Paid newsletter at $100k ARR in 4 months

The newsletter is called Software Ideas, and founder Kevin Conti announced the milestone on Indie Hackers. (According to Kevin’s comments there, SEO has been the biggest driver of growth.)

The elevator pitch for the newsletter:

Hand-picked, validated SaaS ideas delivered straight to your inbox. We analyze tens of thousands of companies, finding niches where bootstrappers can compete & win.

A subscription costs $57 for 3 months, which works out to $19 per month.

How does that pricing compare to other paid newsletters? 🤔

This article has the answer, crunching the numbers of 30 popular paid newsletters.

The skinny:

The average price per month is $11. The average amount of issues published per week is 3.5. That’s 14 per month. That gives us an average value of $0.76 per issue, paid by the subscriber.

If you remove outliers, such as those that charge $29.99 and up per month, the adjusted number is $8 per month, and $0.57 per issue.

You might think that this means you can’t charge more than that. Wrong. I’ve seen many newsletter creators able to charge more than this for far fewer issues per month successfully without anyone batting an eye.