AI Summary
5 min readAlex Garcia, a kid from Austin, Texas, makes $845,601 a year writing five different email newsletters. He runs Marketing Examination, Content Examined, Social Examination, Landing Page Examination, and DTC Exam, which together have about 150,000 to 160,000 total subscribers. His monthly revenue runs roughly $65,000 to $70,000 from ad sponsors alone, with another $15,000 to $20,000 coming from products he is testing. Garcia’s entire career revolves around content, and he broke down the operating system behind building a six-figure newsletter business from scratch.
How Garcia Found His Niche and Started
Garcia’s entry into newsletters came through a job at The Hustle, where he applied because he wanted to understand how to grow a newsletter and scale a media company. He gave himself one year there. About two months before leaving, he went hard on Twitter, making it his primary distribution channel, and started tweaking newsletter content ideas. Once he had that foundation, his concept was to take the Harvard Business Review model and bring it to marketing, scaling that into Marketing Examination.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (03:01) **Alex Garcia's Newsletter Empire** - Alex introduces himself and his five newsletters (Marketing Examination, Content Examined, Social Examination, Landing Page Exam, DTC Exam) totaling ~160k subscribers and generating $65-70k monthly revenue from sponsors.
- 2 (03:37) **Origin Story: From The Hustle to Marketing Examination** - Alex describes how he got his start by joining The Hustle newsletter, then used Twitter as a distribution channel to test ideas.
- 3 (04:17) **The Real Opportunity in Newsletters** - Alex argues newsletters are undervalued as a business model, citing Morning Brew's $75M+ sale and The Hustle's $20-30M exit.
- 4 (05:08) **Finding Your Niche: Passion vs. Profit** - Alex presents two approaches: write about what you love to research, or pick an exploding market trend for a pure business play.
- 5 (06:38) **Getting Your First 100 Subscribers: Hand-to-Hand Combat** - Alex explains the scrappy, unscalable tactics needed to start: DMs, social posts, and personal outreach.
- 6 (07:37) **The Specifics of Hand-to-Hand Combat** - Alex gives concrete examples, including leveraging personal Facebook friends and writing 50 marketing Twitter threads over 50 days.
- 7 (10:12) **Finding Content That Keeps Subscribers** - Alex shares tools for discovering high-value, under-covered topics: shared article tools and Twitter Advanced Search.
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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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