📬 1 year into starting a local newsletter

In partnership with

If you’re new here, we (used to) turn $1 into thousands building weird but simple side hustles. Now this is the story of building a local newsletter business

TLDR;

• Quit job in July 2025 to start a local niche newsletter (kidfriendlyseattle.com)

• Goal is to get to 28,000 subs in by July 2026 (currently at 6,000)

• Target $10k/mo (currently at $3,000)

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The Breakdown

• ~6,000 subscribers

• ~7,200 followers on Instagram

I’ve built the newsletter on Beehiiv (highly recommend if you want to do a newsletter)

I’m currently averaging ~$3,000 in revenue per month

• $1,000 of this is fully subscribed for 6 months. So if I don’t do anything (except write the newsletter) this is predictable recurring revenue

This is a huge shift from where I started when I just had one off contracts with events and companies. My network of local newsletters (love a good network) recommended only doing 3 to 6 month contracts with sponsors. It took about 3 months to get folks switched over but it couldn’t have been better timing.

My expenses are ~$600/mo (down from $1,000… mostly from meta ads)

• CPA $100

• Beehiiv $125

• Meta ads $300

• Other tools: Canva, Capcut, ManyChat, GSuite ~$50

p.s if you click on the beehiiv link you get a 30-day trial + 20% OFF for 3 months 🤯 

The summary

This is a solid side hustle right now, but still about 6 months away from becoming a full time gig. Other revenue streams I was working on from the last update:

• In person events, launched the first one Dad, Beers and Lego which ended up being a massive hit, asked to do something like this monthly

• Another newsletter? Launched Kid Friendly Eastside in March to try to double the subscribers and revenue potential.

• Punch card (launched 👉 check it out) this turned into something different than expected. Was hoping to sell a thousand of these but there wasn’t that demand. So I added the punch card in the final sign up flow to reduce CAC (customer acquisition cost) It’s reduced it by about 20% which isn’t bad!

• Paid event calendar I started working on this but am waffling about how I want it to work/how

• DNNR club. I may start testing out Parent Dinners if there’s demand from it. Expecting to see about $300-$600 per dinner in revenue

I read all of the replies, let me know your thoughts!

Stay tuned for more local newsletter side hustle updates

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