Project Hail Mary is an awe-inspiring masterpiece. I'm not an astronaut. Critics are in agreement. It's utterly spellbinding. So, I met an alien. Mesmerizing and profoundly moving. No, I never. Thumbs up, baby. Project Hail Mary. Amaze, amaze, amaze! In cinemas now. What if I told you you could turn this blank Google Doc into millions of dollars? Well, that's what thousands of people are doing right now on the internet, but nobody's talking about it. So, I found someone who would. Alex Garcia, a kid from Austin, Texas, who makes $800,000 a year writing five different email newsletters. He invited me into his house and broke down everything, including a step-by-step blueprint anyone can use to build a six-figure newsletter from scratch. If you have those four things, you have just about everything you need to run a successful newsletter. We also broke down how to find the right niche, how to get advertisers to pay you thousands of dollars, and the fastest way to get your first 10,000 subscribers. And from that timeframe, I went from 2,000 subs to like 8,000 or 9,000 subs. I think you could build a nine-figure company with new players. What's up, man? Welcome to Texas! Thank you. Good to see you. Yeah. Welcome in. Thank you. Hi, Alex. You have got one of the coolest jobs on the internet. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do? Lucky enough that I get to, honestly, research a bunch of dope content about, you know, a bunch of marketing campaigns and get to write newsletters about it. So we have marketing examine, which is the biggest one. We have content examine, social examine, landing page examine, and now DTC examine. All in all, it's like 150, 160,000 total subscribers. Driving right now, roughly in the range of like 65k to 70k, I'm not the revenue all from ad sponsors. And then on the other end is like the products that I'm telling you I'm testing right now. It's going to be spun into a product that's bringing in 15 to 20k. But my whole life, my whole career revolves around content. How did you come up with the idea to build newsletters? I was a huge fan of the hustle and I saw that they actually had a job opening. So I applied for it because I knew I wanted to be in that space. I wanted to understand how to grow a newsletter, how to scale immediate company. And so I applied for a position at the hustle and I got in. And when I got to the hustle, I gave myself one year, two months probably before I left, I really started going, you could say like hard on Twitter, like making that my primary channel of distribution and started building up the newsletter, kind of tweaking, messing with different ideas of what the content is, what the content isn't. Once I kind of got that, then the idea was, okay, I love HBR. I love Harvard Business Review. How do I take that idea and that concept and bring it to marketing and then scale that into marketing and examining? Let's talk about the opportunity of newsletters. Some people might see a newsletter and think, oh, that's a small business. What are the numbers here in terms of what you can really build with the newsletter? To me, it's how creative you want to get with it. Morning Brew expanded into 15, 20 different publications and sold for a part of the company for 75 million cash. They're now doing over 100 million in revenue. The hustle I was even there and I don't know the final number, but I'm guessing in the range of 20 to 30 million off of one newsletter and a paid product. I think you could build a nine figure company with newsletters, especially in the B2B space. The part that nobody talks about with newsletters is top of funnel for anything else you want to build. If you want to launch an agency, it is top of funnel for your agency. If it works in congruency with your newsletter. The potential is endless. There's so many different things you can write about. Yeah. On the topic of starting a newsletter, how did you go about finding your niche and what would you recommend others to look for? What topic to write about? I think there's two ways to skin the cat there. The first one I think about is if you want to write about something that you love, that's one way to find the niche. What on your downtime, find yourself reading and wanting to do research about or already writing about. I think the second is if you are more money driven, you just want to start a business and sell it. What is the topic that's exploding right now? What is the thing that people are talking about right now that you can start a business in? For me, it was what did I love reading about? What did I love talking about? What did I love researching about? Those three things and it all came down to marketing and content and building things. That's how I found what I wanted to write about. Hey, real quick. That business you want to start? Let me show you that you can make your first dollar online 10 times faster by using case studies. Imagine you could read the exact steps to how someone built a million dollar business and the mistakes they made so