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He Makes $500K/Year With This Automated Newsletter

Matt Moody
  • Matt Moody

  • Founder of Salina311
  • $500,000 annual revenue

From a recent breakdown of Salina311, a daily newsletter for Salina, Kansas (pop 46,000)…

27k free subscribers, 2.5k paid subscribers… Started by Matt Moody, a serial AI/ML entrepreneur, in 2021

The $500K/year revenue comes via 👇

  • Advertising: $180K
  • Subscriptions: $220K (digital & print)
  • Events: $12K
  • Legal notices: $95K

🧐 The really interesting part…

The content in Salina311 is all automated by specialized agents. Some examples:

Public Meeting Agent: Transcribes public meetings on YouTube with OpenAI Whisper, identifies key points, turns key points into headlines, writes articles and sends to Ghost by API, sends Matt a text message to review (by Twilio)

Interview Agent: Uses Gmail API to conduct back and forth async interviews with public figures. Once interview is finished, drafts article, sends to Ghost by API, and sends Matt a text message to review…

Scraping crime statistics and local crimes committed into a weekly crime newsletter

Scraping obituaries posted elsewhere and parsing those submitted by forms into a weekly obituaries section

There’s an 80-minute interview with Matt on YouTube if you want to dive deeper…

What newsletter content could you automate with AI? 🤔

Perhaps an interview-focused newsletter for a particular niche using that interview agent?

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Updated: December 22, 2025

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