This has been flying around my dark socials the last couple of days. It's good:
"A few years ago, direct-to-consumer brands were everywhere. They all had a sleek aesthetic, a compelling brand story, and—more often than not—the same product sourced from the same supply chains. Their differentiation lay more in their customer acquisition strategies. The best DTC brands weren’t product companies; they were customer acquisition machines, built on arbitrage opportunities in Facebook and Instagram ads.
The newsletter economy is starting to look a lot like that.
At a newsletter conference recently, I noticed something: many of the most successful operators don’t think of themselves as publishers. They’re entrepreneurs first, content creators second. Their goal isn’t to build an editorial brand—it’s to master acquisition, churn prevention, and lifetime value. They take a unit economics approach to publishing that isn’t nearly as pronounced in institutional media.
And the risk, just like in DTC, is this model works until the arbitrage disappears. In DTC, ad costs skyrocketed, and many brands collapsed when they had to compete on product, not just marketing. In newsletters, AI-generated content and inbox algorithms could make traditional acquisition strategies obsolete. The playbook of buying cheap attention and then arbitrage with ads, front-end offers, courses and the like will grow harder."
Around this time of year, pre-Interesting, I regularly have conversations where people ask me about 'monetising' Interesting. Or some other stupid thing I've started.
And I resist. And the story I tell myself about resisting is normally around it's too much work, and it's not worth it and I already have a job. And that's all true.
But it's also this (above). It's that I know too much about what you actually have to do once you set off down that path. There's no logical end. If you want it to grow and make money you have to dedicate yourself to not doing the activity you actually wanted to do in the first place. You stop being someone putting on a conference and you become a growth-hacker. And growth hacking stops working once all the growth has been hacked.
Or something.
Anyway.
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