On February 1st, I got an email with the subject line, “Invest in your newsletter.”
“I sure like the sound of investing,” I said to myself. “And I do have a newsletter.”
The background is this:
I had recently signed up for Beehiiv, which is something like Substack, only you have to pay a monthly fee for it.
Beehiiv was created by Tyler Denk, who was an early employee at Morning Brew. Morning Brew is now a $75+ million business, based around a daily email that covers the day’s business news.
I signed up for Beehiiv because I’ve started a Morning Brew-like newsletter. It has nothing to do with marketing or copywriting, and it’s in a different format than what you are currently reading.
So that’s the background. Now that we’re caught up, let’s get back to that February 1st “Invest in your newsletter” email.
Tyler of Beehiiv was writing me that email to give me the opportunity to pay him $499 for his course on starting a newsletter.
So I did.
I sent Tyler $499 and I got access to this course, called Newsletter XP. And I got to listen to a bunch of big people in the newsletter space, including Morning Brew’s founder and CEO, share their ideas experiences on content strategy and growth and newsletter monetization.
People in this “newsletter operator” space don’t seem to be as miserly as people in the direct marketing space about sharing ideas that are normally behind a paywall. In fact, Tyler encouraged people to tweet the most valuable ideas they got from his Newsletter XP course.
I don’t tweet, so let me email you the most valuable idea I got from this course.
This most valuable idea came in the next-to-last session. One of the guests in that session was Codie Sanchez.
Codie runs Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter with some 250,000 subscribers, about buying and selling businesses. She’s built an eight-figure info business off the back of that newsletter, plus maybe several other 7-figure businesses also, plus I guess even the newsletter itself pays her well since she can promote relevant money-related offers.
And maybe most impressive of all, Codie has done all this since corona started.
Anyways, here’s what Codie said that I found most valuable:
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I sort of believe your 1000 true fans — Kevin Kelly talks about this — they’re actually the fans you should charge the most to. Because they are your biggest fans. And where most people screw up when they do paid products is they launch their first product for $10 a month. Their 1000 true fans buy it for 10 bucks. They have cultivated this group of people who buy too low priced of products, which doesn’t allow you to create a real business which can further serve them.
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That’s it. That’s the most valuable idea that stuck with me from the first time going through Newsletter XP.
I’m thinking about it as I work on building up, and monetizing my other newsletter.
Maybe it’s something you too can think about if you are creating an audience, a list, a newsletter, whatever. Maybe you can think of it as the difference between salting the soil in your garden, just because salt is cheap and easy to get, or investing a bit of time to plant a walnut tree that actually takes root and provides shade and fruit for you and yours for years to come.
But enough of the Magic of Channeling Warren Buffett.
Unrelated to the core of this email, if you want to invest in copywriting skills, which can help if you are building up an audience or an email newsletter, I have a quick, compact, exercise-based course on that. For more info on it: