286 - Best of 2025! The Cheat Code to Building a $400k Local Newsletter Empire with Ryan Sneddon

26:22Be like the front page of the newspaper, basically. It's a newspaper. And then there's an ad. Yeah, it's a newspaper. Then there's an ad, and then there's a section called the digest, which is like the miscellaneous stuff underneath that there's local business news like we got a new restaurant this restaurant's closing we got a new boutique or this one expanded or something like that then there's a featured instagram post that's just pretty makes people happy and the real kind of value is the next one is what's happening and that's what parties can i go to like what big fundraisers are fun what am i what can i bring my kids to this week what's going on this weekend all those sorts of things then below that there is a civil news section which is like what the city council is up to if we're changing laws or boring government stuff and then a little bit down further there's the weather i don't know why people like the weather in there especially since we have all these apps and they gotta know that this weather is getting put in at 6 p.m the night before and you're reading it at 6 a.m or maybe noon or whenever you're reading it it's not the most up-to-date forecast and you could literally just Google Annapolis weather and get something or get your favorite app out.

27:31But I asked people if we could get rid of it and they were like, no, don't get rid of it. So we've added a couple of things there that make it a little bit more useful, like wind speed. We're a big sailing boating town. So that's important. Water temperature is important in the summer or in the winter, kind of in the summer too. So you can wonder about jellyfish, but definitely in the winter, if your boat's still in the water or something like that. And then our most popular thing by far, by a mile is almost at the very bottom. It's right near my lowest tier of ads for a reason, because it's the most popular thing.

28:00I got to get people down there to the ads. It's the live music calendar. So it's got probably 80 % of the music that's happening in town. It's very comprehensive. It's broken out by day, by venue. You can see exactly who's playing, what time. Who aggregates all of this stuff for you? That's a lot of stuff in that newsletter. How are you systematizing it? So the live, anything that's like programmatic, like that live music calendar in the sports seasons for the college sports here that would be a programmatic thing all that is done completely 100 by an administrative assistant overseas works in the philippines she's amazing definitely more morphed into an operations assistant than an administrative assistant now and then she also compiles all of the other stories so we're checking a bunch of places people are sending us stuff she just puts it all in a pile and my editor used to be me.

28:55Now it's an actual different person. She looks at it every day and says, we're going to cover this, that, this, and nothing else. Okay, guys, we're going to get back to the show in just one second. But first, a message from a sponsor who is me. Oh, it's me because I'm doing the show for free. Listen, I want to give you a hundred dollars. All you have to do is this, go to Apple or Spotify, give me five stars, write a review, screenshot that review, send it to me nick at cofounders.com and you will be entered to win a hundred dollar amazon gift card every four episodes i'm going to choose a winner at random and i'm going to do this five times five hundred dollars for five stars i just made that up and it's what i'm calling it please go to apple or spotify leave a review screenshot it send it to me nick at cofounders.com and you'll be entered to win a hundred dollar amazon gift card all right let's get back to the show where does your editor get all the stories from people just send it in or you're on twitter all day or like what are you doing people send it in we're on twitter we're on instagram we're on facebook we're facebook groups we're looking at websites we're looking we're on press release lists you're outbound you're like being proactive yeah we're going to look for it we get a lot sent in now which is really helpful but we're going to look for a lot of it do you think this model is replicable in other cities and if you do what do those cities look like i absolutely think it's replicable i always say people are the same everywhere they want to know what they can do on the weekends.

30:18They want to know what restaurant they can try. If the new restaurant opened, they want to know if it's worth the money because not everybody has the flexibility like me. I get to go to these new restaurants or send someone to these new restaurants and it's a cost of our doing business. Our job is to tell people if they're good or not. A lot of times, sometimes the meals get comped anyway. Even if they don't, the meals are a write-off because it's just a cost of our doing business. It's not like a typical business meal where it's just the normal write-off. We're reviewing it for people. So it's actually a cost of doing business, but not everybody has the flexibility.

30:49Not everybody can go to the new restaurant and drop$400 on a meal because they got to try everything and take pictures because they got to tell 20 ,000 people about it in the morning. So the average person wants to know, is it worth me spending my money to go to this new restaurant? And so we do that for them. Yeah. Will it work in other cities? So absolutely. People always want to know stuff like that in any city. Media is just taking a hard hit, especially traditional media, print media, even cable media. Why do you think your business is able to stay viable when those are going out of style?

