Well, the end of my newsletter.
No, not this one. This one will keep going, as long as I keep needing therapy and as long as I keep refusing to trust anyone else with the task.
But as of today, I have decided to stop publishing my health newsletter.
I started that newsletter in January 2023. I published a new issue every week until this week — some 120k words in total.
Researching, writing, and publishing all that word-tonnage took up 300-400 hours of my productive waking time over the past 15 months.
And yet, I’m closing the old heap down. My reason is simple:
I couldn’t get my health newsletter going as a business. And rather than thinking about what I’ve already invested into it, I’m thinking about the time, money, and effort it might still take to turn it into something.
It’s not simply a matter of persistence, either. Because knowing what I know now, I’m not sure my health newsletter would ever turn into something, even if I were to persist.
I could tell you my arguments for that, or my predictions for the future of newsletter businesses.
But instead, I’ll share something by someone much more invested in newsletters than me. That someone is Scott Oldford.
Over the past year or two, Scott bought up dozens of newsletters and newsletter-related businesses with the goal of creating a newsletter roll-up. And then, here’s what he found:
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Our model originally with newsletters was to create lead flow for the companies that we owned inside of our portfolio.
As time went on we ended up a little further away from that model than I’d like to admit.
We attempted to monetize in many different ways and in the end we realized that keeping it with its original intent was a much better strategy.
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We realized that the cost of running a media company at scale simply did not make sense and majority of the costs were actually from attempting to make it a direct-profit driver instead of a value-driver for the dozens of businesses we own and eventually hundreds of businesses we will own.
In short — newsletters and owned media makes a lot of sense. However, I believe the opportunity that people see isn’t the true one.
The real opportunity? Owning your audience.
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For me at least, it’s the end of newsletters as a business.
On the other hand, I will be looking for a business to start or grow, one where a newsletter could be a valuable tool.
Maybe you’re lucky, and you already have a business like that. Maybe you even have your own owned audience. But maybe you’re not doing anything with it.
If so, you’re not alone. I’m always amazed by how many businesses have email lists of tens of thousands of leads or even buyers — that they never do anything with.
If you want my help or advice with that, hit reply and we can talk.
Or if you don’t want my help, and you want to profit from your email list all by yourself, here’s how to start writing a newsletter that complements and feeds your business: