The Risk That Helped 1440 Reach Millions

27 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:00

In this segment, the speaker outlines the remarkable growth of the 1440 email newsletter, highlighting that it generates over $1 million in revenue per employee with a 22‑person team and reaches 4.5 million readers, suggesting a total addressable market of around 100 million. Despite advisors urging a niche focus, the founders—one with a decade in private equity and the other a PhD scientist active in the political‑science arena—choose to serve intellectually curious professionals (doctors, engineers, lawyers) with an "inch‑deep, mile‑wide" breadth of content covering sports, politics, culture, technology, and AI. The narrative emphasizes the challenge of aggregating diverse information for curious readers and positions 1440 as the solution that offers a shallow yet wide view across many domains.

Chapters

How big can an email newsletter get? It's so competitive. It's so mature. We do over $1 million in revenue per employee, and we have 22 employees. We have 4.5 million readers now. We think it's like over 100 million people is our total addressable market. We actually got a lot of feedback from a bunch of advisors and say like, this is not going to work. They told us, you got to go niche. That's the way that media works. What are you guys doing? This doesn't make any sense. I was in private equity for a decade before this. My co-founder's a PhD scientist, super brilliant guy out in DC. He's in the political world, science political world. I'm in the finance world and we're intellectually curious people. We love learning. We want to know everything, sports, politics, culture, technology, all these different things, AI. But like, it's so hard for the reader to go to 20, 30 different sources. We felt like to be an intellectually curious person and like have that inch deep, mile wide view of a little bit of everything, like no one was really providing that. Doctors read our product. Engineers read our product, lawyers read our product, that inch-deep, mile-wide provider for the intellectually curious. That's who we're filling.