Never give away your best stuff for free, right?
Instead, use your free emails to sell high-priced products and subscriptions, right?
That’s certainly one way to run an email-based business. And it’s proven to work well for many people.
But is it the only way?
Let’s reach into the archives of this very newsletter, to a breaking story I wrote about two years ago.
Back then, I reported that the Morning Brew, a daily email newsletter without any backend offers, had sold a controlling stake for $75 million.
That’s not too shabby for a project that was started in a college dorm, by just one dude, some five years earlier.
Today I’ve got some similar, but even more greedy news for you.
It’s about Axios.
Axios is basically a collection of email newsletters on topics like politics, the economy, and technology. For example, I’ve been subscribed to their “Axios World” newsletter for a couple years.
Axios was launched in 2017 by three ex-Politico journalists.
And get this:
Axios, an email-based business that was started five years ago, just got sold for $525 million.
$525 million.
From my back-of-the-envelope math, that’s $25 million more than a half billion dollars. For a bunch of email newsletters. At a moment when everybody seems to be panicking about a recession.
So yes. Never give away your best stuff for free in your emails… not unless… you want a pool filled with gold coins in which you can go swimming like Scrooge McDuck.
Now of course, you can make the claim that Axios is much more than just a bunch of email newsletters.
You can make the claim that it’s a business like any other, with VC funding, a team of employees, and extensive advertiser relationships.
That’s absolutely true.
And it brings me to my offer for today.
It’s also something from the archives of this very newsletter, also from two years ago. Back then, I called this offer my “cash buyers list.”
It works like this:
I have certain skills at a high level, mainly around copywriting and content creation. I also have a simmering, lingering desire to start an email-based equivalent of a magazine, newspaper, or morning talk show that could grow grow into something cool and valuable in a few years’ time.
But I can’t do all that myself. Nor do I want to.
So if you have 1) money to invest or 2) complementary skills to mine, then I’d like to talk to you.
I’m not promising anything and I don’t have any project kicking off right now. But if the idea of something Axios-like or Morning Brew-like gets you excited… and you have something to contribute besides enthusiasm and an “eagerness to learn”… then write me an email and let me know what you can contribute.
If it turns out to be a fit in some way, and I manage to put the other pieces in place… then who knows where you and I and our email-based business might be in five years’ time.