This 1-Man Business Makes Over $1M/year

The newsletters—it's a way to ring the cash register when you need to. The value of a newsletter—I'm going to show you how much newsletters can actually make, so you can take advantage of this relationship building platform to ultimately grow a lot faster for whatever business that you're in. So first and foremost, when I look at some of our clientele, Axios—they are a large newsletter. They sold for about $553 million, and I look at. The Hustle, they sold for about $27 million to HubSpot, which is a publicly traded company. And then Morning Brew, they sold for about $70-80 million, give or take. And that is the potential if you do decide to sell your newsletter business, or you can just keep it and use it as a machine that helps you crank out revenue at the end of the day. I wanted to show you some other examples here. These are 10 newsletters that do $1 million per year with small or one-person teams. This is written by Matt McGarry. Take a look at this one. The TL;DR newsletter estimated annual revenue is $5 to $10 million. And here's That's how they monetize. We'll talk about that in a little bit. And then if we come down over here, Lenny's newsletter estimated revenue is $2 to $3 million a year with 400,000 subs. Justin Welch, $1.7 to $2 million, 135,000 subs. And then The Van Trump Report, $20 million in revenue, 30,000 to 40,000 newsletter subscribers. Straticherie, estimated annual revenue here is $3 to $5 million, newsletter subscribers 26,000. So their value per newsletter is super high. And that's because it's a tech newsletter, right? Superhuman AI, this is an AI newsletter, $800K to $1.6 million. 300,000 newsletter subs. I'm going to talk about why I don't think that's a good idea for the long term, if you're looking to get into the newsletter business. The Generalist is $1 to $2 million with 90,000 subscribers, okay? Marketing Examined, I think it's probably maybe half of this number, maybe it's 500,000 or so. This is 90,000 subscribers. And this is someone that talks about kind of the new stuff that's happening with marketing. And then finally, let's look at Marketing Examples, $600K to $1 million over here, 115,000 subscribers. newsletter subscribers. And so the value of a newsletter looks to be roughly around the same range. In some cases, maybe it's a little higher, but a lot of these newsletters, kind of $100K to $200K or so, maybe they're doing $1, $2, $3 million a year. So you average it out, it's kind of the same. And then you have some outliers that are maybe doing $20 to $30 million a year. And I would say that's more so to do with the industry that they're in. So you can see this one over here. Let's just come to this one with the Van Trump Report. This one has 30,000 to 40,000 newsletter subscribers, but they're all paid. Okay. And it's the go-to newsletter for the agricultural industry. Basically, it's going to help agricultural investors and agricultural professionals. And I believe this person was mentioned on a podcast. This is all this guy does. He writes a newsletter for every single day and he charges for it. And he hasn't wanted to outsource that newsletter. Maybe that's part of the reason why the newsletter does so well. But when you think about how you go about monetizing these newsletters, First and foremost, you can go with advertising, and that's what a lot of these people do. They sell ads, okay? Or they can sell a subscription where they're basically paying for it. But you can see like a lot of sponsorships here, or they can sell courses as well, right? Or they can promote their own stuff. It's really up to them. If you actually want to make money with your newsletter, I would recommend that you use it as your relationship platform where you're trying to build a deeper relationship with your audience. And you have your discovery platforms like a TikTok or a Reels, your YouTube long form, and you just drive them to your newsletter. You drive everything to your newsletter. And then inside your newsletter, if you're lucky enough to have your own products and services, just promote your own stuff because you can control the margin more. You can control the quality of the product. Eventually, what you end up realizing, all creators end up realizing at the end of the day, is that it's better to just have your own business because you have a lot more control and you have a lot more say, and nobody can just pull the rug out from under you. And that's what a lot of creators like MrBeast are doing or Logan Paul are doing, where They are creating their own products. For us, for our newsletter, we're actively trying to grow it more now. There are a lot of different ways to play this, but I would just say the newsletter should be kind of the bedrock of how you're going about content creation for this year and beyond. Newsletters aren't necessarily a new thing, but there's a renewed interest in it now because a lot more people are doing it and they're realizing how powerful it is. It's a way to ring the cash register when you need to, especially when you talk to a lot of people now that are growing these newsletters. They're spending $2 to $3 to acquire a new newsletter. And if you're— the worth of an email is $10 or $20 or $30 or even more than that, then you're just going to make a lot of money from that. The final thing I'll say here is around a lot of people are building these AI newsletters right now. The problem with these AI newsletters is that everybody's just talking about the tools, the latest gadgets, the latest news. And that's not enough because the quality— there's not much of a differentiating quality with these newsletters. So you have to have some type of unique insight. Maybe you have some unique data and that's going to help you stand out from the rest of the people doing these newsletters. And so if you're going to talk about AI, we'll talk about Maybe the data that you have, the data that you're seeing in terms of trends, investing trends over time, or maybe you have some insider information and you're an investor in the AI space and you know a lot more than other people. That's newsletter that's worth reading because a newsletter, the objective for each newsletter that you write, your objective is to get them to look forward to the next one and the next one and the next one. That just tells them that you have good content, you have good open rates, you have good click rates. That's what I think about newsletters. I think they're great. I think for an agency like mine, I really love it because it's the one place to drive everyone to, and it just makes things simple at the end of the day. So if we want people to get interested in our services, maybe we'll push a webinar, or maybe we'll have a call to action, maybe we'll give a bonus, or maybe we'll kind of change up the offers in there. But we get a lot of flexibility in what we want to push there, and it also forces us to be creative. So I hope you enjoyed this one. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. We actually have this next video over here. With the Morning Brew founders on how they grew their newsletter. Check that out over here. See you in that video.