AI Summary
5 min readAlex Garcia, a 26-year-old from Austin, Texas, built a portfolio of five email newsletters that now generate roughly $845,000 a year in revenue. He started not with a grand vision, but by applying for a job at The Hustle, giving himself one year to learn the newsletter business from the inside. The result is Marketing Examined, Content Examined, Social Examined, Landing Page Examined, and DTC Examined — a family of B2B newsletters that together pull in around 65 to 70 thousand dollars a month from sponsorships alone, with another 15 to 20 thousand coming from products he is currently testing.
Finding Your Niche and Getting the First Subscribers
Garcia sees two distinct paths to picking a niche. The first is passion-driven: write about what you already love reading and researching in your downtime. For him, that was marketing, content creation, and building things. The second is market-driven: identify a topic that is exploding right now and build a business around it. He chose the first path, and it gave him the stamina to produce daily content for months.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (02:32) **Alex Garcia's Newsletter Empire** - Introduces the guest and his portfolio of five newsletters (Marketing Examining, Content Examining, Social Examining, etc.) with 150-160K total subscribers and ~$65-70K monthly revenue from ads.
- 2 (03:46) **The Real Opportunity of Newsletters** - Alex frames newsletters as a nine-figure business model, citing Morning Brew and The Hustle as proof, and emphasizes their role as top-of-funnel for other ventures.
- 3 (04:38) **Finding Your Newsletter Niche** - Alex presents two paths: writing about what you love versus identifying a topic that is currently exploding in demand.
- 4 (06:08) **Getting Your First Subscribers: Hand-to-Hand Combat** - Alex details the unscalable, direct outreach methods required to get the first 100 to 1,000 subscribers.
- 5 (06:35) **The "Buffet Marketing" Strategy** - After initial growth, Alex explains how to test multiple channels to find the one or two that have 10X potential.
- 6 (09:11) **Finding Good Content to Write About** - Alex shares two tools for discovering untapped topics that will keep subscribers engaged.
- 7 (09:37) **How Newsletters Make Money** - Alex breaks down the primary monetization models: sponsorships, paid subscriptions, and his own hybrid model of sponsorships plus services.
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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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