New Micro Startups For Sale 🚀 - How to Evaluate Newsletters

Hey everyone. This week was tough. What about yours?

My previous email went to the spam :(

I gave an interview, started Microns page on Twitter, created first part of the Premium plan.

Today I will tell you about newsletters, how to estimate them, the pros and cons of buying, and give you some insights if you want to start one.

I will cover a new section called "Startup of the week" to promote the most promising but underestimated micro-startup available on the site.

Enjoy!

👋 Welcome

Welcome to the 33 new people joining this week!

To make sure you get the newsletter and it doesn’t land in your promotional folder, move this email to your primary inbox.

Let me know what you think of your first one. Replying helps Google realize it’s not spam and helps me learn what topics you are interested in.

Prefer Twitter? Drop me a DM here.

Now let’s crack on with the newsletter ☕️

🗞 Newsletters are next assets to buy

Morning Brew, The Hustle, and even Product Hunt started their businesses by collecting emails and writing to their subscribers. They began from the newsletter.

It wouldn't be great for everyone, but for micro-startups, it seems the way to go. To start getting some traction and building audience newsletters as long as blogs and podcasts are in a great position.

To write a newsletter, you don't need to be a technical person. There is no code to learn or fix. Costs to operate a newsletter are exceptionally minimal. The due diligence process is simple.

Fantastic, you say. But there is one big problem with it. The newsletter entirely relies on the person who writes it. Do subscribers care if the person changes? Maybe. If they stick around? Maybe.

In my opinion, if you have a plan to acquire a newsletter, you should be a fan of it and read every single issue to keep it the same quality.

Buying a newsletter similar to purchasing a content site or SaaS business.

Based on different resources, I can say that it would be a 3 – 5 annual net profit multiple. The concrete multiple depends on newsletter size, open/click rates, audience category, etc.

But what if the newsletter doesn't have any revenue? How to evaluate it?

Good question. You need to spend some time to estimate it correctly, but let me explain two available tactics.

The first one is to figure out costs to acquire each subscriber — for example, a newsletter with 1,000 subscribers, which earns subscribers through paid sponsorships. The average acquisition cost is $5 per subscriber. So you can assume to pay around $5,000.

The second one is to define monetization potential. Due to Substack's data, around 5% of subscribers convert to a paid plan. Using the example above, a newsletter with 1,000 subscribers has 50% of engaged readers.

Let's assume that 5% of these engaged users will convert to paid: 500 * 0.05 = 25 paid subs.

If your subscription costs $10/month, you will get $250/mo or $3,000 per year.

Approximate asking price could be $3,000 * 3 = $9,000. So, you should hope to pay from $5,000 to $9,000.

I think it gave you some understanding of how to price these things.

Tip from me. Suppose you want to start your newsletter. Use an already built platform for this. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Choose Substack or Revue and start writing. The platform will solve many problems for you, from mailing and integrations to analytics and notifications.

🚀 Company recent news

Last week I was worried because my latest newsletter issue went to the spam, and a lot of people didn't open it :(

I figured out that the problem was because of Revue. This is the first time it has happened.

Please, double-check the spam folder and unmark the previous issue. Gmail filters have been mistaken this time.

I guess I know why Microns email went to the spam(noticed huge drop off open rate).

"a few bad actors have been using Revue recently to send spam, which means that some spam filters are picking out certain messages from Revue, and sometimes blocking them" –– Revue

— Ilya Novohatskyi 🇺🇦 (@ilyanovohatskyi)
Nov 4, 2021