A few weeks ago, I announced that I was wrapping up my work at Hampton, and since then, friends in the newsletter space have reached out asking what’s next.

I avoided deciding right up to the end, partly because I wanted to stay focused on Hampton as long as I was there, but mostly because the last eighteen months had been the busiest of my career, and I wanted time to be bored and let my next idea grab me.

I knew I wanted to continue developing the ideas I originally published in the Trends Newsletter Guide. But I also couldn’t just write about writing. That’d be too theoretical.

I needed to build on the one hand, and share lessons learned on the other, which left just one question – what kind of newsletter do you want to spend the next three to five years building?

The short answer: Local.

I think local newsletters are one of the most interesting opportunities writers have right now.

The big reason is that they seem like a great way to stand out. 

There are lots of ways to make money as a writer, but they’re all downstream from the same crucial thing: attention. Someone needs to notice you, and care about what you have to say.

Going local is a perfect way to solve this.

When you write for a local audience, you’re instantly relevant to them in a way that bigger publications like The Hustle or Morning Brew aren’t. That gives you a foot in the door, and if you’re good, that can be all you need. 

You also shrink the pool of competition. Rather than duking it out with every ambitious writer in the world, you’re only going up against the writers in your area, and more specifically, the writers in your area who want to cover the same things you do. That’s a pretty neat judo move.

At the same time, you create a kind of defensive moat other types of newsletters can’t offer. 

Try to write for a global audience, and if you have any success, you can bet bigger publications will notice and move in. Just look at what’s going on in the AI newsletter space these days. It’s a bloodbath as writers compete for both readers and sponsors.

But Morning Brew is never going to follow you to Billings, Montana and try to win that specific audience. The numbers will never make sense for them. But they can work for you, which brings me to the next point…

Can it be a worthwhile business?

That is literally the million-dollar question, but I think yes.

The space has certainly attracted the attention of interesting founders like Andrew Wilkinson, Nathan Barry, and others.

The economics aren’t as obvious as they are for something like The Hustle or Morning Brew. But a few years ago those weren’t obvious winners either. They had to figure out the model, and I think the same is true for local newsletters.

There are three reasons I’m optimistic though:

  1. Smaller newsletters like Ferrari Market Letter and The Newsette punch way above their weight class when it comes to revenue, proving that audience size is only partly correlated with how much you can earn. Audience trust + spending power are more important.
  1. There are 6,000 local newspapers operating across the US, so the industry already exists on some level. That number’s dropping, but it’s still high. A different approach may be all that’s needed to reverse the trend.
  1. We’ve seen that creative business models can completely revive dying media formats, like what Craig Fuller is doing with FLYING magazine (annual returns as high as 234%!).

At the very least, I think a solo operator can turn a local newsletter into a great low- to mid-six-figure job. And Ryan Sneddon from the Naptown Scoop seems to agree.

Can it scale?

Maybe. Brands like Axios and 6AM City are certainly trying. But I don’t think it needs to.

I think the main long-term benefit of a local newsletter is not that it can be a huge business, but rather, that it can be a great business while also giving you a strong local group of friends.

Those two add up to more than the sum of their parts.

The final reason is personal…

I grew up moving around a lot. It was a blast. I loved it. But I never really got good at putting down roots and belonging somewhere.

Seems like writing a local newsletter would practically force that.

So, I’m starting The Austin Business Review – a business & lifestyle newsletter for tech people in Austin.

I’m going to use the newsletter as a way of getting to know my adopted home, and the cool people who also live there. And over time I’ll show how I build it.

If you’re in the city, and want to check it out, you can find the signup page here (publishing starts soon).

And if you’re generally interested in keeping tabs on how I build, subscribe to my blog here.

Below are some most posts about the local newsletter…