Three cheers for long Shortform posts! Totally fine to spell out a half-baked idea here, at whatever length.
Anyway, one of the first questions I always want to ask when I hear a business idea: What’s an example of this type of business succeeding?
Clearly, there are successful people writing newsletters on Substack. But did any of them:
a) Start with a fairly small audience, many/most of whom were already giving them money without expecting something in return?
b) Try to crowdsource content from many sources, instead of having a single author be the driving force/personality behind the newsletter?
There may be newsletters in this category, but I expect that they are quite rare.
Additionally, most EA orgs actively want their ideas to be free, because they want as many people as possible to hear them, and this is more valuable to them than whatever money they would get from a much smaller paid audience. For example, even if 80K could convert their 100,000+ newsletter subscribers into an audience of 10,000 people paying $5/month (no small task), I don’t know if they would want to, given how many fewer people would get job leads from them under that scenario.
As far as newsletters created by individual entrepreneurs, this is a reasonable business idea like many others. You can find lots of online guides to building an audience for your copywriting, coaches to help you get started, clubs where people share feedback on each other’s writing, and so on. But like most reasonable businesses, this one is fairly competitive and tough to succeed in (no such thing as a free lunch!). It will be a reasonable thing to do for a few EAs, maybe, but doesn’t stand out to me as more promising than other types of startups.
This doesn’t make it a bad idea—just one of many, many things that people should consider if they want to build a business.
With regards to EA orgs e.g. 80,000 hours. I wasn’t trying to suggest that EA orgs have their own paid newsletters. Rather, I was suggesting that a separate not-for-profit organisation could be set up specifically for creating paid newsletters (on any topic) while stating that said organisation is trying to raise money for effective charities. The organisation would be made of individuals and teams who each run different paid newsletters under one umbrella. (These potentially could be subsidiary companies; I haven’t really thought through all the business legal stuff).
Sorry, I should have been clearer on this.
The everything newsletter is a combination of newsletters which illustrates how an umbrella organisation with multiple newsletters could work.
With regards to finding examples, I haven’t deep dived into this, but I do know that Product Hunt (bought by AngelList) started out basically as an e-mail list with a) a small audience and b) crowdsourcing their content. Its now morphed into something a bit different than a paid newsletter. Though it does have its Founders Club offering which isn’t that different. (I think newsletters tie in very well with community platforms like those which can be built with tools like circle).
Building an audience does seem like it would be the big hurdle. But I think this would give the EA community an advantage in this arena. If the EA community knows that there is an organisation trying to raise money for effective charities, then they could direct people in their social media networks towards the newsletters. This should provide a big enough ‘snowball’ to start with. Presumably, the combined network of everyone in the EA community is fairly large (though I don’t have figures on this—there is probably a lot of EAs in the followings of EA members and obviously it would be non-EAs that would be the target audience).
Three cheers for long Shortform posts! Totally fine to spell out a half-baked idea here, at whatever length.
Anyway, one of the first questions I always want to ask when I hear a business idea: What’s an example of this type of business succeeding?
Clearly, there are successful people writing newsletters on Substack. But did any of them:
a) Start with a fairly small audience, many/most of whom were already giving them money without expecting something in return?
b) Try to crowdsource content from many sources, instead of having a single author be the driving force/personality behind the newsletter?
There may be newsletters in this category, but I expect that they are quite rare.
Additionally, most EA orgs actively want their ideas to be free, because they want as many people as possible to hear them, and this is more valuable to them than whatever money they would get from a much smaller paid audience. For example, even if 80K could convert their 100,000+ newsletter subscribers into an audience of 10,000 people paying $5/month (no small task), I don’t know if they would want to, given how many fewer people would get job leads from them under that scenario.
As far as newsletters created by individual entrepreneurs, this is a reasonable business idea like many others. You can find lots of online guides to building an audience for your copywriting, coaches to help you get started, clubs where people share feedback on each other’s writing, and so on. But like most reasonable businesses, this one is fairly competitive and tough to succeed in (no such thing as a free lunch!). It will be a reasonable thing to do for a few EAs, maybe, but doesn’t stand out to me as more promising than other types of startups.
This doesn’t make it a bad idea—just one of many, many things that people should consider if they want to build a business.
Thanks for the feedback Aaron!
With regards to EA orgs e.g. 80,000 hours. I wasn’t trying to suggest that EA orgs have their own paid newsletters. Rather, I was suggesting that a separate not-for-profit organisation could be set up specifically for creating paid newsletters (on any topic) while stating that said organisation is trying to raise money for effective charities. The organisation would be made of individuals and teams who each run different paid newsletters under one umbrella. (These potentially could be subsidiary companies; I haven’t really thought through all the business legal stuff).
Sorry, I should have been clearer on this.
The everything newsletter is a combination of newsletters which illustrates how an umbrella organisation with multiple newsletters could work.
With regards to finding examples, I haven’t deep dived into this, but I do know that Product Hunt (bought by AngelList) started out basically as an e-mail list with a) a small audience and b) crowdsourcing their content. Its now morphed into something a bit different than a paid newsletter. Though it does have its Founders Club offering which isn’t that different. (I think newsletters tie in very well with community platforms like those which can be built with tools like circle).
Building an audience does seem like it would be the big hurdle. But I think this would give the EA community an advantage in this arena. If the EA community knows that there is an organisation trying to raise money for effective charities, then they could direct people in their social media networks towards the newsletters. This should provide a big enough ‘snowball’ to start with. Presumably, the combined network of everyone in the EA community is fairly large (though I don’t have figures on this—there is probably a lot of EAs in the followings of EA members and obviously it would be non-EAs that would be the target audience).