How Much Revenue & Income Can I Make Publishing My Own Investing Newsletter Services? Where Do Paying Subscribers Come From?
- This is page 2 of a 4-part article. If you landed here first, you might want to start on page one.
Serious financial publishers (FinPubs)- those not doing it as a hobby or side gig- will grow active subscriber bases ranging from at least a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of customers. The below table demonstrates FinPub business revenue at 3 quantities of subscribers- small, medium and large- paying various levels of average Annual Revenue-Per-Subscriber (ARPS). NOTE: All numbers shown are realistic numbers achieved by existing FinPubs... which means you can accomplish any of these too if you assemble a quality FinPub business and grow it in well-proven ways.
| NEWSLETTER BUSINESS REVENUE | |||||
| SUBSCRIBER QUANTITY | $150 ARPS |
$250 ARPS |
$350 ARPS |
$450 ARPS |
$550 ARPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2,500 | $375K | $625K | $875K | $1.1M | $1.3M |
| 25K | $3.7M | $6.2M | $8.7M | $11.2M | $13.7M |
| 250K | $37.5M | $62.5M | $87.5M | $112.5M | $137.5M |
We've highlighted one example in green to illustrate some points: grow your base to 25K subscribers with ARPS at approx. $350/yr and you'll have...
A simple, all-digital business you can run yourself that generates over $8.7 MILLION annually.
Can this kind of business actually have 2.5K-250K or more subscribers paying $350/yr ARPS? Certainly! Many industry players ALREADY have such FinPub businesses. If you would like to see hard proof of that, ask us to show you.
And note: the best of them have ARPS HIGHER than $350/yr. More ARPS makes a big difference. Look again at the revenue example of 25K subscribers at $350/yr. Slide to the right and look at that same 25K subscriber base paying $450/yr and $550/yr. For relatively small amounts of additional revenue ($100-$200 spread over annual subscriptions is only asking customers for about 28-55 cents-per-day), the cumulative lift in total revenue is substantial: about $2.5 million MORE annually for each $100 increase in ARPS. BI principals are very good at helping FinPubs improve ARPS. We shrewdly plan the very best way to maximize your own ARPS right from the start.
ESTIMATING FINPUB REVENUE POTENTIAL
Some FinPubs aim for subscriber volume plays- the more subscribers, the better- growing into many hundreds of thousands. Others want to maximize ARPS from smaller bases. The smart ones leverage our expertise to help them strike an IDEAL balance: many paying subscribers at an optimized ARPS.
With starters of $350 from 25,000 subscribers, this interactive calculator initially projects $8.75 MILLION...
Punch in a variety of numbers to forecast your own possibilities. For example, if you have something(s) to get only about $50 more out of each subscriber- $400 instead of $350- what would that do to your revenue potential? Or if we help you DOUBLE subscriber quantity, how does that affect the projection? How about a bit more of BOTH? How about a LOT more? There's PLENTY of upside potential for increases to both metrics.
Extra conservative? Cut subscriber quantity down to a much smaller number like 12K, 10K or only 7K. You have to get very conservative to drive recurring revenue down under 7 figures and extremely conservative to get below 6 figures.
SIMPLE STEPS TO $500K, $1M, $4M, $8M, $16M/yr AND MORE
Suppose you want to set your (startup) revenue target at only $500K/yr. If you assume your ARPS at- say- $350: $500K/$350 = 1,429 (subscribers): your new business would need only 1,429 subscribers to generate $500K each year.
Once you achieve some initial subscriber target, you naturally raise both (subscriber count and ARPS). For your next tier, maybe target 1,500 additional subscribers and a modestly-improved ARPS
at $400/yr. 1,429 + 1,500 = 2,929 subscribers times $400 = over $1.1M in recurring revenue.
Why stop there? You can scale up your base this (step-by-step) way towards tens of thousands of subscribers. When you achieve 10K subscribers: 10K times $400 = $4M/yr. If we've grown your ARPS to $500 by then, those same subscribers will give you an extra million dollars each year.
