"I want to acquire a newsletter"
Mike emailed me last week with a question:
"Hey Louis, I just inherited $75k. And I want to spend $50k of it on acquiring a newsletter that I can grow as a side project. Any tips on where I can find legit newsletters for sale?"
Now, I'll put my cards on the table...
Unless you're ready to spend at least $1m, I don't think acquiring an existing newsletter is a smart move.
I'm finishing up a guide right now on what you should do instead once you've found a newsletter you think you might want to acquire.
But — warnings aside — let's do a quick deep-dive on the smart (and not so smart) ways to find "the right" newsletter to buy.
I've split them up into 3 tiers:
- Gold (try this first)
- Silver (worth a shot)
- Bronze (pretty much a waste of time)
Let's jump in...
🥇 Gold Tier Sources
If you only remember one thing from today's article, make it this...
The newsletter you "should" acquire is not listed publicly for sale.
But just because nobody is trying to sell it, that doesn't mean it's not available to buy.
By far the best source of good deals (in terms of price and newsletter quality) come from:
- researching newsletters that are in your "zone of genius" (ie you could run them)
- and then reaching out to the owners of these newsletters directly with an offer
Here's all the places I'd look first:
- Newsletters I already read
- SparkLoop's Newsletter Radar
- Substack's Discovery Features
- Kit's Creator Network
- Ghost's Explore
All of these platforms make it easy to search for relevant newsletters and to see how active they are.
🥈 Silver Tier Sources
Next up we have some less reliable ways to source potential newsletters for acquisition.
These sources will work some of the time, for some people. Most of them involve a bit of luck.
→ 1️⃣ Reddit
Reddit has a decent number of newsletters available for sale (use this search).
What's more, you can join newsletter-related groups in Reddit and post that you are looking to buy a newsletter. These posts get a lot of low quality replies, but occasionally some "valuable" DMs too.
→ 2️⃣ ChatGPT
ChatGPT's o3 model is pretty good at compiling a list of relevant newsletters that fit what you're looking for. Especially if you use the "deep research" feature.
It can take a few tries to get the prompt right. And there's a lot of noise in the results. But in my attempts it surfaced at least a few viable options I hadn't found via the methods mentioned above.
→ 3️⃣ Social
If you're active on social (Twitter, LinkedIn etc) it can be worth posting that you are on the hunt for newsletters to acquire.
You never know who might be reading. Or who might know somebody who knows somebody...
🥉 Bronze Tier Sources
Ironically, I found the least-useful source of newsletters for sale was... newsletter acquisition marketplaces.
Here are all the marketplaces I could find with a dedicated "newsletters for sale" section:
- Acquire.com
- Duuce.com
- Flippa
- Empire Flippers
- Microns.io
I'm glad that these marketplaces exist, and I'd like to see them thrive. Especially as the newsletter industry grows and acquiring newsletters becomes more common.
That said, I was disappointed by what I saw...
- ... none of the marketplaces had more than ~30 active newsletter listings
- ... many of those listings were duplicates across the different marketplaces
- ... the asking prices were (in most cases) wildly inflated and totally unrealistic
My $0.02: There's no harm in taking a look through the marketplaces "just in case"... but don't expect to find anything worth acquiring.