31:22Why haven't they adapted to becoming hyper-localized to stay profitable? Why are they continuing to shut down? Probably the short answer is because they're too big. This is done. I'm full-time, but I'm not even full-time anymore because I'm working on the toilets and I'm having fun and I'm going golfing and going boating sometimes. I'm working on other stuff. So I'm not even really full-time anymore, but I was the only full-time for a while. But then I have one full-time operations assistant and everybody else is part-time. They're contractors, they're freelancers. And I think we have these big media businesses that have to do a similar amount of content.

32:02They might have four full-time people and they're spending so much more money on it. And I think also just not everybody i think this is a plague in the journalism world they want to tell you what they want to tell you about i'm a journalist i know what you need to be reading about i am smarter than you this is important you need to pay attention and i think that's such a wrong way to look at it i think about it the other way what does our audience care about let's just give them more of that like i don't care if our audience cares about this is an example of something we actually do. And it's a lot of fun.

32:38It's not something I don't care about, but we review the crab cakes at all of our local seafood restaurants. And it's super fun. I love doing it. But at the end of the day, if I didn't like crab cakes, but we made a video reviewing the crab cakes and 25 ,000 people watched it in our town of 41 ,000 people, you better believe that I would keep reviewing crab cakes. And people just in this industry, I think they know better than you and they don't give their audiences exactly what they want. Maybe they're not paying attention to what they're clicking on. Maybe they're not paying attention to what they're reading.

33:11But I think it's also a combination of they're just too big and their costs are too high. They're just not thinking about it right. Traditional media has kind of leaned into editorializing things as opposed to just reporting on what is, what's going on and what people are interested in. Yeah, I think it's a lot of arrogance, to be completely honest. I don't think I know any better than anybody in this town what they should think about or what they should care about. I just pay attention to what they do care about and I give them content around that. I don't sometimes care about it, but I know that other people are.

33:46We wrote a story about sharks in the Chesapeake Bay. We're right on the Chesapeake Bay here. It's the biggest estuary in the country, maybe the world. It's a great body of water. We boat on it all the time and we do have some sharks in it and i don't care at sorry i dropped my cup i don't care at all what kind of sharks are in the bay because i never swim in it i don't it's dirty i'm not swimming in it i know that i'm not going to get hurt by a shark in there and i know that even if i do swim in it very low likelihood that a shark is going to attack me the only reason that i would care about what sharks are in there is just because i think it's cool and i would want to tell as a fun fact when I'm out on the boat, maybe.

34:27But I'm not going to read it. My editor, she wrote the story. She did all the research. Hundreds of people clicked on it. Thousands of people, actually, if you combine all the emails we promoted it in, that's great. But I don't care at all. I'm not going to read it. As an editor, as a publisher, there's so much this attitude that I know what's right. And you, the readers, need to listen to me because I'm smarter than you. And I'm doing all the research and I'm in the know. And it should actually be the other way of turn the year over around and listen to what they want and just give them that.

34:58Why are you losing readers? Because you're not giving them what they want. I've been fascinated by this space. I told you this on the pre-call, but I heard Andrew Wilkinson talk about this a few years ago. And I've seen just a lot more of these hyper-localized newsletters becoming popular. So your model just makes sense to me because people want to know locally what's going on. How do you scale this though? Like if you were to go and do another city, how are you thinking about growth? And you kind of talked about it earlier, but what's the plan over the next year or two, as you think about expansion?

35:37So when I started, it was, I'm going to do a, the number I've always picked, the magic number is I'm going to, I'm going to a hundred of these things are all around the country, all around the U S a hundred of these local newsletters. And when I first started, I thought that I would start and own them all. The problem with that is you're basically operating a hundred businesses at that point. And I don't know how many businesses you own, but I own two actually in the process of buying a third, but the third one's very small. And that is hard. I can't run a hundred businesses. There's no way. And it doesn't make any sense also to hire, like, I know that you're talking about Andrew Wilkinson.

