The Startup Ideas Podcast - 10 Newsletter Business Ideas to start in 2025

Starting point is 00:00:00 Okay, everyone, 2025 is here. And I know you want to start a new startup. No, it's on your mind. And I got to be honest, sometimes starting a startup is, actually most of the time starting a startup is pretty daunting. You don't really know where to start. And that's why today's episode is all about 10 newsletter business ideas. You can start this weekend.

Starting point is 00:00:23 How do you start a profitable newsletter from scratch? Now, I know people are going to listen to that and be like, a newsletter, that's not really a startup. It's actually a cheat code. It's kind of like a hack to get a loved group of people to open up your newsletter, literally, and get them to, you know, you can build a marketplace, you can build an agency, you can build so much on top of a newsletter. That's why it's such a good place to start. And today, I found this incredible post. by Matt McGarry. And Matt McGarry is, he's like a newsletter god, you know, says he's gotten 15.4 million email

Starting point is 00:01:08 subscribers for clients. And he's just got a list of 10 really amazing newsletter business ideas that you can start in a weekend and we're going to go through it together. I'm going to give my opinion on each and every one of them. People are going to steal these. They're going to go do them. And they're going to turn into some big multimillion dollar businesses. I have no doubt.

Starting point is 00:01:31 So let's just get right into it. So the first idea he has is a marketing newsletter for global talent. So he says, one of the biggest shifts in the past few years has been the rise of overseas talent. For example, job boards like online pH and overseas recruiting agencies like somewhere.com have grown to eight figures. As a marketer and a business owner, I notice most oversee marketers typically aren't as skills as Western marketers has nothing to do with language barrier overseas marketers have great English. It has to do with something out of their control budgets. So basically what he's saying is there's new marketers in the USA with $100,000 a month budgets right out of school. But marketers in these places like

Starting point is 00:02:39 the Philippines work with less than 5% of that. This creates a skill gap and that is the lucrative opportunity for you. So what's the idea? The idea is go and create a newsletter specifically for overseas marketers seeking remote USA-based marketing jobs. Now, when I first read that, I was kind of skeptical, and I'll explain why. In places like India, you can get newsletter subs for 25 cents to 50 cents from Facebook ads. So if you spend $5,000 a month, they're getting 20,000 new subs every month. To me, this is low-quality subs. What I mean by that is you're not going to be able to monetize them as well.

Starting point is 00:03:17 So I generally refrain from focusing on niches like that. But let's give him a second and let's try to understand what he's trying to do. So he says, here's the structure for the newsletter. You'll have three sections. Section one, great remote marketing jobs readers can apply to. Section two, relevant digital marketing news and updates. Section three, actionable digital marketing tutorials. And then he says, here's how you can monitor.

Starting point is 00:03:47 monetize it. And this is where he was reading my mind. These subscribers are easy to get and we'll find your content valuable. But they're not the audience you want to monetize. He's 100% right here. If you want to make this a real business, you need to monetize the Western audience who wants to hire talented marketing overseas for less than U.S.-based hires. So the four ways that he suggests making money, a job board.

Starting point is 00:04:16 So making a free job board where companies can post marketing job. for overseas talents. You can charge these companies $300 to $500 for a boost, which is totally normal for job boards, where you can feature the job in your newsletter, which reaches 20,000 talented marketers. So job boards, I love these businesses. They do print if you get it right.

