1/ Congratulations to @lennysan on launching a successful newsletter with 486 paying subs and $56k in ARR! That's awesome! Some thoughts: https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1265072097849602048

2/ Content is king. Lenny nails it when he says you have to love what you write about. You also have to ask "How is this valuable for my readers?" "How exactly am I helping them?". If you can help people make better decisions, that's valuable.

3/ The biggest challenge in building a paid newsletter is how to grow your subscriber base. For that, you need to find potential subs, nurture them with free content, and then convert them to paying subscribers by demonstrating true value.

4/ You can reach potential subscribers if you have a large following on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, and if you get help from others with large followings, as Lenny describes. But that can be hard work, and hard to grow.

5/ Newletter platforms therefore need to provide access to potential subscribers as well as a platform to host content and handle subscriber management.

6/ The top authors on @seekingalpha's Marketplace are making >$1M in ARR. Why is that working so well? Three reasons:

7/ First, the @seekingalpha Marketplace platform (for investment newsletters) handles all the logistics and billing. Second, it also provides access to an enormous audience of investors who are potential subscribers.

8/ It also transforms the economics of marketing. When authors write free posts to reach potential subscribers, they get paid for those posts.

9/ As a result, many newsletter authors in the @seekingalpha marketplace are going full time. They write free and paid posts every day, and hire teams to grow their businesses. They make money from paid subs and also payments for their free articles.

10/ The key point in a nutshell: To grow your newsletter business big time, you need access to potential subscribers, not just a platform that takes care of logistics. That's where the big value boost is.

Here's a link to the @seekingalpha Marketplace for those interested: https://seekingalpha.com/marketplace