$4M-$5M/yr evolves into $8M-$10M/yr with 20K subscribers... then $16M-$20M/yr at 30K subscribers. And so on.
Consistently improving those 2 simple metrics grows this kind of business. 10K, 20K and 30K are all readily-achievable subscriber counts in this space. Many FinPubs have grown into those numbers exactly as described... scaling from as little as ZERO subscribers. You can do it too! We can help you.
- Financial publishing is a business that scales up very easily. Your average unit cost of production tends to be highest with one subscriber and then falls with every additional subscriber. Thus, delivering an investor newsletter to 250K subscribers does NOT cost you 100 times more than delivering the same to 2.5K subscribers. Quite the contrary: once a FinPub product- like a newsletter- is created, the relative cost to deliver to many subscribers can be near negligible. The point is that 2.5K vs. 25K vs. 250K is nearly irrelevant from a unit cost of production perspective... especially when most FinPub products are digital & fulfilled by electronic means: no printing, postage, warehousing, distribution middlemen, etc.
- Your production time commitment doesn't ramp up with subscriber volume either. For example, if you are publishing a newsletter for ONE subscriber and BI helps you grow your subscriber base to 250K, it won't take 250,000 times longer for you to create that same newsletter. Your product creation task remains mostly the same. It's the revenue & profit that spikes with subscriber volume growth... NOT the workload.
- Some prospective new FinPub owners see numbers like these and assume lots of infrastructure to support them. They imagine big staffs, office space requirements and so on. But again, this business involves DIGITAL product production & fulfillment that can be managed by as little as ONE (yourself). There are plenty of one-person FinPub businesses making hundreds of thousands to millions in annual revenue. They create & fulfill their own product(s) while delegating or outsourcing functions like marketing, sales & service to talent like us. In short: you can build that big office & team if you want OR you can keep your costs very lean so that more of that revenue flows right into your own pocket as profit. We can help you.
- New entrants often think of their revenue potentials in terms of what they want to charge in only transaction #1. But established publishers focus considerable effort on upselling & cross-selling with an additional product(s). Transaction #2 tends to be much more lucrative than transaction #1 and it's smarter to think about that NEXT sale(s) rather than fixating on the first one. While you might look at $150 to $350 per year (columns 2-4 above) as initial revenue targets for your startup, the more profitable FinPubs average $550+ per subscriber (column 6). Once you're established, you'll likely follow that well-proven lead towards growing your own ARPS metric. It is THE most proven path to building great wealth in this space.
Because of these and many other niceties, FinPub margin tends to be FAT... which means a big slice of that annual revenue is actually profit... about 50% in a well-refined FinPub business. So any income target can easily project the number of subscribers you need by doubling that income number to identify a target revenue and then dividing that revenue by an expected ARPS amount.
Of course not! All information shared in these pages is typical of well-established FinPub businesses, averages and best practices. There are many atypical FinPub businesses too: entrepreneurs of all-digital businesses can pretty much choose their target margin. That's a perk of being king of your own castle.
For example, some FinPub startups want every possible nickel of profit as income for themselves ASAP. So they don't spend ANYTHING on typical FinPub-type expenses, particularly marketing and operations. Often these are do-everything-myself FinPubs with no staff or outsourced help. With a pure focus on maximizing shortest-term profit, they can pocket up above 90% of every dollar they make.
Other startups covet rapid growth. They may reinvest up to 100% of sales and engage experts to help them do it all right. This is applying well-proven accelerants to sprint to much greater numbers. They intend to get theirs later... a nice, ongoing slice of a much BIGGER, recurring top line.
Which is better? That's up to you. Generally, the former are going to face a slow growth proposition, mostly because they are removing money that could be used for advertising & promotion. Those wanting much greater than industry-norm margin can easily get it this way... but at the cost of slow growth. However, new entrepreneurs may need at least some revenue from their startup sooner than later. And that's OK. People start businesses with an expectation of making money for themselves ASAP.
