How do I launch a niche newsletter with an industry influencer?

My favorite newsletter play right now: find a very niche but very lucrative industry, build the general newsletter for it, and partner with one of the biggest influencers in that space to do it.

Why partner instead of doing it yourself?

Because the content has to be good, and someone has to care enough to make it every week. I tested an insurance newsletter myself for about two weeks. The survey data was valuable, and it was too much work for me. My vision for it became who, not how. I don't want to write it. I want to find the person who already does.

What I bring is the part that's easy for me: setting up the newsletter platform and running Meta ads. I already own equity in two media brands this way. The back end took me two days to build, and the ads are ones I'm running anyway.

What does the deal look like?

"You email, you start a newsletter for that group, and then you go find the biggest influencer in the industry and tell [him], let's partner on this. I'm going to take 60%. You take 40%. And all I need you to do is give me ideas once a week for the newsletter and talk about it publicly with your buddies."

• Me: the back end, the setup and the ads.
• The creator or consultant: the ideas and content, and being the public face.

For an insurance creator or consultant, creating the content is worth it. The missing piece is always the same: the person who creates the content.

Which niche should it be?

Narrow. Broad newsletters just aren't working right now unless you're already big, because there are too many of them. If you try to sell to everyone, you're selling to no one.

My test: a normal person would find it completely uninteresting, and your target reader would say, oh, that's for me.

It also has to be a group with money. I've heard of a newsletter with about 1,000 subscribers making around a million dollars a year, for plastic surgeons. That's his reported result, not mine. Plastic surgeons have a lot of money to spend and need to be introduced to new ideas and products.

• Big vendor spend. You want owners who spend tens of thousands of dollars on vendors, not people hunting for $100 or $200 deals. That's why I don't think gym owners are a great niche. A newsletter every plumbing business owner reads is closer to what I mean.
• Small can be worth more. I looked at a newsletter for strength and conditioning professionals with about 5,300 subscribers and a 60% open rate. At the time I had about 15,000 on a local list, and anyone with sense would take that niche list over mine without hesitation. Local is cheap to acquire but not that valuable per reader.
• Bad incumbent media. Insurance media is horrendously bad and legacy. Morning Brew took the Wall Street Journal and made it entertaining and easy. You could do the same for insurance.

What kind of content works?

Short. Newsletters have gone from long and boring to Morning Brew and The Hustle, which are one or two paragraphs per story. Attention spans keep shrinking, so I have a vision of B2B niche meme newsletters: the news plus a meme, one sentence each. The hard part is you have to be funny. You can probably hire that out.

Will the content get easier?

Yes. A media company is a treadmill, but it's only going to get easier because AI will do more of the work. You can talk into a mic and run it through a custom GPT that writes the newsletter for you. I expect each VA to handle 10 newsletters instead of five. That's another reason to build the audience now.

For the case for an industry media brand in the first place, see should a B2B company build a niche media brand and how to choose a newsletter niche.