36:18Andrew Wilkinson hires CEOs, sometimes hires CEOs to run multiple businesses. It doesn't make any sense to do that because they're all the same kind of business. And so the way that I think this works best is with a local operator and some guidance. And so that's what I'm doing now is finding people in cities that match this under 250, 300 ,000 person, but also like a cool city. People are excited to live there. There's lots happening. Hopefully the population's growing. It's a lot of investment maybe is a good sign. I'm trying to find some people in those cities who want to do this but don't really know exactly how to do it and either partner with them as an actual business partner or basically license everything I've learned to them and then get this thing operating and they can get to the point that it's taken me four years to get to in one year because they don't have to make any of the same mistakes again.

37:12Like they don't need to run out of money because they're running Facebook ads too fast. They don't need to run out of money because they have no idea how to do accounting. Like all those things, they don't need to run out of money because they don't know how to sell ads. Like all those things I can do just help them get to the point that I'm at faster. That's where I've leaned into now is the path forward to get this to scale. It's interesting because you kind of have three potential channels that you could grow into. One of them is you just own everything. But in order to do that, you've got to figure out what can I centralize that is independent of local needs, right?

37:55Like payroll, accounts payable, maybe the sports calendar, maybe that's something like that. But because it's hyperlocal, you need an editor who's local. So like the editing, you can't really centralize, right? Because you want somebody who's boots on the ground, understands that market. You absolutely cannot centralize that because that's part of the difference is I know what's going on in my town. And my editor now knows what's going on in town because she's grown up here. She knows the city. She lives here. She loves it here. You can't centralize that. And I am not arrogant enough to think that just because I did it here, I could do it again and be the editor in Frederick, Maryland, which is about an hour and a half away, or Cedar Park, Texas.

38:40I don't know anything about those communities. I've been to Frederick twice. I've never been to Cedar Park. I can't do it there. And so there are things you could centralize and there's things you can't. But there's also benefits. Like I didn't realize this when I first started, kind of figured it out by accident. when you do this and you attach your face to it. And I think you should attach your face to it because I always say this, people connect with people, not brands. So you put your face on this, you become the publisher, the editor, and people know you around town. There are some nice benefits to that.

39:13I get to go to pretty much any fundraiser in Annapolis that I want without paying for it. That's awesome. Sometimes I get invited to weddings because people are like, oh, I want to have you. You become a little bit of a rock star celebrity kind of thing. And that's fun if you like it. I used to be super extroverted, super public. And as I've actually experienced that a little bit, I've gone very private. But you still get to enjoy all the benefits of it. You just go and have service level conversations. And you don't often meet deep, deep connections of these things. But you still get to go and enjoy them and meet cool people.

39:48And maybe you make some of those cool connections. but I don't need that benefit in Cedar Park, Texas or Frederick Maryland. Like I said, those two examples I keep using, I don't need to be a rockstar there because they're never going to go there. I'm never going to live there, but somebody else can live there and they can get that benefit. I can get a little bit of financial benefit by helping them, but they can get most of it. And I feel like that's the real way to scale. I think it'd be really interesting. And you've probably thought about all this stuff, but if you found like a micro influencer in, in the markets that you've identified as potential markets for this, right.

40:25And it sounds like you kind of have a clear thesis of like, okay, these are the types of markets that I'd be interested in because maybe there's somebody there who's like Instagram famous in their town. Right. And that would be the person you would go after. Like, Hey, I'll partner with you on this. I'll do all the backend office work. I'll, you know, I'll handle all the operations and then I'll give you a rev share of everything locally, but I need you to curate, be the editor, et cetera, because like they're already tied into the community. It would just give you a leg up on not only getting users to come to the platform, but also having somebody who knows what those users are going to be interested or subscribers are going to be interested in.

41:04I don't know if you've thought about that. Maybe I'm like telling you something you already know. Yeah. That's like the unicorn. That's like, that's still, I call it the local operating partner. like that's still the same model right they just have their own followers to start with that's like the unicorn someone who knows the town and has an audience if i can find them that's amazing but i think in most cases it's just going to be the person that knows the town really well and maybe they don't have their own followers where are you getting these customers from how are you getting subscribers email subscribers you're talking about yeah about half of our list has come from Facebook ads.