Starting point is 00:04:41 And companies are just used to paying for it. Number two, if you collect subscriber data at signup, work experience, job title, level company skills. By the way, such an important thing to do is collecting subscriber data. You don't just want people's emails, right? So when you're thinking about building your newsletter, whatever it is, think about what is subscriber data that you can capture that is specific for your niche. So he says, you can send targeted sponsored email blast on behalf of job advertisers charging anywhere from 1 to 3,000 for recruiting email blasts, to help companies generate more qualified candidates.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Number three, you can partner or create your own overseas recruiting agency. Hard to do, hard to build your own overseas recruiting agency. A lot of people, a lot of management. But partnering is really an interesting one, right? Like you saw that with Nick Huber and Somewhere.com. Nick Huber, sweaty startup on Twitter, has a lot of traffic, a lot of people, a lot of eyeballs. And he partnered with, was previously, called Support Shepherd. Now it's called Somewhere, where he was basically like, I'm going to

Starting point is 00:05:52 generate leads for you. And then, you know, he took an equity stake in that business. So looking at partnering is probably a more interesting venue to go after. And then number four, create a course, focus on international audience of marketers. I don't think personally that's my least favorite of the options. Here's how the math works out. Okay, this is cool. Assume a 25 cent CPA, $5,000 a month budget, that's $20,000 subs a month,

Starting point is 00:06:27 $300 for a job posting, and five jobs for a newsletter. That's $1,500 per issue. That makes sense. Three newsletters send per week at times four weeks, $18,000 a month in revenue. Five recruiting blasts per month.

Starting point is 00:06:45 And you're charging $2,000 each. So that's $10,000. a month of revenue. So total revenue is about 28,000 per month with an audience of 20 to 40,000 international marketers. I don't think that's absurd. I don't think that's a crazy, you know, a crazy unattainable business to create. And then all of a sudden you're making 28,000 per month. Okay, so that's number one. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about startup empire. So startup empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas.

Starting point is 00:07:28 Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what startup empire is.

Starting point is 00:07:47 And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startup empire.com in the description. Number two, you can create a platform-based newsletter. So, you know, he uses the example of Mixxel. I'm sure most of you know Mixxel. I think she got popular on TikTok, but she basically made learning about Excel fun.

Starting point is 00:08:22 And then she's moved on to, you know, now she does Word and now she does PowerPoint, but she's created a huge business out of it. So how can you replicate this? Create a list of tools, platforms, and programs that are commonly used in your industry or that you personally love. And then basically create an educational newsletter. instructing people and how to use them better. So the examples he uses is Ableton for music production,

Starting point is 00:08:50 DaVinci for video editing, notion for operations, Canva for graphics, Figma for Design, clavio for e-commerce, perplexity AI for research. You get the idea. Pick a tool, make it digestible and delightful to consume that content, and just focus on one particular niche. you're doing, you know, perplexity AI for research.

Starting point is 00:09:15 You're not doing perplexity AI for everyone. And then how can you monetize it? Well, you can build a course. That's like probably my, you know, the least interesting option for me. I think that there's way better ways to monetize. I think being an affiliate partner for the platform, affiliates typically earn 20 to 50% recurring commission. that's insane.

Starting point is 00:09:41 So not many people know this, but a lot of these software products will pay 20%, let's say, recurring commission. If you send them customers, right? So that's huge and it's recurring. I'd probably try to double down as much on that as possible.

Starting point is 00:10:02 And the other thing that's not talked about here is they potentially buy your business in a year or two, three, five years. Lean into templates, number three. So if you have a newsletter about mastering HubSpot, you create a HubSpot template for subscribers, and then you can say sign up through HubSpot, through my affiliate link, and I will give you the template for free. Or if you already have HubSpot, here's a high converting template that can be yours for $200. This is huge, these digital assets, I'm seeing a lot more of it, a lot more people get into templates.

Starting point is 00:10:37 the margins are obviously great. And he's giving away some sauce here. I really like that. And then he ends it with their entire ecosystems and economies built around platforms. For example, if your newsletter is about Shopify websites, you can easily find a SaaS tool that would want to get in front of your readers. Absolutely. That's totally right.

Starting point is 00:11:02 And now with AI, not only could you find a SaaS tool, you can build a SaaS tool. you can build one, right? So you can use tools like Rep, replet, like Bolt, like V0, like lovable, and actually go and create these tools yourselves. And that's another beauty about a newsletter business, right?

