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How a newsletter sold for 10M in under 10 months
Simple ways to launch your profitable newsletter
Nate Kennedy
March 06, 2024
Welcome to Uncommon Advice, where we get into all things marketing and money.
I’ve got some cool additions to the newsletter going from ideation to execution over the next few weeks.
I think you are going to really like them.
In the meantime, lets’s dive in!
The Uncommon Advice for today covers:
This guy, a celebrity, is a genius
Simple ways to launch your profitable newsletter
How a newsletter sold for $10M+ in under 10 months
The debut of Kennedy Khronicles
This Guy’s A Genius
I’ve been fascinated by the new crop of Hollywood celebrities.
A pretty face and fame on the silver screen aren't enough for them…
These days, more and more celebrities are becoming entrepreneurial savages.
They're signing brand deals, building massive businesses and buying up sports teams.
And I’m all for it.
They recognize the fleeting success that comes with Hollywood fame and they’re:
Hedging their bets
Capitalizing on opportunity
Take Ryan Reynold’s for example.
He sold Aviation Gin for $610 Million
He owns the Wrexham AFC
And recently he sold Mint Mobile for $1.3 Billion.
The guy’s a genius.
But as a marketer, here’s what I find interesting…
Mint Mobile owes a ton of its success to Ryan Reynolds's damn good marketing.
Check this out from the New York Post (emphasis mine):
“Over the long-term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile,” Sievert said…
Mint founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim will stay on at T-Mobile after the transaction is complete to manage the brands. Reynolds, meanwhile, will remain in his creative role for Mint.”
You see, Reynolds knows how to speak to his audience, he’s creative and disruptive.
It’s worked for him.
And while most of us aren’t Hollywood elites, I bet you can put more of those into action in your brands as well.
$10,000,000+ in 10 months.
That's how much the Milk Road newsletter made, and it took less than a year to make it.
Here's how they did it:
Milk Road was founded at the start of 2022. It was a newsletter for cryptocurrency news.
10 months later, it had 250,000 subscribers and sold for 7 figures. Here’s how it went down.
1. Niche
Cryptocurrency was trending at that time, which made generating buzz relatively easy.
It also fit into the broader “make money” niche, which is a very good one for newsletters.
2. Brand
They went with a unique brand name and logo rather than doing something more typical.
I'm guessing that this factor didn’t matter much, but differentiation can help in some scenarios.
3. Platform
Milk Road decided to build their newsletter on beehiiv instead of starting from scratch.
Using platforms like this can help you get started faster and scale with less difficulty.
4. Marketing
On the organic side, they created crypto content (mostly on Twitter) to get subscribers.
On the paid side, they did some “meme marketing” with funny ads that people enjoyed.
5. Referrals
They also set up a referral program for the newsletter, similar to the one Morning Brew used.
That meant getting more subscribers without having to pay or work too hard for them.
6. Content
The first pillar of content is making it useful. Milk Road did that for crypto traders and investors.
The second pillar is making it unique and/or interesting. Their distinct voice helped them here.
7. Testing
They didn’t nail this newsletter on the first try, though. They constantly A/B tested strategies.
Subject lines and angles are the best things to test. That’s especially true for automated flows.
Kennedy Khronicles
Did you know that I made my first million and lost my first million in real estate and made my second million in real estate?
I learned a lot during those years. Experience is a great teacher.
Just recently, I decided to lean into those past experiences and get back into real estate.
We launched Refuge Builders with the goal to build 4 - 5 custom homes per year.
Our first project is a 6500 square ft house that sits on 6 acres of land.
It was very Uncommon on how we launched the company and I am going to reveal what led to it’s inception over the next few weeks.
Rooting for ya!
~Nate Kennedy