41:40About 25 % has come from word of mouth, just people telling their friends or using our referral program. And about 20 % or 25 % comes from SEO content. Like I was talking about like best pizza places. But half of your list came from Facebook ads. Yeah. And I went all in on that. People are like, how do I grow this without Facebook ads? And I'm like, slowly. And that's fine. If you want to do that, that's totally fine. But at the end of the day, if you want to get this done fast, Facebook ads are the cheat code. How much did it cost you to get the 9 ,000 that you bought through Facebook ads? $21 ,000.

42:18Okay. Yeah. So it's over$2 per customer. Yeah. I mean, it's a little bit, but you can either do it in 10 years or you can do it in four years or even less. This is my favorite page in the media kit. It's the fastest growing publication in annapolis this y-axis or this x-axis goes out for 25 years and it goes the y-axis goes up to 20 000 subscribers and i actually made this a while ago back when we only had 15 000 and so there's other publications some of them that are even bigger but it's taken them 25 years to get where we are and i mean my line's almost vertical so that's the question none of these people spend any money on reader acquisition.

43:03So do you want to take 25 years or do you want to take one year? That's my question. And that's, I just love showing that to advertisers because they're like, how did you do that? I'm like, Facebook ads. It's very simple. I think it's crazy that you have almost half of your town on your newsletter. Yeah. That's Facebook ads. You're not going to get that kind of growth organically unless you go viral every week. Annapolis is a city that everybody, almost everybody in the country knows. Yeah, so it's a pretty unique city. It's bigger than it is. It's 41 ,000 people, but we've got the Naval Academy.

43:35We're the capital of Merondah. We're very close to DC, and we have a lot of money here. So it's definitely bigger than it is. Most people do know Annapolis. I'm actually not from Annapolis originally. I live here now, luckily, but I'm from about 45 minutes away, and I used to tell people, nobody's ever heard of my town. There's like 5 ,000 people in it. So I used to just tell people I was from Annapolis in college, and almost everybody was like, oh yeah, cool. I least I've heard of it. What's the profile of a town? Where would you go next to open a location? Let's say you weren't going the model where you're licensing it.

44:07Let's say you just wanted to go to open a location. How would you decide on a city to go to? If I was going to just do it 100 % me, no partnership, no licensing, anything like that, distance would be important because I would want to be able to be there a lot in the beginning. Because we have a Monday a weekly content meeting. And that has been absolutely incredible for the team. And I would want to be able to do that in person, not on zoom with whatever team I was doing. And also sales are always easier in person and also just more fun. Okay. So tell me what, like, what's the size you would look for?

44:42Anywhere from that 50 to 250 ,000 people. But if I was, I already have the two picked out, cause I used to think I was going to do it this way. I would start with Frederick, Maryland, which is about an hour and a half away. About 90 ,000 people, really cool town. It's in the mountains of Maryland. Not that we have very big mountains, but people love living there. They got a baseball team, minor league team. They got cool bed and breakfast. They got cool restaurants. People go there. They seek it out. It's a cool town. And then an easy other answer would be Charlottesville, Virginia, about two and a half, three hours away.

45:13You've definitely heard of Charlottesville probably. It's UVA. It's awesome. It's got a ton of great wineries. Dave Matthews winery is there. It's a destination. It's funny because you kind of want a destination, but you don't actually want any of the tourists to read your thing because they'll unsubscribe. You want a place that's really cool to live and cool to be, and destinations usually are, but you also don't want a super seasonal place. But then even if you do have a destination, you just want the residents to read. You don't care about the tourists. There are other people that are going to focus on that.

45:46There's a great town that I absolutely love, and I'm going to buy a house someday. about cashers north carolina you heard of that nope absolutely amazing town it's 95 degrees here in annapolis today july 9th it's probably 75 in cashers and they might even have a little rain to cool everything down it's amazing towns at like 3 500 feet elevation there's amazing golf hiking it's just it's beautiful it's where i want to spend most of my summers eventually and a lot of fall too because it's just fantastic what's too small for this yeah yeah because you're at 40 Anything under 40 ,000 would be really, really tough to make a full-time living.

