263 - Best of 2025! The Modern Newspaper: How to Build a 50,000-Person Local Audience in 6 Months with Jas Singh

0:00So if you're going to start a local newsletter, do not tell your advertisers that you're in the last six months, we now have a total audience of about 50 ,000 people here locally in Winnipeg. Five zero? Yeah, five zero. The math that I did is$7 a subscriber. Even if you're acquiring a subscriber for three,$4, you're still 2xing your money in a year. And then after that, it's just gravy on top. Okay, here's my question that's on everybody's mind. Is this a side hustle that you would recommend to other people?

0:33all right jazz welcome back to nickanomics you are you're my first returning guest yeah i mean i came about six months ago so i mean it's a full circle moment it's a circle of life i'm super excited so why don't you give the people a brief background what have you been doing the last six months previously i made a lot of content on twitter but then for the past six months i haven't posted much and decided to run away with this like local newsletter thing And in the last six months, we now have a total audience of about 50 ,000 people here locally in Winnipeg. Five zero? Yeah, five zero. So it's grown a good amount.

1:13But then, yeah, so 35 ,000 is about on Instagram. And then we have an email list of about almost 16 ,000 people now. Congratulations, man. Yeah, no, thank you. I mean, it's honestly like the community feedback's been great from the city as well. also. What made you decide to go into a local newsletter? Why not just do a traditional newsletter? Previously, a little background would be that I actually grew a Twitter account to about 35 ,000 followers in four months, but in the AI niche. So I did that last year. And from there, I had built like an AI newsletter and like sold it for a few thousand dollars.

1:49And then I had seen this guy, his name is Ryan Snell. I'm not sure if the viewers know, but he kind of like popularized the idea of local newsletters so I'd watched a bunch of his podcasts and dabbled with the idea for about a year now and I was like you know what like Winnipeg as a city is very much like it's a large population but it's not a tech savvy city by any means so I always saw like bigger cities like Toronto and Vancouver have these kind of places that you could go to for all the events that are happening in the city and that sort of thing but Winnipeg never had one so I was like you know what, we have a million people here.

2:26I think there's a great opportunity for me to kind of come in and own that space. Ryan grew his kind of newsletter to 20 ,000 in a 50 ,000 people city. And I was like, with my million people, I'm sure I can at least get to 100 ,000 people. Right. And so that's kind of where the journey started in April. And now here we are. Dude, well, I'll level set for some people. So newsletters have become more and more and more popular. But the reason that they're popular is because people who have an audience on, let's say, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, they are at the mercy of the algorithm. So if YouTube decides to change how they're recommending your videos, or if Twitter decides to change how they're recommending your content, or extrapolate that to any other platform, then all of a sudden, your reach is limited.

3:12You may have worked over years to acquire, like you said, 35 ,000 subscribers or followers on Twitter with the AI newsletter. But then all of a sudden overnight, if they change the algorithm, you don't have access to them, right? You may post something, but how do they see what's new? And so all that value that you've sort of accrued to yourself is gone. But with an email newsletter, because you have their emails, you can take them off platform and you own the relationship. You're not dependent on this middleman third party algorithm to dictate the relationship. You own the relationship with your customers.

3:43And what I've seen is they're kind of broadly two types of newsletters. There are local newsletters that you're talking about. And I had Ryan on my podcast. It was a freaking awesome conversation. So there's local newsletters. And then there's like general newsletters for a specific niche. But local newsletters are becoming more and more and more popular because people are looking for things to do in their local markets. So did I do a good job of like explaining the newsletter? Yeah, I mean, I would say I would it's kind of like the modern day, essentially newspaper, right? Like no one is wanting to pay for these newspaper.

4:18And it's very much like, you know, old jargon that they speak in a sense, like very much traditional English, whereas like local newsletters, you kind of want to position them as like a community led initiative almost, where the community is a part of your growth, you're, you're involving them in the decisions you're making and that sort of thing, where they feel like they're part of it as the newsletter is growing itself. So what is your newsletter about in Winnipeg? We kind of cover a pretty broad spectrum of things. So we cover everything that's away from crime and politics. So any community initiatives.