A good analogy is to compare a startup business to a newborn baby. Both need tangible investments to nurture them in their infancy. If their needs are constrained, they are less likely to develop at the desired pace. Perhaps the biggest goal of a parent to either is to grow their "baby" into something that can fully stand on its own two feet. Obviously, starving a baby is NOT the way to do that. Investments help the newborn get its own legs under it, evolving from barely crawling... to walking... to running. Little-to-no such investments may still lead to a comparable outcome... but over a much longer timeframe.
If one has very long-term patience, maybe grabbing every nickel from the start works for them? Else, regularly investing in your business is key to faster growth into something substantial. Even FinPubs established several decades ago re-invest about 50% of revenue to keep fueling growth. You do NOT have to do that too... but now you know why THEY do it.
ANOTHER COMMON SCENARIO
Some DIY startups slam together a website and product and get some relatively easy, early sales from family & friends. Through that lens, it can logically SEEM like margin should be sky high... and who needs much marketing investment when it has already been grown to this level without it?
The flaw in that thinking is simple: with the cheap & easy reach of family & friends sold, there is no more comparable fruit to harvest. They now need to attract & sell total strangers. This requires a strategic evolution of approach. Since friends & family tactics won't work with strangers, they should adopt well-proven industry marketing practices to continue growing their paying base.
What does THAT take?
- Marketing investment to regularly & effectively attract (targeted) strangers (most likely to buy),
- Marketing & operational tactics to nurture and bond with all new leads, and
- Marketing creative to motivate those prospects & leads to "subscribe now."
Some of these FinPub startups get mentally locked on the bigger margin/income realized by selling friends & family and can't readily accept reducing it down towards industry norms (even if that is still well north of ultra-profitable companies like Apple). So they are stuck with what feels like a hard-capped subscriber quantity that is unlikely to grow much larger... until they finally come around to adopting what actually works in this space.
An irony in this is that the fundamental proposition of a FinPub business is subscribers needing to put money at risk to make good ROI. If a subscriber shares they are looking to harvest a big profit while investing nearly nothing, the FinPub is going to have to educate them on a very old cliché...
It takes money to make money.
The same applies here. Putting nearly nothing into this- or ANY- business and expecting it to generate a huge & fast ROI anyway is NOT a realistic expectation. If that worked, everyone would be in this business.
Bottom line: investments in fueling growth of a startup business- particularly marketing investments- help grow a subscriber base much more than draining them of every possible free dollar right from the start. If the goal is to build a very lucrative business without waiting an eternity, you should (re)invest in it.
Subscription models are like annuities in that you put a lot into establishing them to then enjoy a great ROI over a long "tail" of renewals and related sales. For startup entrepreneurs wanting a 2X AAPL-type margin, take strategic aim at your golden years, when you have accumulated a massive base of subscribers and thus can wind down investment in new acquisition and simply ride an ongoing wave of renewals year after year. When you no longer have to do much towards attracting & selling strangers, this business can enjoy a gigantic margin on mostly subscription renewals to customers already in the database. If maximizing the profit of the business is THE paramount concern, THIS is the ideal way to do it.
FROM WHERE DOES ONE GET MANY SUBSCRIBERS?
First, you should identify how many customers you actually need. If you are starting this business to replace up to ALL of your current compensation as someone's employee, we suggest giving yourself a raise to where you think your annual compensation should really be.
Multiply that number by 2 on the assumption that your FinPub can run at that 50% profit margin.
How many subscribers do you need? Divide target revenue by ARPS. These 2 simple formulas help you forecast an initial subscriber quantity to pay yourself ANY income you desire.
