💵 Newsletter Exits

💵 The Peak Sells For $5M

The Peak newsletter just got acquired for $5M by Zoomer Media:

Brett posted on linkedin how he and his co-founders saw a gap for a Morning Brew covering Canada, and launched during the summer of 2020, writing every weekday since. He states how it was the hiring of a talented team that turned The Peak from a newsletter to a sustainable media business with 115K subscribers at the time of sale.

Zoomer Media, the acquirer, has a large number of digital media properties, such as EverythingZoomer.com which has 60K email subscribers, but up to now it looks like it’s been web and pageview focussed:

The Zoomer Digital Network is similar to the Wisdom Media rollup I covered last week (more on this below!), and they state in their media kit they have over 750K email subscribers across their properties where they offer ‘custom tile’ and ‘banner ads’ placements.

With this acquisition, I wonder if they will now see newsletters as the main business and repurpose the media kit to be about native ad packages.

This is one more significant exit in this burgeoning newsletter business area we operate in as Matt McGarry states:

💵 ConvertKit Acquires Sparkloop

Nathan Barry just announced the acquisition of the newsletter growth platform Sparkloop:

ConvertKit is now looking to build out the largest advertising network for creators, who can recommend and get paid by other newsletters who are not even on ConvertKit.

I did a comparison of Swapstack, Sparkloop and beehiiv’s boosts in this post.

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🔦 Featured in Beehiiv’s Creator Spotlight

Beehiiv has just published their latest creator spotlight newsletter, this time on me, where I talk about the newsletters I build and the exits I’ve had:

This is very timely as I have a new exit to share with you…

🤝 I’ve Joined The Wisdom Media Rollup

I’ve been wanting to go big in the newsletter space for quite some time.

After selling the Website Investing publication and co-founding investing.io with Travis, I wanted to build out a newsletter for each different asset class such as website.investing.io, startup.investing.io, crypto.investing.io etc, into a newsletter network.

This wasn’t the path to move forward on, so I bought the domain junkie.email and thought about doing an inside.com play with whatever interests I was into, such as Snow Junkie about skiing, Coffee Junkie etc.

But I realised the audience demographics needed to match. So I went back to what I knew best, online assets, and set up the Alts Cafe newsletter & community which I sold to Flippa.

My intention was to blow this up to over 100K subscribers within a year, but this unfortunately did not happen.

I then set up Acquire.gg to build an online business and investing newsletter network on Substack where at one point I ended up with 6 niche newsletters:

I was partnering up with subject matter experts to help me run them, such as Colin Ma with Acquire Websites and Sean Markey with Dropping Domains.

I even alluded to a bigger play I had in mind but never announced - I was looking to launch a native ad sponsorship network. I was also thinking about launching a newsletter marketplace.

But I quickly realised that all of these ambitions required investment. Inside.com raised $3.5M. Alts.co raised $1.5M pre-seed and raised an extension last year. Swapstack raised $750K.

At the time I was bumping into limitations on Substack that beehiiv unlocked and so I consolidated down to the 3 per account on beehiiv I was allowed:

Now I’ve consolidated down to owning just one and have finally found a structure to achieve everything I was looking to do.

I’ve just sold this newsletter along with Acquire The Web and Acquire.gg to Wisdom Media and have joined the media rollup. Here’s the press release.

I’ll still continue to operate these newsletters, but this Creator Funnel one will be rebranded and integrated into what will become THE destination for newsletters, coming soon.

I’m now involved with sponsorships.com, and will also be involved in almost every aspect of the newsletter landscape, from investing to SaaS platforms to marketplaces…

That’s right, Scott has also acquired the biggest newsletter marketplace Duuce and I’m going to be helping with valuations and other aspects.

And on top of all of this I now have over 800K subscribers across all the newsletters to leverage!