Starting point is 00:11:19 Instead of, you know, you can build software to sell to these people. Okay. Number three, this is actually my least favorite idea on the list, an unofficial sports team newsletter. I'm not saying that it isn't cool and

Starting point is 00:11:35 interesting and fun to have. I just think that, I don't know, maybe it is, it's just not exciting to me. I also think that from a revenue perspective, it's one of the tougher ones. So now that you're like so stoked about it, now that I've pumped you up on it. But listen, someone may like this. So he says, find a sports team with a big fan base, but not much media coverage. This could be your local team, a minor league team, a college team. Don't start with something. something like the Dallas Cowboys, there's already so much content on them. So how do you source content? Instead of writing your own content, go to subredits and forums and select the best takes on your local teams. Link out to these takes or go one step further, DM the person behind them,

Starting point is 00:12:24 asking them to contribute to your newsletter. And you'd be surprised a lot of these people would do it. Linking out is probably the best way to start. It removes the time and effort and content creation and lets you quickly scale horizontally. You could easily create five unofficial local sports teams, newsletters quickly, monetize this through sponsors and creating a paid Discord or Facebook community. To turn this into a big business, and I agree with this, you probably need a dozen newsletter for multiple teams, but it's doable. Again, that's one of the reasons why I don't like this. You have to amalgamate a lot of these to actually create serious revenue, but it's an opportunity for someone. Okay. Number four.

Starting point is 00:13:05 4. Local real estate investor newsletter. So this, there are, there are examples of people making millions of dollars with real estate newsletters. A friend of mine used to run a company called BizNow Media. I think they ended up selling for about $70 million. And that's what they were doing. They were just doing email, real estate news newsletters. So just, just, because, you know, a transaction of a real estate transaction is so big, there's a lot of money around it. So what's the idea that Matt has? So he says, this idea works for cities with 200,000 to a million people. The target audience for this newsletter is local real estate investors who are looking to invest in that city. And here's how you can do it. Step one, go do Zillow or contact local

Starting point is 00:14:03 realtors to discover the best investment properties. Once you know what to look for, you can probably outsource this to a virtual system for $500 a month. You can also probably use AI to automate that. Number two, place 10 to 20 high quality listings in each newsletter. And three, enrich the listing by adding potential mortgage rates, forecasting potential returns on the investment. This added information will make your newsletter more valuable and interesting to read. Newsletters like the newsletters like the offer sheet and here.co do this for Airbnb properties and the offer sheet is huge. I think they have more than 100,000 subs. So how to grow this? Okay, everyone wants to know. Use Facebook ads to build your subscriber list. Your CPA should be $2 or less. Promote your

Starting point is 00:14:49 newsletter in local FB groups and subredits. Just be careful on how you do this because you don't want to get banned for shilling. Yeah, it's harder to do it on subredits. You can The way to do it is just you add value in your post, and at the end of it, you just link out to your newsletter. You just say, like, for more of this, go here. And then share pre-and-post CTAs on social media to tease your content, your newsletter content. And if you don't know what that means, a pre-CTA just basically means, you know, an example like this. This is a tweet that Matt did. He says, my results from Twitter ads last month, and, you know, $1.97 C.P.

Starting point is 00:15:32 B, 64% open rate. Want to see how I run Twitter ads for myself and 10 plus other newsletters, my Twitter ad guide drops tomorrow my newsletter, get it here. So it's a pre-call-to-action. He's saying something is, you know, he's teasing with a carrot of information. And then he's saying, you know, tomorrow my newsletter, you're going to want to be on the newsletter because I'm not sharing it here on Twitter. and Post is kind of a similar thing.

Starting point is 00:16:03 He uses a Justin Welsh tweet who says yesterday, 38,000 of my subscribers learn four lessons from a million dollars in online core sales. And then you tease some of what is in the post and then you link it out. So that's called a post-CTA. Pre-C-TTAs and post-C-CTAs are just some of the best ways to get people from your your social audience, X, Instagram, TikTok, and get them on your newsletter.

