Codie Sanchez argues that starting a newsletter is the safest, low-cost side hustle with high upside: email has far higher conversion rates than social media, and ownership of an email list lets creators monetize reliably. She defines newsletters as regular emails that capture attention in subscribers' inboxes, describes how media has decentralized (top journalists moving to Substack/Beehive), and gives concrete startup advice: choose a subject you care about, pick a cadence (weekly recommended initially), create simple branding, and grow via newsletter swaps and social channels. She cites personal results (started her newsletter in January 2020; currently doing $400,000–$600,000 per month in sales; she claims ~ $5,000 earned each time she sends an email) and examples of others who earned large sums. She outlines monetization via ads, sponsorships, and emerging ad-network features (e.g., Beehive) and briefly notes having raised $2.5 million.
Questions this video answers
January 2020
$400,000–$600,000 per month in sales
About $5,000 per email
$2.5 million
Chapters
Do you want to know the absolutely safest business you can start with? $0. That can make you thousands and multi, multi millions if you do it right. And now every time I send an email, I make around $5,000, which is more than I was making in a whole month of working full time as a doctor. It made these guys $75 million at the age of 25. It made this guy eight figures when he sold his. Made this guy seven figures in 12 months. It's a business nobody's talking about, but they should. It's called newsletters. Or I guess you could call it fancy ass emails. All right, what's a newsletter? I think you guys know about this by now, but let's break it down. Essentially, newsletter is this your attention in your email box paired with somebody sending you either a daily or weekly email. And it's something that you consume on a regular basis, which means that your eyeballs make them money. Your inbox, somebody's email, they make cash. That's what a newsletter is. Back in the day, people used to have blogs. But the problem is, when was the last time you went and just searched to go read something on somebody's blog on the Internet? You don't do it anymore. And most people now these days obsess about Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. But the truth of the matter is the highest conversion rate of anything you can do, which means that somebody sees something that you want to sell and they buy it occurs in your email inbox. It occurs more there than mail than any social media channel, than YouTube, than telemarketing even than door to door sales. We trust our inbox. It's our home. And that's why people make millions and millions of dollars by selling us things in our email inbox. Media companies have decentralized. What does that mean? We no longer watch cnn, cnbc, Fox News, msnbc. What's happening today is that people want news from particular sources. They don't want to hear about the politicians and all the nonsense going on in Washington all day. And so what happened? The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all of these news sites lost their best people. And those best people went to sites like this. This one's called Substack. I started my newsletter there along with thousands, if not tens of thousands of other people. And now they're going to sites like this one, Beehive. I actually invested in this company, by the way, because I believe in this trend so much. These days you can open up an account and start an email business. That leads to millions. I know a thing or two about this because I have a newsletter business. I started it in January of 2020 and now we do between 400 and $600,000 a month in sales. We don't have to go out and create brand new products. We just bring them to our audience. So if you're watching, this is what you should do if you want to start a newsletter company. So you know the opportunity. There is a war going on for our attention. Are you paying attention or are you delusional? And it's across all platforms except most people get it wrong. Most people focus on social media. These are the conversion numbers on social media. These are the conversion numbers on email. You can use the social channels to grab subscribers, but instead of keeping those subscribers on somebody else's platform, which at one point or the other will become irrelevant, aka Snapchat, gone. MySpace, gone. TikTok, who knows? What you want to do is you want to take those subscribers and you want to pull them into your email newsletter. If you guys are interested in this, I'll do a totally deep dive on how to start a newsletter business for $0. But how would I give you three, three specific things you can do today to start a newsletter business. And I'll be damned. First of all, you're not going to lose money on a newsletter business. No guarantees in life. I'm not allowed to do that as an investment professional. Now, first step, you're going to take. Something that you talk about all day long to your friends. I want you to get your curiosity right because that's going to be the subject of your newsletter. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to be some professor. You don't have to be a business professional that's made millions of dollars. All you have to be is a curious human who is interested in documenting something or pulling information from other people. If you're watching out there and you're a mom, start a newsletter on being a mom. If you're into dogs, start a newsletter on dogs. The moral of the story is start on something that you care about enough. Because one thing is true about newsletters, you have to keep writing. By the way, if you want to see what a newsletter looks like that does $12 million a year and is all about making you money. I got you, fam. You should click this. You can see it all for yourself. It's like here or here or somewhere on here on YouTube. There. You should do it. It's worth it. Whether that newsletter is Weekly or daily? Up to you. I'd say in the beginning, make it weekly so you don't actually kill yourself trying to get it done. But make sure you're curious. Now you have your subject, you're gonna come up with some name and logo. Use 99designs. Don't spend a lot of time there. They are the easiest platform out there for starting a newsletter. They basically cost you $0 to start and they allow you to have a beautiful newsletter, a beautiful website. They even have some custom logos that you can do inside of it. And you can do all of this without spending any money. Now all you're going to do is come up with a cadence. How often are you going to email people? I like once a week. You pick your poison. The difference between a great newsletter and a good newsletter is two things. One, consistency. They keep doing it. Two, iteration. They keep learning as they're doing it. That's all you have to do. For instance, you can see this guy, his name's Sean Puri. He started a newsletter called Milk Road. What Sean did brilliantly is he drafted off the fact that everybody was super into crypto and created a newsletter on the daily that basically curated the best news about crypto. That's it. No investigative journalism, no deep dives like mine that are 3,000 words. The guy took a bunch of the news out in the world, kind of said it in a funny and pithy way, and put it in a newsletter. That's going to be you, and you're going to pick your cadence. You can download this here, which is how I got to my first 10,000 subscribers in 30 days with a newsletter. You can get it below at the link. It's free. But there's really just one thing you have to do. In my opinion, the easiest way to grow a newsletter is with other newsletters. So first you're going to do the little things like send it out to your friends, post it on your social media accounts, et cetera. But then you're going to do something called swaps, newsletter swaps. And this is something that I did with a ton of newsletters, like Liquidity. These guys here, they're hysterical. They have great social platforms. They took their social platform, they created a newsletter. So I sent them an email just like this and said, hey, what's up, guys? I love your newsletter. I have this many subscribers, you have this many subscribers. What if we cross pollinate the two? Here's a sample snippet of what I'd put in mine. Here's a sample snippet of what you could put in yours. Do you want to do it next week on Thursday? You make it so stupid simple for somebody else to say yes to you, and you make sure that you're not a taker. Liquidity's newsletter was just a little bit smaller than mine. So when you're first starting out, you are going to grow those first 500 subscribers from your own network, et cetera. But then you're going to go find other people with 500 subscribers, and you're going to cross pollinate between the two of you. And you're going to do that again and again and again. And until you get to a point where your newsletter is making millions of dollars. How do newsletters make money? Put a little sticker on the end. Now, we have a whole breakdown of this you can see here. But newsletters can make money off about a billion different things. The most common way, like Morning Brew, the Hustle, Agora Financial, they all made their money off of ads. The cool thing about Beehive is they have a component where they're going to start allowing you to do an ad network, just like YouTube. I'm on YouTube. We put a video out, it gets a couple hundred thousand views. I make anywhere from 10,000, $30,000 a video, right? That comes out to all of you. I don't have to sell you anything. I don't have to do anything. It just makes you money. That's where beyond is going. But it's probably not going to make you a ton of money on subscribers. So in the beginning, you're going to reach out to a few people and ask them if they want to sponsor your newsletter. And then you keep leveling up the game. If you have $0, if you have no ability to raise capital, but you want to make thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, I think you're crazy for not looking at newsletters. We just raised $2.5 million.
