking okay cool story but Alex was early into the newsletter again what about getting involved now isn't it too late to start a newsletter in short no so let's debunk the saturation myth the global email marketing industry was valued at 7.5 billion dollars in 20 20 and it's expected to hit 18 billion dollars by 2027 reflecting at 13 in kager to put that in perspective the smartphone industry is growing at a seven percent kager and the Cosmetics industry at five percent email marketing is going to two and a half X from here and it's still an attractive Channel with a solid Roi according to HubSpot every dollar spent on email marketing returns 36 dollars it's a no-brainer for Brands to use newsletters to Market themselves and 37 of brands are already increasing their email budget 64 of Millennials think email is the most personal channel to receive communication from Brands but aren't there a ton of newsletters out there already yes and I personally can't handle more than four or five subscriptions at a time I'm OCD about my inbox but keep in mind that Brands want to work with different newsletters in the same Niche to get their message across why well Brands partner with influencers in the first place because they know that the influencers audience trusts them more than the brand Itself by working with a large newsletter such as morningbrew a brand gets a wide reach show four million subscribers which is cool but these Subs might not be as engaged as a newsletter with only a thousand Subs depth is a critical component this is something McCormick figured out early on patch his newsletter per my last email on sub stack in May 2019 and later rebranded it to not boring in April 2020 during the peak of the pandemic you know nobody obviously subscribed to the newsletter I had to beg the first time I set up my sub stack I sent out a tweet that was like please just like I need to get 20 people to subscribe to this like please just sign up so I don't have to ask people individually and so that's that's kind of how the whole thing started and really it was this exploration for the first year or so where I was just sending links and sometimes I'd go a little bit deeper on something but those things that I was listening to and reading I think it's a really good way to start doing that and kind of summarizing other people's work and getting that muscle in the beginning I was petrified every time I hit send that like there was this shame going on among my friends that were like what is packing doing like he went to a good school he reported in finance for a while and now he's like he's sending this newsletter every Sunday does it like random internet links like what the hell is going on here today not boring has more than 160 000 subscribers and brings in more than one million dollars in annual revenue but paki's primary revenue source is not necessarily brands that want random slots in his newsletter to Market themselves one of his Revenue strategies entails carefully selecting startups that he's interested in learning more about and writing deep Dives about their business models for a fee I haven't been able to figure out exactly how much it charges but according to some estimates a deep dive can cost up to fifty thousand dollars I absolutely love this approach it allows to learn about new companies on a deeper level and recommend services and tools to his audience in an authentic way while honing his writing and investing skills Packy's a better investor because of his writing and he's a better writer because of his investing it's a perfect flywheel and something I'm trying to emulate with this YouTube channel another thing I love about paki's story is that he's the only person behind not boring it's a solo corporation which strangely also seems to be one of the key factors behind his success similar to morning Brew writes his newsletter from the perspective of making business Concepts fun and lighthearted but as opposed to mourning Bruce Army of writers writes every newsletter himself this has allowed him to keep his content more personal authentic and help him create a strong community community and Word of Mouth was a critical aspect to his growth in the early days none of this growth happens without people responding giving feedback and sharing and all those types of things so that's really been practically the big thing I know Community is an overused word and certainly like this is more I guess technically an audience and a community because I don't have a slack group but I don't have any of that but all of the growth has come from people reading and talking about it and sharing thanks to his newsletter and its devoted audience Pacquiao was able to launch not boring capital a venture fund with more than 40 million dollars under management across two funds a large number of his audience are investors in his funds and his business writing has landed him an advisory role at a16c crypto working alongside investors like Chris Dixon so what is it about newsletters that make them so compelling while the term content marketing is relatively new stemming from the early 2000s newsletters have been around for centuries handwritten reports from the Roman Empire and China's Tang Dynasty informed illiterate adults about current events and the state of the world in 1732 Benjamin Franklin began publishing Poor Richard's Almanac a newsletter in which he wrote about weather predictions recipes trivia follow philosophy and other life hacks people wanted to learn about he sold 10 000 copies per year and according to some estimates made between 10 to 40 million in today's dollars since then newsletters have played an integral role in the communication flow between businesses and customers thought leaders and readers if you visit any Brand's website today they'll likely ask you for your email we all have email addresses and we want something in return for giving our valuable addresses out and so writing a weekly email newsletter is an easy way for Brands to reciprocate but what makes readers so obsessed with newsletters in the first place newsletters tap into our core human desire to constantly be in the know and to belong we'd love to know what's going on around us to feel like we're part of a community and to share content with like-minded people this can be as