Local newsletter for a small city: $200K last year 💰

The Scoop does soft news, meaning coverage is generally light and lifestyle-focused.

Ryan quit his job to start his own thing (he wasn’t sure what). He landed on The Daily Thread, which he now says was “a terrible newsletter. It was a terrible project, but it did teach me all the basics of how to start a newsletter.”

Over 10 months, Ryan spent "500 or 800 bucks" running The Daily Thread, which topped out around 800 subscribers, a 35% open rate, and $300 in revenue.

overtook The Daily Thread in terms of subscribers within a month, and [Ryan] sold that “terrible newsletter” to one of its subscribers for $800, going all-in on the Scoop.

Mastering the basics is what makes you win. It’s just about not quitting. So many people say they’re going to do a newsletter, write three episodes, and then quit. 

If you commit to writing a newsletter, and you say you’re going to send it at this time on these days, and you just do exactly that, and you don’t miss an edition for three-and-a-half years — I’m living proof it can change your life.

We specialize in direct-response video ads on Youtube, TikTok, and Meta.

We are currently doing around 6 figures a month, with about 40-50% profit margin.

When I finished school, the aerospace industry in Canada wasn't doing too well, so jobs in that field were tough to come by, I decided to give this online world a fair shot.

I started off doing SEO for my own private affiliate sites. It made a little bit of money ($400/month) and I was hooked. Not to say that was a lot of money or anything, but that first success kind of taught me that making money online was possible and wasn't just a thing that was something theoretical.

what that process did teach me was how to run facebook ads.

I had a friend that was looking for someone to help run Facebook ads for one of his clients.

I took the project on and did a decent job… We slowly realized that the ads management service we were providing was valuable to businesses and decided to approach it as a team.

We posted on all of the places that had what we thought had our ideal customers and tried to have genuine conversations with them. We posted in relevant Facebook groups, private Slack channels, conferences and events.

Then once we did a good job, a good portion of new business came from referrals. We also would bid for projects on platforms like Upwork.

The main marketing channel for us is our organic Youtube channel [20K subscribers]

We use this channel to give tons of information out for completely free.

As a result we have now become the leading authority on Youtube ads and some of the other platforms.

If a brand wants to work with us, the cost is $5k/m + a percentage of ad spend.

We also have a stand-alone course ($1497) that teaches people how to run their own youtube ads. We recently also launched a tiktok masterclass that teaches people the basic of running tiktok ads.

One of the reasons for our success is that we were providing a service that was very new and had very little competition in.

Back in 2018-2019, there were very few people doing Youtube ads and this helped us stand out and get those first few clients.

Start by building an audience, which I did on Twitter and with my newsletter.

Once you reach a decent number of followers/subscribers, launch a community so they can connect together (the exact number of followers/subscribers you need depends on the type of community you want to build, for example a small mastermind of 10 community members may only require a newsletter with 100-200 subscribers)