that you can avoid them when you launch. Well, at Starter Story, we have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can do this all backed by real data. For example, Luke joined Starter Story in Dove into our case study about a newsletter that makes $25 million a year. Just one month later, he launched his own newsletter and did $5,800 in revenue in 30 days. It's simple. He studied what works, implemented it, and avoided the mistakes of people that were just a few steps ahead of him. If you're serious about building a business, head to StarterStory.com slash Alex. It's only $1 for seven days and I'll leave a link in the top of the description. Much love. Hope you guys enjoy the rest of the video. Peace. Let's talk about how you get your first few subscribers. How do you get your first 100 or 1,000 subscribers on a newsletter? Yeah, so this is something I learned from Noah Kagan and it's this idea of like hand-to-hand combat. When you're trying to get your first 100 subscribers, your first 1,000 subscribers, you do things that aren't, you can't really scale. And so you're reaching out to people, telling them that you have a newsletter, right? You're DMing people on LinkedIn, you're DMing people on Twitter, Instagram. You're getting friends to push it. You're doing little giveaways. Like you're finding the small things that adds 10 subscribers, 15 subscribers, right? Second thing I would do is what we call it, it's like buffet marketing. The idea of like you walk in a golden corral and you see all this food, you're like, man, I got 20 bucks and I got all this food right now. I'm about to get all these plates and I'm going to try all this shit. And then what I like, I'm going to go back for. And then it's like, what has the potential to 10X? Finding those things that have the 10X potential and then honing in on like the one or two things that always are driving growth. If I was trying to start from scratch again, I would start first with hand-to-hand combat, then buffet marketing, then I would optimize, scale and continue refining it. Yeah. This hand-to-hand combat, what specifically does that look like? That's going on your Facebook page, right? You have 500 to 800 friends on Facebook that you've never go on there. That would actually click a link and subscribe something and support you, right? For me, you know, one of the things that I did at the beginning was I wrote 50 marketing threads over 50 days. So every day I was publishing the marketing content, specifically a Twitter thread. And from that timeframe, I went from, it was like 500 followers on Twitter to 40,000. In between that, I grew my newsletter from, I think it was like 2,000 subs to like 8,000 or 9,000 subs. All right, let's talk about how to find good content to write about and content that will keep people subscribed and coming back for more. One way you can do it is you can use a tool where you can put in a certain topic and it will give you the most shared articles on the internet about a certain topic. Twitter Advanced Search is another great way if you could understand how to use the filters and use Advanced Search just to find like hidden gems that nobody talks about, right? Like you could put different keywords in Twitter and find like, in my case, like that marketing campaigns known as ever covered. Let's talk about monetizing newsletter. How do newsletters make money and how are your newsletters making money right now? The simplest way to monetize a newsletter is via sponsorships. That is going out and finding somebody that wants to get in front of your audience. You've built distribution, you've created trust with your audience. People want a piece of that. So think of your newsletter as Facebook ads, as Instagram ads, as TikTok ads, where you have the reach, you have the potential for return on ad spend. So now how do I get people to want to pay money to get in front of that group? The other way is a paid newsletter. I don't know if you're familiar with Lenny's newsletter. That is another great way of monetizing your newsletter, where he has the free newsletter that works as top of funnel for his paid newsletter that he charges, I think like $8.99 or like $10.99 for. Or it's more exclusive content. Me specifically right now, we're monetizing in two ways. The first way is through sponsorships. The second way is through services, which is the testing grounds for a product that we're going to be launching in Q3. What tools do you use to run a newsletter business? All right, so there's four primary tools that I use and like this is the core of the company. It's Zapier, it is Notion, it is Slack, and it is an ESP. If you have those four things, you have just about everything you need to run a successful newsletter. You have Zapier, which connects everything. You have Notion, which controls everything. You have Slack to communicate with everyone, and you have your ESP, which sends the emails out to everybody. So you have five newsletters. Do you write all the content yourself? So I hired writers now