$14K/Month College Sports Newsletter

Matt Brown was recently interviewed on the Send & Grow Podcast 🎙️

Matt was a sports writer at Vox before being laid off in April 2020 due to the pandemic.

📝 With lots of free time on his hands, he decided to start his own newsletter called Extra Points which covers the business side of college sports: media rights, coaching changes, budget analysis, and more.

Check out a recent edition 👈

Matt already had expertise in data analysis and college sports, which allowed him to create a newsletter with unique insights.

Extra Points quickly found an audience, gaining 100 paid subscribers within 48 hours of launch 🚀

Matt attributes his fast start to having an existing following on Twitter and relationships in the industry.

About a year in, Matt found it difficult to manage the day-to-day of producing the newsletter while also trying to grow his audience. That’s when he sold to D1.ticker, a company that covers the latest news in college athletics.

Matt said in the interview…

I was also fortunate because when this started… the business of college athletics was becoming a more important news vertical. Many entities reached out about buying me.

And I talked with several of them and I had a partner with a company called D1.ticker… they are a B2B focused just college sports industry publication.

And so the way that it works now is that I’m a 1099 employee there. I have full editorial control over the newsletter… [and] they share some of the operational expenses in exchange for revenue share.

D1.ticker has a full-time sales person who spends most of his time selling subscription packages for Extra Points. And we share some of the tech costs.

Extra Points now has around 16,000 total subscribers and ~3,000 paid. 

The payment plans are $8/month or $75/year. So my conservative estimate is that the newsletter generates over $150,000/year from paid subscribers (after discounts on bulk orders).

And they make another $15,000/year or so from sponsorships and affiliate deals. (Matt says 90% of their income is from paid subs.)

In total, that’s about $165,000 a year or $14,000 a month 💰

Matt’s advice for anyone thinking to launch a newsletter…

The mistake [most people make] is not really focusing enough on what differentiates your product.

I think the thing that has made Extra Points successful has been the fact that I write a lot of information that our consumers really can’t find anywhere else… whether that is through original reporting, whether that’s picking up the phone and getting other analysis…

… If I had decided to make this… “Here’s five links with a paragraph of analysis about the sports business world” … I might have a larger audience, but I would definitely not make as much money and… I wouldn’t have some of the professional relationships so this wouldn’t be as deep.

In other words, Matt didn’t just do the easy thing of starting another curated newsletter.

There are a ton of those nowadays. And while they can add some value, Matt’s approach of offering original insights and analysis clearly has more potential 😎