4:58Exactly. any any community initiatives any um news related to like let's say students and the city itself any development happening in the city businesses and then the kind of the biggest part of our newsletter is the event section where we cover like 30 to 50 different events and then like tickets to their like direct links to their tickets essentially dude that's really interesting see like you're very similar to ryan's newsletter so ryan has a newsletter in annapolis maryland 40 ,000 people, 20 ,000 subscribers. And you have a very similar sort of cadence. Do you do the weather like he does too?

5:35I don't do the weather. No, not as relevant here. It's either cold or freezing cold where you are, right? Exactly. It's kind of like the Arctic here. Okay. So what I want to do, I think your newsletter is awesome and you've gained 35 ,000 or 15, 16 ,000 subscribers in the last six months. My goal is for whoever's listening to walk away from this conversation, A, hyped, motivated to do it in their local market, and B, feel like they have the tools necessary to actually do it. So I want to go through and ask you a bunch of questions. Is that cool if we kind of just like go through the process? Yeah, for sure.

6:15Let's dive into it. Okay. So how did you pick your newsletter? In my mind, there's three kind of broad things you can pick to do a newsletter on. You can do it geographically. So whether you're in a big city or a small city, like New York City, okay, I'm going to cover the Bronx or I'm going to cover Hell's Kitchen. So you can do it geographically. You can do it by topic. Okay, we're a pizza review newsletter or we are a sports newsletter or some amalgamation of those things. Or you can do it by demographic. All right, we're a newsletter for millennial dads. We're a newsletter for senior your citizens.

6:50In my mind, those are the three kind of categories that you could pick from in order to niche down on one of these local newsletters. Is there anything I missed? No, I would say generally that definitely is the is like the three different paths that you can take. Now, there can be a combination of some like New York is too big. So you can say restaurants in New York, you can say events in New York. So you can definitely like combine some of these as well. It just depends on like, you don't want the audience to be too big in the sense that you don't know who you're able to target or not target.

7:24What is too big? I think that's the first question I'd want to ask is like, how do I define my parameters for the local newsletter? What's too big? I think for a local newsletter, anything over like 900k to a million would be a little too large because at that point events start to get way too broad, right? Like I'm covering something in the west end of the city and if it takes someone an hour and a half to get there most people are not going to go there so it's not as relevant to them might as well be a different state or county or province exactly now now here in winnipeg i know that generally anyone can go from one end of the city to the other 30 ish minutes so no matter which position i'm covering or what side of the city i'm covering it's kind of relevant to everybody so that's why it made sense for me to just cover all of Winnipeg and not like one particular side of it.

8:14All right. Now's the part of the show where I feel the most uncomfortable, but my therapist says I need to face my fears. So here we are. I've started a newsletter and I want you to subscribe. And what you're going to get every single week are the aggregated conversations from that week that I have on this podcast with an overview of what their business actually looks like. I'm also going to throw in a review of one or two businesses that are listed for sale. I'll give you my opinion on whether or not the EBITDA multiple is good, or there's customer concentration of those red flags or green flags.

8:38And then lastly, I'm going to give you one piece of actionable advice every single week on how to buy your first business. So click the link below, subscribe to my newsletter and let's get back into the show. Okay. So the upper bound is kind of 900 is a million, let's call it. But basically anytime you're getting to the crossing the threshold of people that, that identify as a different geography, like that's too big. So I'm from Southern California. I would say San Fernando Valley is different than the San Gabriel Valley. And if anyone who's listening is like, okay, I know what that is. Orange County is different than Santa Monica, right?