simple as sharing your favorite book or posting a review of a restaurant you like a Weekly Newsletter is a terrific way for Thought leaders to share their story expertise and build trust you actually don't even need to be a thought leader to get started you just need to be a person with a brain with something remotely interesting to say I according to James Clear author of the best-selling book Atomic habits as humans we often convince ourselves that massive results require Massive Action it doesn't it just requires habits that allows us to be doggedly consistent if you've ever walked into a bookstore or browse Amazon you know that Atomic habits has been one of the most popular books in the last few years it's been on Amazon's top list of most sold books for 200 weeks in a row this is of course incredibly impressive but I don't think it's the most interesting thing about James Clear what's cooler is that James Clear actually started off by writing a newsletter he sent out his first email in November 2012 and practically had Zero Subs at the time now 10 years later in November 2022 he's officially crossed the 2 million mark That's The Power of consistency and compounding when he announced this on Twitter he wrote I've said this before but it's worth repeating when I started in 2012 I thought I was too late it seemed like blogs and newsletters had already peaked it's not too late someone is starting the next 1 million person email list right now if you're thinking about starting do it James Clare's newsletter is one of the most popular email newsletters in the world and his subscriber growth has been nothing short of impressive what was his secret one way to think about it is just kind of basic math like if you just look at the numbers if you were able to improve by one percent each day for an entire year and those games compound you would end up 37 times better at the end of the year many people think that they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity they think that they need to get more motivated that they need willpower in order to execute on a habit if I just felt like writing if I just felt like meditating I felt like working out then I would do it but in fact they don't have a plan for it so they wake up each day thinking I wonder if I'll feel motivated to write today I wonder if I'll feel motivated to work out today but instead you can take the decision making out of it by explicitly stating when where and how James encourages aspiring newsletter entrepreneurs to stop thinking about email marketing as a tactic and start thinking about it as a system this is a common theme I encountered when talking to newsletter entrepreneurs including the anonymous Creator behind short squeeze a finance and business newsletter with over 200 000 subscribers short squeeze is run by overhood on Wall Street a finance meme account on Instagram and they haven't missed a single day of newsletter writing since launching in March 2021 short squeeze attributes their newsletter success to providing real value to readers such as free private equity and VC guides Financial modeling courses and Excel shortcuts people don't want to read long articles so short squeeze focuses on digestible business news using humor and memes the peak is another finest newsletter that's been consistent with their content creation efforts over the past 2-3 years focused on Canadian business news the peak has a team of 10 around 90 000 subscribers generates close to 3 million in Revenue per year and does one million in profit Einstein called compounding the eighth wonder of the world and these newsletters are surely making it easy to understand why but newsletters aren't just for business and finance Pros Daniela Pearson a 27 year old entrepreneur founded women-focused newsletter denuzette when she was 19. and guess what her wild success overshadows many of the newsletters already mentioned when Daniela was a sophomore at Boston University in 2015 she struggled to find the time to stay on top of the news and trends that were important to her so she created a newsletter that curated the best beauty Wellness culture and business content from the web and deliver them straight to her reader's inbox as with anything it started off small but through word of mouth and personalized referral codes she grew her subscriber base to more than 500 000 subscribers and as Daniella subscriber Bay sword sorted her Revenue her Top Line Grew From 1 million in 2019 to 7 million in 2020 to 40 million in 2021 of the 40 million 10 million was profit that's absolutely insane from an email newsletter her advertisers have included Brands such as Bumble Twitter and Walmart today Daniela is one of the wealthiest women of color in the U.S with a 220 million dollar net worth she's teamed up with Selena Gomez to launch mental health startup wondermind and they recently raised 5 million dollars at a 100 million dollar valuation from Serena Ventures and all of this was made possible simply because she wrote an email newsletter consistently over a long period of time so don't wait get started if you're thinking about it I feel like this is the moment where I should drop a link to my newsletter but I don't actually have one um if I do launch one I hope you'll give me some love though in the meantime my YouTube channel is definitely in need of some love help me break that 1 000 subscriber barrier by the end of this year it's a personal goal I'm hoping to hit the internet is wild influencers are killing traditional Brands and Reinventing business models but they're not just taking on the media industry they're also going after the big dogs on Wall Street watch this video next to learn how influencers are taking over the private Equity industry once you make it big with that newsletter this could be the next on your roadmap thanks a lot and see you in the next video

Channel: Probably Something

Views: 163,391

Keywords: newsletter, business, finance, making money, creator economy, influencer, alex lieberman, morning brew, overheard on wall street, james clear, atomic habits, not boring, packy mccormick, the newsette, wondermind, daniella pierson, forbes, young money, wall street, silicon valley, investing, solopreneur, social media

Id: aVQjtJdO0Co

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022