The following table illustrates a variety of compensation numbers at a a variety of ARPS targets. Our work can generally help FinPubs grow into an ARPS of about $550 per year... though we have done even better than that for some FinPubs . If you aspire for more, we'll help you figure out the best way there.
| HOW MUCH INCOME CAN I MAKE? | ||||||
| TARGET INCOME | TARGET REVENUE | $550 ARPS | $450 ARPS | $350 ARPS | $250 ARPS | $150 ARPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100K | $200K | 364 | 444 | 571 | 800 | 1,333 |
| $200K | $400K | 727 | 889 | 1,143 | 1,600 | 2,667 |
| $300K | $600K | 1,091 | 1,333 | 1,714 | 2,400 | 4,000 |
| $400K | $800K | 1,455 | 1,778 | 2,286 | 3,200 | 5,333 |
| $500K | $1M | 1,818 | 2,222 | 2,857 | 4,000 | 6,667 |
| $750K | $1.5M | 2,727 | 3,333 | 4,286 | 6,000 | 10,000 |
| $1M | $2M | 3,636 | 4,444 | 5,714 | 8,000 | 13,333 |
| $2.5M | $5M | 9,091 | 11,111 | 14,286 | 20,000 | 33,333 |
| $5M | $10M | 18,182 | 22,222 | 28,571 | 40,000 | 66,667 |
| $7.5M | $15M | 27,273 | 33,333 | 42,857 | 60,000 | 100,000 |
| $10M | $20M | 36,364 | 44,444 | 57,143 | 80,000 | 133,333 |
| $50M | $100M | 90,909 | 111,111 | 142,857 | 200,000 | 333,333 |
| $100M | $200M | 181,818 | 222,222 | 285,714 | 400,000 | 666,667 |
Using a realistically-achievable ARPS of $550 to replace annual compensation of- say- $300K/yr, you would need to acquire a little over a thousand subscribers: 1,091 to be exact. If you wanted to create or replace income of ONE MILLION DOLLARS EACH YEAR, you need only 3,636 subscribers. $5M income? 18,182 subscribers. And so on. YOU pick the income level you want. We'll figure out the metrics & tactics to achieve it.
How many individual investors are there in the world? Many hundreds of millions. To achieve incomes like those, you win over only a TINY fraction of that massive pool.
If you already have a price in mind for your own product, divide your revenue target by that price to determine a very specific minimum number of subscribers. For example, if you want to replace a $250K/yr salary with a $250/yr subscription product, $250K times 2 = a $500K revenue target... $500K/$250 = only 2K subscribers. 2K is NOT a lot of subscribers in this business. You would be aiming very low vs. industry norms. There are people doing this as a hobby with well north of 2K subscribers.
If you would rather make this a moonlighting business, only 2,000 subscribers at $250/yr could help you make an EXTRA quarter million dollars on the side... or that same 2,000 at $550/yr could yield well over a million dollars. Not a bad moonlighting gig, huh?
Second, hire industry-experienced talent (like us) to help you put the business together with the crucial foundational (core startup) pieces... and leverage our marketing services for new subscriber campaigns and ARPS growth. What can we do?
We've run cost-efficient acquisition marketing models for individual FinPubs that harvest more than 2,500 new paying subscribers EACH MONTH.
Yes, that added more than 30K new PAYING subscribers in only ONE year. Needless to say, we view targets like adding 1,000, 2,500, 4,000 or more as smallish... and relatively easy. THERE'S PLENTY OF OPPORTUNITY if you/we assemble an attractive, competitive FinPub business and market it in the most proven ways. We're expert at ALL of that.
Would you like to talk about it right now? For FREE? Let's do it...
In only minutes, we can help you figure out if this is right for you, how this can work around whatever you are doing now, revenue & profit potentials for your kind of trading or investing educational offerings, timeline to first sale and answer all of your questions.
Wouldn't you like to know if you can do this? And specifically what's in it for you? One of our experts is standing by with a lifetime of direct experience ready to share. Call that number or request a FREE, no-obligation consultation
The next page shares an important checklist and answers three popular questions:
- "What is the CHEAPEST way to get started but do it all right?"
- "What is the FASTEST path to making millions?" and
- "What is the OPTIMAL way for ME to start?"
