A newsletter founder explains why expanding into multiple publications kills growth. He uses a candy company's story: they had 40 products but only a few like Reese's made real money. The CEO asked which product they'd grow 20% next year. The answer: focus everything on one thing.
I think on your homepage it looks like there are different topics and it gives me the impression that there are a lot, but it's still from what I'm hearing from you to this day, just one newsletter. So it was until about a couple months ago. But yeah, we looked at other, like launching like a science newsletter. You start doing the math on it and you're like, okay, so maybe you get to a couple hundred thousand subscribers. You have to add an editor, a seller, a marketer. You like rebuild your company basically with 10% of the revenue is like, why are we thinking about this? It doesn't matter. Like, why don't we take all that energy and focus it on something bigger? One of my favorite stories is we had a candy company called Sweethearts. We had 40 SKUs and most did under a million in revenue. The eventual CEO who was very senior at Mars came, he's like, what the F are you guys doing? You have Reese's that does $600 million in revenue and you have Bit-O-Honey that does $10 million. Which one do you want to grow 20% next year? So our whole thing is like, do one thing, keep it simple, focus, focus, focus. And when you do that, like magic happens, I think.
