Building A Local Newsletter Business

Nathan Barry writes about the first year launching and growing From Boise.

It’s a local newsletter for Boise, Idaho (population ~230k) that goes out twice weekly. Here’s a recent edition 📫

Nathan has outsourced pretty much all the work, spending $62k to grow it to 10,000+ subscribers. Though he estimates he could have saved $34k if he had done most of the work himself, and even more if he hadn’t used paid ads to attract subscribers.

Revenue mostly comes from sponsorships. But that’s only amounted to $4,500 to date, plus another $635 from reader donations.

So it’s still far from being a profitable business, but I really like local newsletters and root for them to succeed 🤞

Andrew Wilkinson once tweeted that his nascent local newsletter (in Victoria, Canada) had already captured a bigger audience than the 100-year-old local newspaper. He later commented on a podcast that he believes a great local newsletter could pull in $1-2 million in annual revenue.

And last May it was announced that his company is aiming to add 250 staff and 50 more newsletters by 2023 📈