A Multi-Million Dollar Newsletter Run by 1 Guy

Dan Ni’s TLDR Newsletter has 850k subscribers and self-describes as…

the free daily newsletter with links and TLDRs of the most interesting stories in startups 🚀, tech 📱, and programming 💻!

Chenell Basilio has an insightful deep dive on Dan’s newsletter business.

She notes that Dan offers 3 sponsorship spots in each edition of the newsletter:

• Top Section: $15,000
• Programming Section: $10,000
• Quick Links Section: $5,000

So…

If he sells all 3 placements for every issue, that’s $30k per issue. And this newsletter gets published every weekday.

That’s $150k per week.

Or $600,000 per month.

Or $7.8 million every year.

Even more impressive is that Dan only started the newsletter in 2018 and it apparently only takes him 30 minutes per day to put together 😎

(I suspect he also spends a few hours a day finding content for the newsletter. 30 minutes is likely just the time he spends assembling each edition in his email software.)

According to Chenell, Dan relied on paid ads to land his first chunk of subscribers.

But not the usual paid ads…

Most companies go to Facebook and Google first, because there is a ton of scale to be had there. But [Dan] advocates starting with Reddit and Quora for people with smaller budgets.

He did this as well. He started off spending $50 a day on Reddit and Quora ads, which helped him get to 1,000 subscribers in the first month.

Tons more insights about Dan’s growth strategy in Chenell’s write-up 👈