Starting point is 00:16:35 And by the way, while you're creating your newsletter, well, for any of these ideas, you should be creating, focusing on one platform, one internet audience, maybe it's TikTok, maybe it's Instagram, maybe it's X, depending on what it is, and just be focusing and building that audience while you're spending money on meta

Starting point is 00:16:56 and other places to get subscribers. Because eventually what you want to do is you don't want to be reliant on paying Zuck, you know, thousands of dollars a month for unmed ads. So the idea is eventually your organic will surpass your paid. You know, he says, send this newsletter out one time per week to start. As you sell more ad inventory, send it to three to five times per week. Okay. And then he says, how to get your first ad sale?

Starting point is 00:17:26 because I know a lot of people are thinking like, okay, great, but how do I actually sell an ad spot? So let's assume you have 1,000 to 5,000 subscribers, which, by the way, isn't a lot. I'd approach a local business, charge a flat fee, run an ad for them until it gets an agreed amount of clicks. Here's what this looks like. The sponsor and you agree to a certain number of clicks at a specific price.

Starting point is 00:17:51 I'd aim at 500 clicks at $5 per. charge an upfront flat fee of $2,500. You'll need to run the ad for multiple weeks to get 500 clicks, but that's okay. Take that $2,500 and reinvest it in ad spend to get more subscribers. Get more subscribers, close new sponsors at that higher rate. So local businesses with high LTVs that already work with real estate investors are the best sponsors for this newsletters, for example, lawyers, accountants, bankers, insurance brokers, et cetera. Once you have five to 10,000 subs and a steady stream of ad revenue,

Starting point is 00:18:29 then you can repeat this newsletter framework for another nearby city. And then you can scale horizontally by following the same model in two to five towns in the surrounding areas. So there's more ways you can monetize, of course, because you can sell your subscribers a local in-person real estate investment seminar or event for $500 to $1,000 per seat. That's happening all the time people doing really well with that. You can also offer premium subscriptions and put 50% of the properties behind a paywall for $1,000 a year. So, you know, if you do the math, you assume a $2.000 a month budget, which is $2,500 new subs a month. You're adding 20 subscribers per day from organic social, so it's 600 new subs per month. Basically, 3,100 new subs a month total.

Starting point is 00:19:18 Now you have a valuable audience of 3,000 local. real estate investors, you can start selling ads. If you sell three, run until 500 clicks ads like we talked about before, for $2,500 each month, that's $7,500. If 2% of a 5,000 person list purchases a $500 seminar, it's $50,000 in sales, which doesn't include the potential sponsorship revenue from the event, and you will be able to make money from sponsorship revenue. If 1% of a 5K list converts to $1,000 a year premium subs, subscription, that's $50,000 ARR, total revenue is $190,000 with an audience of 5 to 10,000 subs, and plus the economics get better as you scale. And plus, you can sell this business

Starting point is 00:20:11 on a dime. This is a super sought-after audience. And the reason I'm happy that he put this example here is a lot of people tell me, oh, I want to start a newsletter business, but I'll only start making $100,000 a year once I hit 100,000 subscribers. No, you know, five to 10,000 subs and you're making $190,000 a year. Okay. You still with me? You get in those creative juices flowing? You still sip in? All right. Well, let's keep going. don't, you know, hope your notepad is out and you're sort of writing notes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:20:56 So number five, newsletter for B2B decision makers. So this is actually one of my favorite, favorite on the list. So the beauty of this type of newsletter is you don't need a huge list. So it's even less than the previous one. If you have 2,000 subscribers and they're all C-suite execs, you hit a home run.

Starting point is 00:21:19 sponsors are desperate to get in front of these decision makers. The hardest part will be acquiring newsletters that fit your ICP, ideal customer profile. Here's how to start. Pick a niche and focus on one industry. For example, this could be CEOs at Fortune 500 oil and gas companies. The next step is acquiring subscribers. As I said, it's tough, but there are three approaches. Chat with an executive at a Fortune 500 company in your target industry.