9:13Like if you like identify as being from a certain place, that's probably the first place. How did you land on being just kind of the geographic newsletter of like, okay, I'm going to do everything in Winnipeg. Why not pick one of those topics or demographics well because in winnipeg i would say winnipeg is not a tech savvy city at all so there's nothing like this in winnipeg at all right so rather than me covering one particular thing i was like i might as well target all of winnipeg and kind of be the first to have the first mover advantage as well and that would lead to the quickest growth as well because i would be able to target everybody here in winnipeg rather than like a set group of people all right so you found your market you found what you're doing how did you decide on frequency i started out actually as one time a week because it started for me started out as a side thing like i was doing a full nine to five essentially and i was like you know what i'm gonna start this as a side thing i don't want this to take too much effort started it once a week and then i just saw that there was too much information for me to cover in that one times a week newsletter were you writing the newsletter at that time and are you still writing it yeah yes to both so i was writing it back then i'm still currently writing it at the moment and then planning to soon hire someone for it are you daily at this point no we're at three times a week at the moment as well so now we know that three times a good three times a week is a good balance where we can cover all the news in winnipeg and the events without having to cut anything important out tell me why three times a week works?

10:44When you say like, it's enough balance to cover, like, what does that mean? Can you go a little deeper on that? Yeah, for sure. So in once a week, in once a week, there's too many events. So Beehive has, or any newsletter platform that you're using, has a limited amount of words and essentially space and newsletter can take, right? So it's like a word count almost when you're writing some sort of an essay or a story. And for me, I've noticed that's about 2000 words, including some images in the email. So in two other words, I have to cover everything that's happening in Winnipeg and still be short enough that someone doesn't get bored going through it.

11:21So it sounds like you had to kind of decide on the content first and that's now dictated your frequency. Exactly, exactly. So I dictated essentially what different things I want to target in the city and now that's dictated how many times I'm sending it out. Okay, so tell me what things are covered in your newsletter. When you say events, what does that mean? Like what events? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we cover, so we, in the beginning, I basically went and manually just pulled every single news website, city website, province website. And I was like, okay, before I write this newsletter, I want to go through all of these.

12:00So what it covers is city news, any city updates, any business news. So a new business is coming into town. Again, in the news aspect of things, anything that's away from politics and crime. Are these in sections? Are you like, I have a news section. I have a community section. I have an event section. I have a food section. Like they have sections? Yeah, exactly. So it's essentially, we have a news section. That's our top story. Underneath that top story is like our sponsored section. Underneath that sponsored section, we have like a specialty section. So for example, in Monday's newsletter, that's a restaurant of the week.

12:34in Wednesday's newsletter, that's charity of the week. Friday's edition, it's live music, right? So it's a specialty section underneath that. Then comes all the community news. So, hey, this business is opening up or the Winnipeg Jets or a hockey team won this game or lost this game, so on and so forth. And then underneath that, like at the very end is all the events. And that's actually very strategic because it forces anyone opening the email to have to scroll all the way down to get through all of our content to find the event dude and then the and then the events are even split up by like categories essentially all right so from the newsletter construction perspective you have the top story and then you have like a i don't know rotating section where one's the charity and one's the i can't remember all the other things then you have the community section and then you have the events exactly exactly yeah you've told me this before but how did you get the idea for this?

13:33Will you just tell me that really quickly? Yeah, I mean, I essentially saw Ryan go on a bunch of podcasts and I was like, okay, there's nothing like this here in Winnipeg. So let me just spin it up here. And I actually just went through all 20 of his podcasts and I was like, okay, I'm going to jot down all the notes, see what crosses over and then just do it here in Winnipeg. I freaking love that because it's free. It's out there. Cool. I'm going to go listen to every one of his interviews i'm going to put those pieces together and then i'm going to launch it because you saying the words i put the events at the end because those are the most sought after thing that's exactly what ryan said to me when i talked on my podcast he's like oh i put that at the end because that ensures that people will actually get to the end of the newsletter so yeah yeah that's a whole separate topic that i would love to talk about is just like the ability to act quickly because there's so much information available to you on the internet i'm curious about your content though so you're you're editing it like there's a lot of editorial discretion on what you're putting in and what you're not however you used to write an ai newsletter it would seem to me that you would come in here and be like cool i can systematize x y and z i'm gonna go and scrape all these websites it's gonna bring me the news stories this is how they'll pick it and it'll just auto generate why aren't you doing that because a big thing about a local newsletter is the fact that you're not talking like the news, right?

