1440 newsletter hits 65% open rates by making a delightful daily product, then sells ads to that engaged audience and reinvests the revenue to grow. Co-founder Drew, a PhD scientist, helped build a Topics feature after readers said the content was hard to understand. The founder answers every subscriber email himself.
Basically, if you break down our core business, it's really just 3 things. It's write a wonderful product every day that delights our user. So we have like a 65% daily open rate. We pour our heart and soul into the product. You do this as well. Like you have to like really like put your heart and soul into the newsletter. And then we sell ad placements to that smart audience, to our partners. And then we basically reinvest that money back into growth. So we have a little flywheel business model. So like 2020 was kind of like figuring that stuff out, right? Like what are our unit economics? How do we de-risk the selling, the sales part of the house, the growth part of the house? And then like, yeah, starting in like late 2021, we started like the business was scaling. I think that's when we hit about a million subscribers. And then right around then, Drew, who's my, our co-founder, PhD scientist, really smart guy that works on Capitol Hill, we like were running into this with the product that is now Topics. We were running into it and we're basically like, we could feel it because I actually answer every email you send into 1440. They still come to me. Mm-hmm. And people would tell us this all the time, like, I love how you guys go curate all this knowledge and information around the daily news, but like, I'm having trouble understanding this thing and like, it's like really bothering me. So we heard that from them. They're like, I wish you guys could help me more.