Starting point is 00:21:48 Ask about their info diet and what they want to read about. Then create for that person, eventually ask them to introduce you to more people in their network, ask those people what content they're consuming. Create hyper-relevant content that executives in that niche want to read. Do an analysis in summary of important press releases, product launches, executives hired, fired, earning reports, etc. Take all the information they normally consume and summarize it into a five-to-five. 10-minute newsletter. Number three, share that content on LinkedIn and X to drive people to your newsletter. And number four, advertise in other newsletters that your ICP is reading. However, these ads may get expensive or may be expensive. As your audience grows, you can do cross-promos

Starting point is 00:22:35 with these newsletters to grow for free. The next part is, the next part of this is critical to monetizing a newsletter. So you want to create a survey after people subscribe. You can do that with something like Beehive Survey Forms, and you can ask people their job title, their industry, their company, and their location. We talked a little about, you know, getting more, you know, data enrichment than just a sub, a plano email earlier. And again, this is coming up again. So analyze the results to determine what percentage of subscribers are your ICP and what percent aren't. If you can say 50% of our subscribers are C-sweets execs in XYZ sector, then you have serious leverage when selling sponsorships. So I think this is a really, really great playbook.

Starting point is 00:23:28 And again, I like it because I like high value, valuable customer bases. I like when people have a lot of disposable income to spend, who are in charge of budgets. These are beautiful businesses to create. And then again, you can create software on top of it and sell them things. It doesn't necessarily need, these are just, you know, it doesn't need, you know, you don't need to necessarily sell by ads, events, courses, stuff like that. I actually tend to think you should be selling software, but you can always start by selling ads and events. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called Boring Marketing So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the

Starting point is 00:24:20 world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. Okay, number six, niche ad examples for media buyers. So media buyers need to stay current and find

Starting point is 00:25:09 add creative examples to get better at their job titles. Some newsletters do this like the ad professor, which covers general ads and inspiration and biddy co. But there's a lack of newsletters dedicated to ad creative for media companies, SaaS, info products, lead gen, and many other industries. Create a newsletter that's broken down into three to four sections. Each section should feature ads from a different niche. Here's how. Create a spread, number one, create a spreadsheet and determine which niches you want to cover. Number two, source high converting ads for each niche. Do this by going to meta ad library.

Starting point is 00:25:52 Look for ads that have been live the longest on high spending accounts. They're literally consistent high performers. Select three to six ads per niche. Add some context to each ad. This can be one to two sentences. Now, how do you monetize? Well, you want to put 80% of the content behind a paywall, make Canva templates for each ad that subscribers can download. You want to sell sponsorships to advertisers that want to target paid marketers.

Starting point is 00:26:19 That's obvious. And you want to sell a community or a membership or a course to that audience. So, you know, super straightforward on how to monetize it. I think there's a ton, a ton, a ton of opportunity in this one. So, yeah, that's number six. Let's keep on going. This week in memes. Most newsletters are text-based, but there are some great exceptions.

Starting point is 00:26:45 Charter, which was acquired by Robin Hood, which was visuals and infographics on business, finance, and technology. Smart nonsense, a daily comment explaining nerdy stuff like your five. And the Bay Area Times, which was started by Anthony Pompliano, which is a visual daily newsletter on business and tech. But no newsletter explains the news with me. Here's how it could work. Find a big story that happened that day or week. Find a meme that represents or relates to the news story and write a witty and concise summary of the story

Starting point is 00:27:17 in 100 to 250 words below the meme. Trong Fan does an incredible job at curating memes around business and tech news on Twitter, but who's doing it in a newsletter? So this is the idea. Creating one of these newsletters, creating one of these newsletters isn't rock in science. So you just want to cover two to four stories per day, one meme for each story,

Starting point is 00:27:42 100 to 250 word witty summaries for each. You don't need to make any memes from scratch, find them on Reddit, Twitter, memelord. Tech, it's actually meme-alertz.com and other sources. I'd recommend choosing a prosumer niche, focus on business, tech, investing, or finance. but this can work for general news too. Pro-sumer content has more monetization opportunities. Yeah, so obviously the more consumer you go, the less monetization there is. And the more prosumer you go, more B2B you go, the more monetization goes up.