for marketing and exam and there's a writer for each niche. Tell you kind of a tip for finding a good writer. Search a very niche topic on Google and then go into like pages two, three, four, like just deep into the archive of Google. Read some of these people's content. That is such a place to find great writers. It is a difficult thing to find good writers, but if you find a good writer, do everything you can to keep them and retain them. How have you grown your newsletter? First one is content marketing. And it has been using my Twitter to really grow the newsletter and being able to find like what are the growth pieces of content? What are the pieces of content that the algorithm favors and will push? And then the last year and a half that has been Twitter threads of being able to use Twitter threads and segue people to the newsletter. The second one has been paid acquisition. So that's running Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, Reddit, like all, you know, testing all the different acquisition channels. I'll try all sorts of different CTAs on my Twitter threads. Whatever works there is then the basis for a lot of things I'll do on pace. And then the third is this is newer. It's a lot of platforms like Sparkloop, a lot of platforms like Beehive are now in ConvertKit. They gave you a scalable way of having cross promotions. So where you can set a budget of $10,000 a month and then piggybacking off somebody else's content. Yeah. Or somebody else's newsletter and growth. So those have been the three main acquisition channels. We talked about the growth side of how you find readers. How do you find advertisers who will pay you money to sponsor your newsletters? There's two ways you want to develop. How can you get people to want to sponsor you that are readers? And then the other way is outbound. The way I want to do it with inbound traffic or with inbound sponsors is having the newsletter and having a very easy way for people that want to sponsor the newsletter to be able to sponsor the newsletter. The second way is the outbound process. All the newsletters in your niche that already have advertisers and find those advertisers and reach out to those advertisers, right? Like these are already people spending money on newsletters primarily comes down to cold emailing. So your newsletter has 10,000 subscribers. How much could you sell an ad shop for? If you have 10,000 subs, you could sell anything for over $1,000. And people will pay for it. So get in front of 10,000 people that is your direct audience. I mean, I'd pay $1,000 for that. All right, you're a world-class marketer. You run a business about marketing. What's your advice on how to become a better marketer? One you want to find somebody that is where you want to go and you want to learn from them. The second thing is build things. Like tinker, build actual products, launch things, try to figure out how you can get your product to $1,000 or drive $1,000 in sales or whatever. The third thing is you have to be not so data driven and like intuition driven. And I know you're super into fitness. Tell me about your daily routine and what you do outside of marketing exam. There's three things that I basically do. I work. I work out and I hang with my fianceing dogs. Like that is my routine. And so right now that I'm, you know, I am trading for what's called Austin Fit Fest in August 19th. So we're about 12 weeks out. I'm up by six, by six 30. I'm training either in the garage at the collective or at another gym over here called Los Campiones. But as soon as I finish that session, that's usually around eight or eight 30 shower and the next four hours, five hours is deep work or just work in the office. Then I'm hitting my second training session, usually around 2pm. I'll do more work again in the office. And then I hit my third session. And then at night, if I'm not hanging out with Vanessa, I'm back in my little office. Like I told you, I'm trying to create that, that vibe of like nighttime creativity and just being in the office. But I mean, that's essentially my routine. Our final question that we ask all entrepreneurs, if you could go back to when you were just starting your business or just starting getting into marketing and sit on Alex's shoulder, what would you tell him? I would build more things. And I would test more things and just try to continuously build little things that I could ship and I could learn what's good. What's not what do people like. And then I would take very intentional jobs that are stepping stones to where I want to be. What I would advise is be very intentional in the things that you give your time and energy to because they're going to, those are going to be the things that then propel you to where you want to be. So yeah, that's what I would tell somebody. Thank you, Alex. Awesome dude. I appreciate you having me. It's been amazing. So if you have any other advice, please give me a call. I'll give you all this advice and you'll build a multimillion dollar newsletter business.