46:21Interesting. You could definitely do it as a cool side hustle, but it would be very tough to make a full-time living. But you don't want to tell them, jumping back to like, you don't want to tell them like cashers because they've got 35 ,000 people or 3 ,500 people in the year-round population. And this summer, it goes up to like 40 ,000. Oh, my gosh. And you'd have all of those readers in the summer because you'd be curating all the cool events. But then you'd have nobody for the – like there's nothing happening in caches in the winter. There's no reason for them to read your newsletter. You'd have to go down to like maybe once a month of a newsletter, maybe two times a month.

46:57And you'd still be scraping for content like, hey, guys, like next season, this coffee shop is not going to open. It's going to be this one. But like you can only write about that so many times. So you want a destination, but you don't want the tourists and you don't want seasonal. So I live in Eagle, Idaho, and I've thought a lot about doing a newsletter here. I'm always looking around like I'll go to the city's website because I want to know about the new construction that's going on. Or there's lots of new restaurants or like whatever. And I have to like piece it together from Twitter or the city or Facebook or whatever it is.

47:32Eagle is the highest income city in the state. It has the highest. It's where a lot of the politicians, business owners, entrepreneurs, et cetera, live. But there's only like 35 ,000 people who live here. So it fails your 50 ,000 person test. However, the demographic to me feels like if I was ever going to do it in some place like Idaho, it might be a worthwhile demographic. What would I need to look for? yeah looking at eagle i'm just looking at proximity to boise on google maps and population and stuff it's really close you might be able to get away with it something like there based on your demographics like you just talked about you're probably a really cool place to live i'm looking at beautiful amazing pictures of this amazing landscape but then you also could fill in with some boise content like people who live in eagle are probably going out to hang out in Boise every once in a while.

48:25And so you could fill in with big Boise content. Like if a Michelin star chef is opening a restaurant in Boise, people in Eagle are going to care about that. If a building is getting, a new development is going up in Boise and it's going to change the skyline, people are going to care about that who live in Eagle. And so you could definitely get away with it from a suburb perspective like that. Could you get away with it if you decided to do weekly as opposed to daily? Yeah, definitely. I probably wouldn't do a daily in Eagle based on the population. And I would imagine that a lot of the news is going to be Boise news, but then you could also go a totally different way and you could add a little bit more state news into it.

49:08I don't cover anything that has anything to do with the laws that get made here in Annapolis were the state capital. So you could add that in and it's, it could be very much more of a bigger, a little bit of a bigger thing and a little tiny bit less local, especially given, you know, your number of people in Eagle 33 ,000 looks like it seems pretty affluent. That's great. And it looks like people probably like living there, but then you also have a big city around. You wouldn't do just Eagle. You'd probably want to do like, I live in the treasure Valley is what it's called, like sprawling suburbia, including Boise.

49:47Yeah, maybe something more like that. Okay. So Eagle's probably a little bit of an exception to my rule, but it would probably work just as well there. I could ask you questions for another hour, but we're bumping up against some time. So let me ask you the rapid fire questions to end. Is that cool? I love rapid fire questions. Okay. What do you love about this business? I love selling ads. I love getting businesses to give me$5 and then I give them$15 back. That's such a cool feeling. Some of these people, they come to us when they're brand new in town and we have built their business with them.

50:25And I've become friends with them. It must be pretty cool to be in the know as well. It is really cool. That's probably the second thing. People call me a man about town or you might say bon vivant. I love being at all the things. It's so fun to be included and to go and to see people and to know people. It is so much fun. Those are my favorite two things. What do you hate about it? I hate the daily grind. I hate right now, unless I talk like I talked about, I think I talked about with you. No, it was a different podcast I was doing earlier today. Actually, so we've done hundreds of these newsletters now.

51:01the first one that went out completely without my any attention for me was actually this week it was the july 4th newsletter on july 3rd we have another firework show and i i had a few drinks and i was hanging out and i didn't really i did i completely forgot that we were sending one the next day and then i hadn't actually looked at it yet but my editor wrote it completely and or you know the writers wrote it she added it completely and i saw it the next morning and i was like oops I totally forgot to look at that. So it took almost four years to get to a point of where I didn't actually see a newsletter before it went out.