Starting point is 00:28:23 What's the big idea around this one? So the big idea is today's newsletters are techs. And in 2025, they are going to be more and more visual. I think that memes is one more visual way to, like, meme images are a great way to consume information. It's tried and true. There's also other ways you can do it. Like you can do infographics. You can do GIFs.

Starting point is 00:28:53 So just think there's just a lot of opportunity in making more visual newsletters. So that's kind of like the idea for me on this one is creating more visual newsletters. in a space that doesn't have any visual newsletters and create something that doesn't feel like work to read. Because I think a lot of newsletters now just feels like a lot of text and people don't have time for that. Okay, so number eight, industry-specific AI tips and tactics. This idea is modeled after write with AI.

Starting point is 00:29:31 It's a weekly paid newsletter that trains how to write with AI. They send chat, GPT, and AI prompt to your inbox every week. So it's $200 a year, $20 a month. They have $200,000 in ARR through their paid newsletter subscription. So you can take this concept and apply it to other categories. AI for marketers, AI for lawyers, you get the idea. So the key to creating a successful newsletter that people pay for off the bat is creating content that gives them the results. People want cheat codes, help your readers save time and money with AI tools and tactics.

Starting point is 00:30:06 Okay, so I think what isn't said here is that Nicholas Cole and Dickie Bush, the people behind write with AI, have hundreds of thousands of followers already. So on social. So they're able to take that to generate this $200,000 ARR. So the question is with this idea is, if they didn't have that audience, would they be able to use Facebook ads, acquire customers, obviously not at $2, a paid subscriber, but maybe $20? That's my question mark with this one. So I believe in the product. I believe that there's a ton of opportunity to create newsletters where people are learning AI or new tools or basically. things that save them time or money.

Starting point is 00:30:58 And I think that people are more willing in 2025 to pay for them than they were in 2015. But my question is, can you do that without a social audience? Let me know in the comments. So number nine, lessons from leaders or inspirational figures. So this newsletter would feature highlights and lessons learn from inspirational leaders. This type of newsletter is trickier to monetize because there's no clear niche, but it's a great way to grow a broad audience fast. This content also translates great to social.

Starting point is 00:31:35 It translates great to social because it's the type of stuff that goes viral, specifically, especially on X, but in other places too. If you need some ideas on leaders to profile, there's a lot of great podcasts that go in-depth on similar topics, how to take over the world, business breakdowns, podcast acquired FM. Rather than keeping in-depth profiles on leaders, the profile does a good job doing this.

Starting point is 00:32:02 I would keep this newsletter super short, two to five minutes max. So let's say your niche is investors and you profile Warren Buffett. Create three to four sections that look like this. Best interview with Warren Buffett, best quote from Warren Buffett, best book about Warren Buffett,

Starting point is 00:32:18 best piece of advice from Warren Buffett. Remember, readers like predictable formats with short actionable content. There's like very little risk to create something like this, and it's just going to work, right? It's going to work because you're picking back off the credibility of, say, Warren Buffett. You can do Facebook targeting to, you know, people who like Warren Buffett or follow Warren Buffett on or follow Berkshire Hathaway on X or follow people like

Starting point is 00:32:50 Bill Ackman who are students of Warren Buffett. on X. So there's a lot of ways, there's a lot of ways to make this work. I don't see it as high risk. But my issue with it is like, where do you, where do you take it from there? How do you monetize it? If we were going to use the example of Warren Buffett, I actually think that's probably one of the, you know, a great place to actually, to build a business around because then you can, you know, it's a business around investors, people who like value investing. You know, you could, there's a lot you can do there.

