Issue#37: Building $1K -$10K MRR Micro SaaS products around Newsletter Tools

Mar 24

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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

Newsletter space is growing exponentially. Let us see some of the profitable tools around the Newsletter ecosystem.

SwapStack: The Premier Newsletter Advertising Marketplace Connecting brands to newsletter audiences for relevant sponsorships.

SparkLoop: The referral tool for newsletter growth Thousands of smart newsletter creators use SparkLoop to get more, high-quality email subscribers on autopilot.

ViralLoops: Referral marketing made easy for everyone. A revolutionary template-based referral marketing solution for modern marketers and creators. (This product/revenue is not just for Newsletters. That’s for the entire referral suite)

NewsletterOS: Master the art of creating & running a newsletter Curate, write, grow and monetize your newsletter with this comprehensive system.

Paved: Email advertising & sponsored content, supercharged. Paved makes it easy to launch sponsored campaigns, manage publisher relationships, and seamlessly track results.

LetterDrop: Create a high-performing blog and newsletter. Earn via paid memberships or sponsorships. All features that you need to run a Newsletter.

Newsletter Crew: Whether you’re launching a newsletter for the first time or scaling to thousands of readers, Newsletter Crew is a community of expert newsletter writers. A paid community for Newsletter writers.

Newsletter Guide: A guide for taking your newsletters to the next level — growing the lists, making money, and more.

Newsletter Bootcamp: Newsletter Bootcamp is a seven-day email course and Ebook that will teach you everything you need to know to start and grow your newsletter.

Evergreen Newsletter: Evergreen Newsletter is a "done-for-you" service to help nurture that list & increase sales through smart, evergreen newsletters. (Not yet launched).

Hecto: Reach your target market, through trusted newsletters. Hecto is a platform to buy, sell and manage newsletter ads and sponsorships.

LetterLoop: Create group newsletters with friends and family Stay in touch, grow closer together, and discover things you never knew with the most important people in your life.

NewsletterSpy: Unlock a database with extensive data on 20,000+ Substack newsletters.

Track.So: Write, send and grow your newsletter, all from Notion From draft to publish, in your favorite app.

NotionMailer: Write newsletter in Notion Easily send emails written in Notion. Integrates with all popular tools.

LetterHead: Business tools for your newsletter. Most email tools are built for marketing, not for newsletters or communities. Letterhead's built for newsletters from the ground up.

LetterWell: Advertise in email newsletters Reach your audience by advertising in 400+ email newsletters.

Memberful: Easily integrate Memberful memberships with your favorite email marketing platform and gain control of both your content and audience. Creating a paid newsletter gets easier.

BoostReferral: Set up your referral program once, then sit back and relax as Boost Referral automatically turns your subscribers into your advocates. Incentivize your audience to refer friends to your newsletter with digital or physical rewards and giveaways.

MailPoet: The Best Email Plugin for WordPress. More than 300,000 websites are using MailPoet to keep in touch with their subscribers. MailPoet works seamlessly with your CMS so you can start sending emails.

TheNewsLetterPlugin: The most advanced newsletter plugin for WordPress to manage everything from user subscriptions to email automation, from follow-up notifications to list building.

ListMonk: Self-hosted newsletter & mailing list manager that can be installed and run by anyone for newsletters.

🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who surpassed $100K in Marketplace GMV in 6 months.

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🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $4M/year.

🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making an estimated revenue is $1M per year with advertizing and sponsorship relations.

🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who made $35K in revenue in one year with an info product around Newsletters.

🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which IndieHacker newsletter product is backed by Y-Combinator with funding.

🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which Newsletter community got sold and acquired for 6-figure.

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Negative Nancy says - ‘I don’t need tools for writing Newsletter. I can just write in my email client and send the email’

Me - Managing newsletters is not just about sending the newsletter. It's about managing lists, handling subscribers, and understanding the stats - like open rates, click-through rates, and many more. These newsletter tools will help with most of that.

Negative Nancy says - ‘If my content is good, I will automatically get new subscribers. I don’t need referral tools.’

Me - Have you ever heard of “Good products suffering from bad marketing”. The same is the case with ‘good content. Lack of proper marketing could kill your newsletter with no growth.

Deep-dive & Some niches

Let’s see some of the products that can be built in this ‘Newsletter space’. Note that we are only talking about ‘Newsletter tools’ but not about the ‘Newsletter content’ or general ‘Email Marketing tools’.

