How to Build a Successful Subscription-Based Newsletter Startup

Should you build from scratch or go with a newsletter-business-in-a-box?

Look, there aren’t any get-rich-quick secrets in this post. I actually never meant to build a business around a subscription-based newsletter. It happened kind of accidentally.

But because that business (TeachingStartup.com) took off, I get a lot of questions about how to make a subscription-based newsletter successful. I’m not kidding myself; I know the demand for my knowledge in this arena has little to do with me and much more to do with the recent success of newsletter-business-in-a-box companies like Substack and Revue.

There’s definitely money in newsletters if you do them right.

But I’m also not kidding myself in thinking I have the secret formula for newsletter success. Like I said, I never meant to build a newsletter business. But in a weird, kind-of-backwards way, I think I can tell you exactly how to build a better newsletter — either as a standalone product or as part of a marketing campaign — by telling you why I set out not to build one.

Why Newsletters Are All the Rage

Yeah. Why now? Email marketing has been around for decades, and email marketing…