Starting point is 00:33:29 Some ideas, just like off the top of, off the top of my head, is, but one, you can raise a fund, like a head fund, and you could be a mini Warren Buffett and raise from people like this. You can do an agency of like, you know, Howard Warren Buffett, run your, company and do consulting around it. Of course, you can sell courses, make a few hundred thousand dollars a year there. Maybe make a stock trading app that is just, you know, all around Warren Buffett and value investing, you know, an AI agent that you charge for that looks at your portfolio and optimizes it like Warren Buffett. These are just off the top of my head. But I do like it because, you know, people, you know, if you are going to do this idea,

Starting point is 00:34:30 focus on, I would say, focus on inspirational leaders that also attract like a prosumer audience. Okay. Last idea is local newsletters, number 10. So traditional media publications have shifted to digital platforms, but local news still hasn't caught up. So there's a big opportunity right now for digestible local newsletters that focus on what people want. Positive community-oriented news, not crime-heavy local news stories. People are so tired of just looking at the news and seeing sad things come out of their town. So you can do with things to do this weekend newsletter. Send it out on Thursday mornings, highlight local events, live music, food, and fun things to do.

Starting point is 00:35:19 Pro tip, find locally sourced events that aren't on event brink. right. Like events that are written on chalkboards at local cafes and bars, things AI easily can easily, things AI can't easily replicate. So how do you acquire subs? Classic FB ads to grow your audience. These FB ads should be pretty straightforward. Here are five restaurants to try this weekend in Miami. Once people click on the ad, it should link to a landing page where people could subscribe. and then Matt says that he's helped local newsletters acquire subscribers for less than 50 cents so you can acquire them pretty cheap.

Starting point is 00:36:03 I would be curious of those U.S. So monetization. You can monetize the newsletter through local sponsors, particularly from high lifetime value businesses like lawyers, realtors, and wealth managers. Local newsletters can go to six-figure businesses in one city with the potential to skill. out of seven figures by expanding into multiple cities. If you want to learn more about local

Starting point is 00:36:26 newsletters, he has a podcast interview with Ryan Sneddon of Naphton of Naphtown Scoop, a local newsletter covering Annapolis, Maryland. That's 400K per year in revenue. And then also check out the media startups that had big outcomes from small local newsletters. So I didn't know this, but 6am city grew to 8 million in revenue with 1.4 million subscribers. The Charlotte Agenda was acquired by Axios for like $5 million. So there is opportunity and local. People are always searching for new things.

Starting point is 00:37:01 And I think the key insight was like keep it positive, keep it community oriented, keep it curated. And in a world where AI is going to flood content, like how do you become the anti-AI? So there you have it. You have 10 really, really

Starting point is 00:37:21 easy to start startup ideas that isn't going to cost you a lot of money to start. That could be the foundation for a really big agency business, a really big software business, a really big marketplace business. And you'll have your customers coming in every single month because you'll have your Facebook ads generating subscribers at hopefully at a cost that you're making more money. So you're bringing in every single month, you're creating that moat. And then your organic audience is also every single month getting bigger and bigger. And you're sending people via these pre-CTAs and post-CTAs into the newsletter.

Starting point is 00:38:07 And then you use AI coding platforms like Replit, like Bolt, to create products for these people, create software for these people, try new experiments. So it's funny that we're in 2025 and newsletter businesses are still, you know, actually, I was going to say they're more relevant than ever. And yeah, I hope you go build something. I hope this inspired you to go build something. If you got one ounce of value from this, just let me know in the comments. I'm always, in the comments replying. That's where I live. I want to hear from you.

Starting point is 00:38:54 And I want to give a shout out and thanks to Matt McGarry for writing such a great post. I'll include it in the description of the YouTube video and the Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And that's it. That's the pod.

Starting point is 00:39:11 Startup Ideas Podcast. Welcome to 2025, baby. It's going to be a big year for us.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - 10 Newsletter Business Ideas to start in 2025

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