AI Summary
5 min readAlex Garcia, a kid from Austin, Texas, makes $845,000 a year writing five different email newsletters. He started by landing a job at The Hustle, gave himself a year to learn the ropes, and then built Marketing Examined, Content Examined, Social Examined, Landing Page Examined, and DTC Examined. Combined, those newsletters have roughly 150,000 subscribers and generate between $65,000 and $70,000 in monthly revenue from ad sponsors alone, with another $15,000 to $20,000 coming from products he is testing. On a visit to his home in Texas, he broke down the blueprint for building a six-figure newsletter from scratch.
The Niche: Passion vs. Market Timing
Garcia sees two distinct paths for choosing what to write about. The first is to pick something you genuinely love—whatever you find yourself reading and researching in your free time. For him, that was marketing, content creation, and building things. The second path is purely market-driven: identify a topic that is exploding in popularity and start a business around it. Both can work, but Garcia’s own approach was the passion route. He wanted to take the concept of Harvard Business Review and bring it to the marketing world, creating a publication he himself would want to read.
Getting the First Subscribers: Hand-to-Hand Combat
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:36) **Alex Garcia's Newsletter Empire** - Introduces Alex, who makes $800K/year from five newsletters totaling 150K subscribers and ~$70K monthly revenue from ads and products
- 2 (04:26) **Finding Your Newsletter Niche** - Two strategies: write about what you love or pick a hot topic that's exploding right now
- 3 (05:57) **Getting Your First 100-1000 Subscribers** - Hand-to-hand combat and buffet marketing are the core strategies for early growth
- 4 (08:53) **Finding Great Content to Write About** - Use tools and Twitter Advanced Search to discover hidden gems that nobody has covered
- 5 (09:29) **How Newsletters Make Money** - Sponsorships are the simplest path, but paid newsletters and services are powerful alternatives
- 6 (10:30) **The Four Essential Tools for a Newsletter Business** - Zapier, Notion, Slack, and an ESP (Email Service Provider) are all you need
- 7 (10:55) **Hiring Writers and Scaling Content** - Alex now has a dedicated writer for each newsletter niche
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
I Make $845,601 Writing This Online...📚 Make Your First $1 (10x Faster) with Case Studies - https://www.starterstory.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=alex&yts=true📩 Business Ideas Newsletter (free) -https://www.starterstory.com/newsletterIn this episode, I meet up with Alex from Marketing Examined to ask him how he makes $800,000/year writing online… and it might be easier than you think.He reveals how to get your first 1,000 newsletter subscribers, how to land big time sponsors, and the 4 key elements to build a $1M newsletter business from scratch. Hope this one inspires some of you to start!0:00 - Intro 0:52 - The Business Model + Revenue 1:33 - Finding the idea 2:13 - Building a 9-figure newsletter 2:56 - How to find a niche 4:32 - Blueprint for first 1,000 subscribers 5:36 - The outreach method 6:04 - Finding interesting topics 6:35 - How to monetize 7:32 - Tools 8:02 - Outsourcing writers 8:28 - How to grow a newsletter 9:28 - Finding advertisers & pricing 10:07 - How to get better at marketing 10:36 - Daily routine 11:33 - Advice for new entrepreneursFollow Alex 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/alexgarcia_atx 🖥️ Website - https://www.marketingexamined.com🔔Subscribe - https://www.youtube.com/@starterstory 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/starter_story/ 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/thepatwallsSharing ideas that make money!Disclaimer: This podcast is published by a viewer using content from Starter Story's YouTube channel with the goal of making his valuable insights more accessible to those who prefer audio formats, helping more people discover and learn from the insights shared in his videos. It is not an official production of Starter Story. For any requests from Starter Story, please don't hesitate to get in touch. -------- Keywords: startup advice, software business, bootstrap startup, tech entrepreneur, tech business, startup stories, micro saas
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