They Got Acquired - The newsletter playbook 📈

January 10, 2022
​Read on web​

What do you get when you combine two hot trends—crypto and newsletters—plus two serial entrepreneurs and a tried-and-true playbook?

The answer: An email list of 250,000 subscribers and a sale just 10 months after launch.

That’s the story of Milk Road, a crypto newsletter created by Shaan Puri and Ben Levy.

The pair launched the business in February 2022, and sold to Bitfo, a media company that operates several cryptocurrency websites, by the end of that year.

Why did Bitfo want to buy the brand just 10 months in?

✅ Content is both entertaining and informative

✅ Size of the email list = 250,000 subs

✅ Website does well in Google search

✅ Brand has a good reputation, which also helps search (1,300 people search monthly for "milk road," according to Ahreafs)

Our story explains how they grew the audience and how the deal happened 👇

​With 250,000 email subscribers, crypto newsletter Milk Road sells after just 10 months​

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Behind the business

Here's a little bit about what went into reporting our story on Milk Road:

Like some of you, I follow Shaan Puri on Twitter and occasionally listen to his podcast My First Million. And I'm familiar with the playbook he used to build Milk Road because I watched his podcast co-host Sam Parr lean into it as he grew business newsletter The Hustle.

Yet even with how much Shaan has shared publicly about the company, I knew we could offer something different: a full-picture recap of how he and his co-founder grew and sold the business.

Our reporter Lisa Rowan spent hours pouring through tweets and podcasts to pull out important details about the sale and bring them together within one story.

Shaan respectfully declined to comment, and we didn't hear back from Levy.

So we didn't get to interview them, which is always our preference. In journalism—we follow journalistic ethics at They Got Acquired, pulling from my own experience as a reporter—getting information directly from the source is always best.

But even when the seller can't talk or doesn't want to, we can often find other ways to gather data points and context about a sale. For this deal, because of how public Shaan's been about his business ventures, we had a lot around the internet to lean on, much of it coming directly from him.

If you want to go deeper into our sources, scroll to the bottom of the story and click the +Sources. There you can see which podcasts, blog posts and tweets we relied on. (Every story has this feature.)

See you next time,

Lexi Grant
Founder & CEO
​They Got Acquired​
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