51:37But for the most part, I do look at it every day. I used to write it every day and edit it. Then I used to just edit it. Now I just kind of look at it. But the daily grind is hard. And then a close second would be, and this is just my fault because I could set it up in a way that's better with auto pay and stuff. But the other thing is collecting ad money, looking at the accounts receivable, that$35 ,000 you talked about. that's already services that have been delivered. That's not contracted revenue. I've already completed everything that is required to earn that money, except for cashing the check.

52:09And I hate that part of it too. That kind of sucks. For you, let's say you have two hours in the day. You don't have any work responsibilities, no family responsibilities. You can do whatever you want. What are you obsessed with right now? What are you spending your time on? Depends on the weather. I might go boating. I might go golfing. I might spend time with my girlfriend. She's not working. She's an ER nurse. That's tough. I would probably be thinking about exactly how we structure the licensing deals because that's not done yet. I'd also be thinking about the toilet business because that's something I'm doing right now.

52:41It's the second business and I just love it. It doesn't feel like work anytime I have to work on that. Probably one of those things. Okay. And then last question. What advice would you give yourself five years ago? Before you started this entrepreneurial journey, what would you tell yourself? Two pieces of advice. The first one would be hire faster than you think. You're going to be uncomfortable with it and you're going to feel like they can't do as good a job as you, but you can't do a great job at everything. It took me a long time, way too long to learn that, but I still am very lucky that I've learned that at an early age.

53:13I'm only 27. So I feel like by the time I'm 40, I'll be really good at that. That's a huge advantage. And then the second one would be learn how to manage your cash flow faster so you don't run out of money ever because that is not fun. And then also I probably would caveat the hiring thing, which is don't ever just hire the first person that applies. I did that one time and I didn't actually, I just told somebody that I was hiring and then they said, oh, you should hire this person. And I just did. I didn't do any application process that cost me a lot of money. It wasn't the right person obviously.

53:47And that sent me back probably about six months financially. Oh my gosh. So that would be part of my advice for the hiring advice. So that's a little bit of a cheating answer because they gave you three. I love it. But that those would be my answers and it would save me a lot of heartache over the next five years. This has been an awesome conversation. I need to come visit Annapolis so I can experience what the VIP treatment is like. You got to do it in the summer too. It's really fun here in the summer. It's a little hot, but anytime before or through October, we'll have an absolute blast if you come visit.

54:20Okay. All right. Sounds like I got to come visit Boise too. You can stay at my house. If you come visit, come to ConvertKit. You can come stay at my house. Say what's up to Nathan Berry. Sounds great. Apparently you live in like the best suburb of Boise. So it's probably a great house. Yeah. Unless you followed the advice of buy the worst house in the best neighborhood. Maybe you did that. I can neither confirm nor deny. Is this off the record or on the record? I know you media people are always looking for gotcha questions. Where's the best place for people to find you? So probably just Twitter or X at life of underscore scoop.

54:51I only talk about local newsletters and toilets. And then if you want to go a little deeper on local newsletters, it's so funny is that you can't not laugh talking about toilets. You got to take yourself, you can't take yourself too seriously. But if you want to go a little deeper on local newsletters, I do write a newsletter about local newsletters that I don't update as often as I should. That's at lifeofscoop, no underscore dot beehive.com. Those are the two best places to find me. Those are, that's where I write about everything I'm doing. Okay, man. I can't wait to check in with you in a year and hear about your poop business.

55:21It's going to be great. All right, man. Have a good one. Thanks, Nick. All right. That's it. Another one for the books. I'm fired up. I don't know what else to say. I hope you found something valuable in that conversation. I hope you learned something. I hope there's something that you can apply to your business today, tomorrow, in the future that makes you money, makes you more successful, gives you more time with your kids. If there was something, I'd love to hear about it in the comments below. Give me some feedback. And if you like actionable advice and you want more of this, I write a weekly newsletter that gives insights, tips, and tricks into the world of entrepreneurship.

55:57Subscribe in my bio. And if I can help you in any way in your entrepreneurial journey, don't hesitate to reach out to me. Nick at cofounders.com. Sorry, Kelly, for more emails. And the last thing is remember, curiosity is a superpower and you can use it to your advantage. As my mom used to say, there's no such thing as a dumb question, only dumb people. We'll see you next time.