💰 Would You Sell?

💰 Would You Sell?

Serial community builder Greg Isenberg launched his newsletter/community You Probably Need A Robot earlier this year and has already grown it to a super impressive 60K subs.

He recently received an offer of $635K to acquire it which he’s been debating taking:

According to his Passionfroot page, he has a 49% open rate for 30K opens. He doesn’t have pricing on his page, but AI is a hot niche right now with a lot of sponsors, and you can command high CPMs.

He also doesn’t have packages, so I’m going to assume a combined CPM of $70 for both the main sponsored placement and his secondary ‘featured’ placement. And let’s assume he sells out 50% of all inventory.

That works out at ~$4K per weekly send or $200K a year.

In the email sign off, it mentions Greg as well as a Lexi and Jordan writing the newsletter, so let’s assume that total profit is ~75% so it makes ~ $150K in profit from sponsorships a year.

Seeing as he’s launched a paid course I think a conservative assumption would be that it makes 50% of sponsorship revenue for an additional $100K a year, all profit. So we would be at $250K profit a year which makes the offer a 2.5x profit multiple.

Newsletter valuations are not particularly sophisticated yet (I’m helping to improve this) but if we go to the Duuce newsletter valuation calculator and round up to $30K/m in revenue it comes out with a valuation of $457K making the offer sound very reasonable:

💯 All In on Newsletters

Scott Oldford, the founder/CEO of The Wisdom Group, of which one arm is Wisdom Media (which this newsletter now belongs to) wrote a great thread on how he went all in on newsletters.

There’s almost 20 newsletters now within Wisdom Media now and I am constantly updating the Passionfroot storefront with ad packages!

But Scott made the point that newsletters and media properties in general (which I feature within the Acquire The Web newsletter - also now part of Wisdom Media!) are only one piece of the puzzle:

Scott has also now acquired the newsletter marketplace Duuce, a way for newsletter creators to grow at audienceswaps.com and a place to discover newsletters and find community at newsletters.co which I’m involved in and you’ll be hearing a lot more about soon…

📰 Classifieds

Duuce is the #1 marketplace for buying & selling newsletters. See what your newsletter is worth with their free valuation calculator. Check it out

The Newsletter Is The Business is everything I know about launching, scaling and selling editorial newsletter businesses. Check it out

🚀 No Code Exits

The Duuce marketplace is actually built on Bubble, a no-code tool which many makers use, and there’s a thriving online M&A market for these startups:

Indeed, Acquire.com writes how since its founding in 2021, 86 no-code businesses were sold on its marketplace.

A great newsletter to learn more is No-Code Exits by Katt Risen.