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Brett Chang
- Co-founder of The Peak
- $3 Million annual revenue
The business is The Peak 🏔
It started as a single newsletter in 2020 and is now a fully-fledged media company producing multiple newsletters, podcasts and events.
From a recent press release…
Founded in 2020, The Peak serves busy Canadian professionals and business leaders with the top global business, finance, and tech stories of the day packaged in a smart, fast, and easily digestible format. The aggregate purchase price of $5 million is comprised of $3.5 million cash on closing and a $1.5 million promissory note.
Co-founder Brett Chang shared on LinkedIn how the idea for The Peak came about…
the start of the pandemic and Taylor, Alex and I were figuring out what was next for us.
We loved Morning Brew and couldn’t figure out why nobody was writing a similar product for 🇨🇦…
We consumed every article / podcast about their business, and developed our MVP (minimum viable product).
We brainstormed names and came up with The Peak. It was a business term (market peak) and also Canadian (mountain peaks). Our friends at August spun up the logo.
A week later, we started writing…
The first newsletter went out on July 16, 2020 and we got it out every weekday after that.
It took them 5 months to reach 8000 subscribers…
We got our first 1,000 subscribers through brute force. We posted on our personal LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts with a story on why we founded The Peak and what readers could expect.
But the real growth came from direct 1-to-1 messaging. We went through our contact list and individually messaged anyone who might be interested
They sold $4160 of ads in those first 5 months 🤑
Here’s how…
- Set pricing at $250 for one week of ads
- Developed a media kit
- Made a list of brands they thought would be a good fit
- Found contact info
- Sent out short emails (template shared here)
Out of 110 emails sent, they only got 20 responses (18%).
But that was enough to sell $4160 of ads.
Over the next several months, they sold $150,000 more 💰
And Brett recently tweeted…
We were on track for $3 million this year with a 30% margin.
Flashback to something Brett wrote in December 2020…
there are a number of profitable newsletters that are doing over $20 million in annual revenue… But they all have one thing in common… They’re American. And when we looked for Canadian equivalents we couldn’t find them. So we said screw it and started our own and that’s how The Peak was born.
That’s often a good jumping off point for building a successful business: what’s already working well in bigger markets? 🤔
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