How to Start A Clucksessful Newsletter Business with SubStack
Doomberg, the Green Chicken
Today there are more than 1 million paid subscriptions to publications on Substack. How do I start to build my own Newsletter Empire Business? Let’s follow success:
It starts with building a brand.
A unique name - Doomberg is Bloomberg with a twist, and occasional doom and gloom themes.
A professional logo - Green Chicken with wide-open eyes.
A slogan - “Chicken Little gets a Terminal.”
Chicken Little is a children’s Fairy Tail. An acorn fell on Chicken Little’s head. He thought the sky was falling.
The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer software system that enables professionals in the financial service sector to access Bloomberg Professional Services through which users can monitor and analyze real-time financial market data (to determine if the sky is actually falling). It is expensive.
Then the Product.
A newsletter about finance and the economy.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to Doomberg to feed your worst fears with the sweet nectars of penetrating logic and sharp visuals. Doomberg is especially useful on days when you are feeling confident about the future. Five minutes on Doomberg will set you straight.
What is Doomberg?
Doomberg is the anonymous publishing arm of a bespoke consulting firm providing advisory services to family offices and c-suite executives. Its principals apply their decades of experience across heavy industry, private equity, and finance to deliver innovative thinking and clarity to complex problems.
You had me at sweet nectars.
Unlike other financial newsletters (like Motley Fool, Seeking Alpha, Zacks, Ark Invest, and others), Doomberg does not give stock picks. They give you information as to why you may want to research a particular sector or company. They are experts in the energy sector.
Excellent writing. They are effective, clear communicators with a unique educational voice. And are social on Twitter.
They like to have fun. The punny article titles are great:
“No Planet for the Apes”,
“Magnesium, P.I.”,
“Have Fun Staying Cold”,
“An Urgent Call on Line 5”,
“Greenpeace is a Physics Denier”.
And there is usually a little Green Chicken logo embedded in their graphics. Fun!
The Doomberg newsletter is free right now and just started at the end of April 2021.
Q&A: Moving Forward: From the Chicken’s beak:
Q: How many newsletter subscribers, roughly, until you go with a paid option? I saw you were around 20K already in just 8 months! Congrats.
A: Going paid is the toughest decision for us. We are growing so fast (we grew 29% month-over-month again in December) that it seems like turning on the paywall now would be a mistake. Our original intent was to stay free until growth slowed, thereby letting the market define our total addressable market. It is more difficult to grow once you have the paywall up. At the moment, we have made no final decisions.
Q: Would you consider advertising as another revenue stream? More merch?
A: We have considered advertising as a secondary revenue stream, but it violates one of our core branding strategies, which is to delight content consumers who are willing to subscribe to us. By accepting advertisements instead of going with a subscription-only model, we would be pleasing the subset of our readers that would never subscribe at the expense of those who would happily do so. Our branding and demand creation strategies are focused on identifying and pleasing the latter category, so advertising is a non-starter. We have spent a lot of time studying who our ideal customer is, what they are looking to read, and how we can create value for them. Annoying them with advertisements is counterproductive.
Merchandise is not a revenue stream for us - it is a self-funded marketing strategy. We have priced our merchandise to be as accessible as possible (i.e., practically no margin) and have encouraged people to share pictures of our product on social media. It is just a fun way to get the green chicken into the zeitgeist.. We have no further plans to offer new merchandise - our core business is creating great content, not selling t-shirts.
Q: Are you going to break away from your current consulting and advisory business? What milestone are you looking at for that?
A: We intend for Doomberg to be the work of our lives and have already stopped accepting new clients in our advisory business to invest more of our time and energy in making Doomberg succeed. Doomberg is the authentic expression of our passion, and it would be an incredible gift to focus all our energy on it. We intend to do so. The key milestone is going paid.
So start with building a brand. Then find your unique writer’s voice. Craft sharp topical content, sprinkled with wit, and good graphics that inform and inspire. Grow an audience. Then turn on the revenue stream, and enjoy the “work of your life”!
Excellent current Interview:
Go Deeper into Marketing: https://pau1.substack.com/s/getting-deeper-into-marketing
Thank you Doomberg!
I’d like to take this time to wish everyone a healthy, and happy 2022.
As I aggregate and synthesize the articles, books, podcasts, interviews, and videos about a particular subject, I learn more than I knew before. You?
I’d love to hear your comments on any of my blogs and truly appreciate🙏 my subscribers.
You had me at Chicken Little. I love green chicks! I'm getting ready to launch a 2nd substack - you've given me pause to think about adding more feathery fun into my readers' lives! Thanks, Paul. (Although I also need to keep from going down the furry rabbit hole - SO easy for me to do!)