14:56So actually we do use AI. So I use ChatGPT to write a lot of the newsletter. It's just that when I'm reusing ChatGPT, again, because I come from a little bit of an AI background, I use specific prompts to at least make it seem like it's written by a local Winnipegger, right? So the way the English is written, it's a Canadian way rather than an American way. For example, another thing is I say specific things in the newsletter that only a Winnipegger would know or specific events, which is why the curation of the events is so, it has to be manual at the moment, simply because of the fact that there's specific events that ChatGPT won't even know about because it's specific to Winnipeg, right?

15:38It's not just the large events. We cover, for example, in our event section, it's like, I'll go to Facebook events and check every little event that's happening and then add that in my newsletter essentially. When you say you use chat GPT prompts, are you gathering information via AI or is that all manual? No, the gathering is manual, but it only takes me about 20 minutes because I have like a, let's say, bookmark list. How did you decide who you're going to go pull manual information from? Yeah, so I mean, over time, the links have honestly just grown. So we, you know, we check all the news sites, we check all the university websites.

16:16And over time, links have just added on top of each other. So in the beginning, we weren't covering certain events. And then people actually made us aware that, hey, this is happening. This is also happening. So over time, the links have just added. And anytime we find like a new website, we just added in that list. Okay. So if I was listening to this and I was going to go to a new city and start this, how would you go and replicate this in another city, knowing what you know now? Specifically the content, but like, I'm not talking about everything else, just the content piece. From the content standpoint, I would simply go to the news websites that are happening in the city because you're not competing with news channels.

16:53For example, our newsletter, we say as reported by CTV News, for example, right? Like we are not trying to take credit for things that we have not written. So I would go to all the news channels and news sites in the city. Then I would pull up the city website, the state website. Right. And then I would see like, hey, what's before I write the newsletter? Hey, what's the newest thing that's happened since the last time I wrote, essentially? Right. Or a day or two. What's what are the things that have happened? I generally try to collect about seven different stories, two for like our main header stories and then five for like the community section.

17:28OK. Yeah. And then from there, I would then go to the events and do the same thing. All right. So you laid out the sections. You laid out how you gather information. What do you use ChatGPT for? Yeah, so I use ChatGPT for not plagiarizing, essentially. Like, I don't want to, I don't want, because, well, I called out it for once. Like, it was a very similar thing that I had pulled from a news article, and I wasn't aware of it in the beginning. And then, as now time has gone, I have used ChatGPT to first write the article differently, essentially. So the article that, let's say, a news channel is writing is 1 ,500 words or something.

18:09I need to condense that down to 150 words because all the reader is getting is a snippet of what's happening in the, in the news. They're not getting the full article from us. If they want to. Are you then, are you linking to that article? Yeah, exactly. And then we link to the, either the full article or the city announcement or whatever the case may be. So you, in many ways, you're a news aggregator. Have you decided on that 150 words as like, oh, that's kind of just the best way to do it through trial and error. Or is that a thing? like is that that does that exist i think well coming back to like the original point of like the 2000 capacity of the whole email okay we know that we have to also write the event section and so on and so forth so i don't try to make the main news stories over 150 words and then the snippet so for example in the community section it's like small snippets of everything that's happening that's like 100 to 125 words okay yeah i love that my next question is how did you decide on beehive honestly i had used it for my ai newsletter and not not like shitting on any other like news news like platforms like convert yeah convert kit or hujabi yeah yeah like not not shitting on any of those ones but it's just that i've seen beehive execute at a very high level like they okay when you when you submit something to them they'll fix it really quickly any bugs or anything of that nature so whenever i've seen that happen i'm like okay this is the really the platform that i want to go with essentially they all have very similar um features it just comes down to your preference right like i know a lot of people that have started with convert kit and then switched later on it's just that you don't want to go through the hassle of switching afterwards okay now we're getting to the good stuff you ready yeah you grew this within six months to 15 16 16 ,000 subscribers.

