Last year, I read a lot of biographies about media entrepreneurs. I knew nothing about the industry and wanted to understand it and the people in it better. All that reading totally changed my perspective. Media is an industry that I now have an appreciation for and wish I’d studied when I had my e-commerce company.

My research led me to a subset of the industry: email newsletters. As I dug into newsletters, I discovered newsletter entrepreneurs building massive businesses (tens of millions in annual revenue). A couple have sold in the last few years for ~$30 million and ~$75 million.

I’m interested in learning more about newsletters because I think they could be an effective way to market the software I’m building and to share what I’m learning from the biographies I read. I also want to meet the entrepreneurs in this space and see the industry behind the scenes. Last month, I learned about the Newsletter Marketing Summit and decided to attend as a way to check all these boxes.

The conference wrapped up today. It gave me exactly what I was looking for. I met some amazing newsletter entrepreneurs who shared the secret strategies that led to their success.

I’ll digest my notes and the presentations in the coming days, but here are a few initial takeaways:

• Advertising  – Generating revenue from advertising was emphasized. This makes sense given it’s media, but advertising revenue is new to me. I learned a ton. Side note: I heard several conversations about advertisers pulling back.
• Metrics – Lifetime customer value and customer acquisition cost were also discussed a lot.
• Early – This industry isn’t developed and structured. It had an upstart and wild west‑ish feel to it. It’s getting harder to build a newsletter business, but I get the feeling that it’s still early days.
• Newsletter mafias – A lot of the successful people in the space were early employees at a handful of companies, including The Hustle and Morning Brew.
• Scalability – You don’t need a huge team to have a sizable newsletter. One presenter is doing over $21 million in annual revenue and has only 21 employees. That’s $1 million in revenue per employee, which is amazing.

I saw some great, eye-opening presentations. I’m going to dive into reviewing them and likely will share insights from them later. I didn’t know what to expect from this conference, but it was a great event and I’m glad I attended.