A Daily Curation of the Web's Best Content for Startups

How the Morning Brew Newsletter got its first 10k Subscribers

How the Morning Brew Newsletter got its first 10k Subscribers
Morning Brew was acquired this year by Insider Inc. in a deal that valued the company at $75m. The company was started in 2014 by 2 University of Michigan students.

They got their early subscribers by pitching business classes at the university.

“After we pitched a lecture, we’d pass around pieces of paper for everyone to write down their email. Simple, but turned out to be *very* effective.”
 
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Getting your newsletter in front of an audience

Getting your newsletter in front of an audience
“Growing your newsletter can be quite a difficult feat, and it takes a lot of patience and consistency to reach that first 1000 subscribers mark, but it’s definitely not impossible. After my newsletter had recently reached that 1k milestone, here is a detailed account of the measures and practices I used to reach that, and that you can take away from.”
 

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The Business of Paid Subscription Newsletters

The Business of Paid Subscription Newsletters

Courtland Allen of IndieHackers interviews Casey Botticello, founder of the Blogging Guide newsletter that has recently reached the $500 per month in recurring revenue after starting in February. Casey shares his business model and how he is growing the newsletter. Paid newsletters on platforms like Substack (What is Substack?) have been gaining in popularity recently. There is a growing market willing to pay for quality content, despite all the free information online. If you are a content creator, paid subscriptions are worth considering. I’ve decided against that direction for this IdeaEconomy newsletter, but there are many that seem to be succeeding. For more information, Trends.vc has a helpful post on the business of paid newsletters

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Scaling Your Newsletter to a Multi-million Dollar Business

Paid and curated newsletters are a very popular startup idea now because of the low startup costs and large profit potential. James Altucher talks to his old publisher of the multi-million dollar Choose Yourself Media, David Newman, about everything newsletters. This conversation is pure gold. They cover: the opportunity with newsletters, the importance of offering a lead magnet to get subscribers, using Substack to publish newsletters, why affiliate links can be more profitable than ads, using giveaways to get subscribers, and much more.

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Building a 7 Figure 1 Person Business (How to Build an Audience in 2020)

Building a 7 Figure 1 Person Business (How to Build an Audience in 2020)

Brian Clark of CopyBlogger, Genesis WordPress Themes, and the Further personal development newsletter has a simple free course called Next 7 that he says “can lead to a 7-figure business without employees or investors.” It is delivered by email after short quizzes for each lesson. I find the process a little annoying, but it might be a good strategy to encourage people to complete a series of emails. It ultimately leads to information on his upcoming course on the subject. Despite the promotion, it’s still interesting. The main idea is that email newsletters of curated content are a big business opportunity in our world of information overload. Obviously, that is the premise of starting this IdeaEconomy newsletter so I’m biased on the topic. 🙂

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How Morning Brew Got to 1.5m Subscribers

How Morning Brew Got to 1.5m Subscribers

The First 1000 newsletter shows how the Morning Brew added subscribers at different stages of their growth. It started with helping students keep up with financial news for job interviews. They later experimented with different iterations of an ambassador program, a referral system where subscribers can earn prizes for recommending people, and paid ads.

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The Future of Food Media Is in Your Inbox

The Future of Food Media Is in Your Inbox

“Indie newsletters are booming, and they’re home to some of the most exciting food writing today.”

Here is a look at the business of food newsletters. This can apply to any niche.

Business Opportunity: I think almost every business could benefit from a newsletter, even if it’s sent out once a month. Newsletters are easy to start and building an audience in your niche can open up all sorts of opportunities.

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Curators Are the New Creators

Curators Are the New Creators

“The Business Model of Good Taste”

“With more creators, more content, and more choice than ever before, consumers are now being consumed by a state of analysis paralysis. The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention. When it’s impossible to absorb everything from the flood of information, the best we can do is pick and choose what matters to us most — or, better yet, find the people who can do the curating for us.”

I’m biased, but I definitely agree that curation is going to play a much bigger role in our future. There will be big opportunities for those who build a sizable audience.

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