He Built a $10K/Month Newsletter in 10 Months

Richard Patey used to build websites, now he launches newsletters 🚀

Having previously built and sold content sites between 2016 and 2019, including a six-figure exit on Empire Flippers, in 2020 he was looking for a business model that wasn’t so dependent on search traffic from Google.

He was also looking to move on from client work…

I was working with investors, helping them to acquire and operate revenue-generating content websites, but kept running into myself as the bottle neck. I wasn’t scalable, and I’ve never truly enjoyed consulting. Instead of charging ~ $1K/m and working with 5 clients at a time, I could instead charge $49/m and aim to get 100 paying customers.

Richard launched the Website Investing newsletter on Substack (a new platform at the time), and within 10 months he had over 100 people paying a $49/m subscription, “plus a similar level of revenue from advertising/affiliate.”

He then sold the business for six figures 💰

At the end of 2021, Richard launched the Alts Cafe newsletter and Discord community. That caught the interest of Flippa and turned into an acqui-hire.

Richard then launched a newsletter sponsorship network of online business, investing and web3 newsletters at Acquire.GG which he sold earlier this year to Scott Oldford’s The Wisdom Group.

He also released a product on how to launch editorial newsletters called The Newsletter is The Business, and I really like this tip he shares there…

Identify niches that you’re personally interested in (so that you enjoy the grind and don’t quit) and then pick one where a lot of money is being spent (the value of subscribers is high). If I can’t identify 5+ legitimate, repeat sponsors in a niche, I won’t enter it, even if the intention is a paid subscription rather than advertising.

(Btw, as of Nov 2023 you can get that product for free as part of Richard’s $99 Beehiiv Done For You offer.)