Is it too late to start a local newsletter?

You think you're late, but you're early.

Why does it feel crowded?

Because of where you're looking. If you follow newsletter people online, you're hyper aware of a space that roughly 99% of people have never encountered. That number is my gut, not a study, but the point stands.

"Digital marketing, email, local newsletters, selling your own products are foreign ideas to 99 percent of people."

It felt the same with crypto and AI. People felt late and were early. The scarce thing isn't opportunity. It's curiosity. Most traditional operators aren't curious about new models like email and digital marketing, and that's the advantage.

Is local still less competitive than national?

By a lot. Breaking into a national niche like entrepreneurship, AI or tech is very hard. Local has way less competition, especially if you put real effort in. See local vs. national.

When is a town actually taken?

It can be. A specific town can have one entrenched competitor. Suburbs of big metros get crowded enough that businesses tell you four other newsletters pitched them recently. Check your market, not the internet:

• Who already publishes there, and do people actually read it?
• Are local businesses being pitched by several outlets?
• Is there a nearby city or county nobody covers well?

What matters more than timing?

Effort. The bottleneck is commitment, not crowding. I've interviewed five or six local media operators making six figures, some part time. Almost nobody is putting real effort into this, including me.

"If you're smart, run with it, go all in, put in true effort."

The downside is also gentler than most businesses. I built an AI startup before this. Everybody loved the idea and we couldn't get it over the finish line. With a local newsletter, failure can still mean an audience of 10,000 or 15,000 people paying attention to you. By late 2025 I'd done this 14 times. It works.

I stumbled into this myself. I'm not a journalist. I saw entrepreneurs doing it on Twitter and started one as a side hustle for my wife while I was running that AI startup.