19:59That's a lot. For those who don't know, Chris, my business partner, he launched a newsletter a year ago and he's grown 20 ,000 organic subscribers, but he's never paid a cent in advertising. How did you get to 16 ,000 in less than six months? Yeah. So I mean, honestly, paid ads. There's no other way around it. I think in the beginning, so something that we had done was we have a local subreddit here. So what I did was I just got the first 200 subs from the subreddit with like posting let's say events and that sort of thing to test like to test out the news that are in what the feedback is from the community let me double click on that so you went to reddit and you just said hey i have a newsletter for local events what do you guys think or how did you because reddit can be freaking ruthless when they think you're trying to sell something yeah how did you actually test it yeah so what we did was we just put the events list the same that we were going to put in our email newsletter we just put that same list on Reddit and at the end was like, hey, if you want this on a weekly basis, go subscribe here.

20:58That's it. Did you get that from Ryan or was that you? No, that was me. I don't know if Ryan did that. That's a really, really good strategy. All right. So you tested it. Obviously, it picked up some traction. And so you started going that way. What are the different acquisition channels that you could have? Yeah, I would say probably the four big ones you're going to find are referrals. Paid ads is the biggest one for sure. And then you have kind of like organic and then SEO is kind of the fourth one that we're unlocking right now. Okay. So let's talk about paid ads really quick. You're talking about Google, Facebook, Twitter, like, or where are you doing paid ads?

21:35Only Facebook. So we don't do anything else. We just do Facebook ads. And then there's two ways to run that. You can either do straight to your landing page, or you can just run a form in the Facebook ads, which is what we do at the moment. And then we use Zapier to automate it. What's the difference? The big difference is I think the platform credibility. You'll hear probably Alex Hermosi talk about this a little bit, but when you're using a form for Facebook ads, you're borrowing Facebook's credibility essentially. So the person can just put their email in there and then sign up to the email.

22:07Whereas when they're coming to your website, sometimes Facebook can also say like, hey, are you sure you want to go to this website? That's an extra step that the person has to go through. Yeah. Okay. So when you're on Facebook ads, you're targeting specific people and they can fill out the form natively on Facebook is what you're saying. Exactly. Exactly. And in terms of like the demographic and everything like that, I don't even worry about it. I just said it by the city. And then the only thing that really is going to make a difference for your Facebook ads in terms of cost for acquisition of a subscriber is going to be your creative.

22:40That's it. Okay. So tell me what was, what was your customer acquisition costs through paid ads. Yeah. So I mean, in the last six months, it's about been 82 cents Canadian dollars per subscription that we get. Yeah. What was it in the beginning? It was like 25 cents, 30 cents. And then over time now it's about a dollar 10 that we're getting it at right now. Why did it get more expensive? Well, it's just as more and more people that have already been interested in the beginning. You got the lower hanging fruit in the beginning and now it's harder and harder to convert people. Yeah. Which is why I would never actually I don't plan on selling the newsletter is because it's almost impossible for competitors to come in and compete because any new competition coming into the space has to get their initial subscribers at$1.20, right?

23:25Or$3 or something like that. So it makes it very hard for a new competitor to come in the city and do the same thing. What did you think it was going to be when you started? Did you think it was going to be 25 cents or were you like, all right, I'm budgeting for$2? Yeah, my idea was$2. I thought I would get each sub at about$2. And the goal when we had started in April was to grow to about 8 ,000 to 10 ,000 subs by the end of the year. What do these ads look like? Like you said the creative is important. Are you just being off the wall or is it like, check out my newsletter and just like very straightforward?

23:57Like what is it? Yeah, so I mean, I use, so I actually went through probably seven, eight different local newsletters that run ads in other parts of the country. And I just copied all of them and saw which ones worked the best. Oh my, that's genius. Yeah. So we did that. So you can do that just by going to like Facebook ads library and putting in specific companies and you can see their Facebook ads that they're running. Oh, so you, so you went around and you're like, okay, these are seven local newsletters around the country. I know the names. I'm going to go to Facebook's ad center, specifically look at their creative and then not mimic it, but take the best parts from it and make you, make your creative pop.