Newsletter Marketplace for Advertisers and Publishers: Newsletters make revenue in two ways usually. One way is through charging the subscribers. This is usually called Paid Newsletter. The other way to make revenue is to not charge the subscribers but to add sponsored content in the form of ads in the newsletter. There is a third way also to make money from newsletters via affiliate links. But for running a free newsletter, writers need to look for sponsors who can sponsor the content. Create a Micro Marketplace platform for this where publishers(newsletter writers) can add their newsletter with required stats like total subscribers, open rates, and click-through rates. Publishers (Newsletter writers) also should be able to mention the rates for these ads. Advertisers on the other hand should be able to pay for the slots via the platform. You can improve the whole flow by adding messaging options right inside the app without going through native emails, manually sending emails. If you further want to improve this and make it easy for advertisers, work with advertisers where you understand their monthly budget and automatically distribute/place ads in the various newsletter without advertisers going through the whole process. This process isn’t new. Google Ads exactly does that but for website and Youtube ads. Google just collected all the publisher’s info and lets advertisers put ads on multiple publisher websites. You can replicate the same where advertisers enter the budget per month/quarter with daily limits and you automate the ad placement in the newsletters and required follow-ups with publishers.
Newsletter Referral Tools: Referral traffic is usually considered high-quality traffic. The conversion rates are way too higher for referral traffic as usually it’s considered as a recommendation by friends. There are many tools for referral marketing for SaaS products where users can get an affiliate link and start using it to refer. But in the case of Newsletters, it’s not that easy as it depends on the ESPs (Email Service Providers). SparkLoop just entered into this space and made thousands of dollars in less than a year. Start building a Micro SaaS tool that writers can use as a referral marketing tool for newsletters. The tool should generate a unique link for each subscriber and add that field against the subscriber inside the ESP (Email Service Provider). When you send an email to your subscribers, the email should add the unique referral link at the bottom of the email or the designated plated. Most ESP provides options to add custom data to subscribers and use that inside the email content to make the content look personal/unique. The same concept has to be used to generate the unique links and add to the emails while sending emails to subscribers. This can be further extended by add the number of referrals (successful referrals) made by each subscriber dynamically.
Newsletters from Notion: If you haven’t heard of Notion, you must check it. Notion is considered one of the easiest and distraction-free tools for writing and managing content. Notion has been growing at an exponential rate with more users using it. Notion also recently released public API access to access the Notion docs programmatically. Create a Micro SaaS tool where writers can just write from the Notion document and publish it right from the Notion document. Alternatively, you can let writers just write the content in Notion doc and they can just input the Notion doc URL into the Micro SaaS tool that can generate the newsletter from Notion content. The tool should also provide options for handling subscribers, tag subscribers, send newsletters, etc.
Newsletter Referral Tool for Substack: Newsletter referral tool for other ESPs (Email Service Providers) is a lot different from Substack. This is because Substack doesn’t provide a lot of control/APIs for handling subscriber data or dynamically drafting email content. So, this makes it challenging to build Newsletter Referral Tool for Substack. There are a couple of ways to build this. Create a new Micro SaaS tool where writers can import the users by manually exporting the list (maybe every week) from Substack and uploading it into a new tool to generate the links for each subscriber. Once the new links are generated, subscribers should be sent emails about their unique links from the tool as you can’t do it with Substack. Subscribers would use this new tool to see their status and any goodies awarded for successful referrals. If you can hit this process with a little bit of automation, you can use NewsletterSpy that has a list of 20K Substack Newsletters (you can subscribe to the email and reply to the email to reach the writer)that you can offer this tool. At a 1% conversion, you will have at least 200 paying customers if executed well just from this list alone.
Tool to improve Newsletter ideation, track things & improve the process: Create a simple tool where Newsletter writers can track things and ideate on what to write with an actionable template. Don’t overcomplicate things. Start with a simple manageable dashboard where things related to Newsletters can be tracked. This can be done using something like an Excel Templates or a Notion Template. See NewsletterOS for inspiration that made $35K in sales with a Notion document for people writing Newsletters. Once you have enough users, you can double down on this by building a UI and adding more components like - a community for Newsletter writers, a marketplace for Newsletter publishers who look for sponsors, etc.
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