24:35Yeah. I mean, not even mimic it, copy and paste it. You know, like I didn't even I'm not even like there's nothing to hide here. You know, it's like it works. Why not just use it? And so we did that. And then over time, we have now figured out what works, what doesn't. And now we have our own creative that we've put out. Tell me about the subscribers that you acquire specifically through Facebook paid ads. Are they churning really quickly or like how long are they actually staying subscribed? What does that look like now? Yeah. So, I mean, honestly, we probably have had like we have an unsubscribe rate in the beginning.

25:07it was actually 0.5 % per email that we sent out. Now that number is down to like 0.02 or something like that. So geez, that's great. Yeah, it's been great. Like I would say the churn is now super low because we're really dialed in the content and we know what works, what doesn't work. Okay, so through paid acquisitions, you're looking at between$1 and$2. Right now you're$1.20. But you know in the beginning you were much lower tell me about the other acquisition channels that you mentioned i will leave seo last because i think that that's i think that just builds over time because you're producing content talk to me about the the other two yeah so i mean the second is referrals and referrals and organic content are probably pretty neck and neck referrals is just simply you know you they will refer two people to you using their unique url or whatever that they have in their email.

26:02And once they do that, automatically something will be sent to them like a restaurant guide or something. We have a restaurant guide that we have curated for when you refer two people to us. I know the more than Rue did, like you get a cup at 15 and all of that, but 90 % of people are simply only going to refer two people to you. So just focus on the first achievement or the goal that they're going to get. Oh, interesting. So when you said referral program, you weren't talking about like going and placing ads in other newsletters. You were talking about, hey, if you refer a friend to this, you get something.

26:36Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And then it's automated as well, actually. So I know some people do like stickers and stuff, but that gets hectic because you're actually now physically shipping out things. Yeah. For us, we've gone and just created like a notion guide that they get a link to and all people do it anyways. yeah it's like a traditional lead magnet yeah exactly did you advertise in anybody else's newsletters ever we have tried that it doesn't really work the best honestly yeah like i wouldn't say that you like we get like 50 subs or something like that from like a 10 000 people email list and i was like i'm never doing this again what about just organic what what were you doing for organic customer acquisition yes organic meaning like instagram videos facebook videos and that sense so we actually post every single day and we have been for the last six months and that's been the big unlock for us okay so you at the same time launched the socials yeah on instagram just instagram or anywhere else instagram and tiktok only like a month like actually two weeks ago instagram was a big focus because of the fact that that audience probably matters the most to anybody that you're advertising to why not youtube why not facebook well facebook on instagram you We do post on Facebook, but it's simply the toggle that you switch on.

27:57Like, hey, yeah, when I post to Instagram, just post to Facebook as well. That's about it. The reason for not YouTube is it's really hard to build a local community on YouTube. And for local things, Instagram and Facebook are probably your best fit. You should look at YouTube. There's this guy on YouTube. He's like Dallas Fort Worth real estate guy or something. I can't remember exactly what it is, but he has like 150 ,000 subs. And he probably makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just monetizing. off of YouTube. So I mean, Dallas is obviously a lot bigger than Winnipeg. I do think there is some opportunity there.

28:28How do you get people to convert from Instagram to the newsletter? Because if you've got 35 ,000 Instagram followers, but only 15 ,000 newsletter subs, obviously not everybody is passing over to the newsletter. So actually Instagram does this one specific thing for you when you're running ads. And this is something that we have personally noticed is when you have an established Instagram page, your ads will convert a lot better because there's like a trust trust factor that's already been built into it because of the fact that people can click over from your ad over to your instagram page for example and that builds a lot more credibility to you so here's a really dumb question you were doing facebook ads and obviously facebook owns instagram yeah were those ads cross posted or do you have to do specific ads for Instagram and specific ads for Facebook?