Five lessons I learned from acquiring a SaaS newsletter

Back in January, I acquired a newsletter called Category Surfers and rolled it up under my own publication, SaaS Weekly.

While the acquisition doubled my subscriber count overnight (to 4K subs), the process taught me a few things.

🧵 Here’s a brief breakdown of the deal 🧵

👉 Why I bought a newsletter

At the start of the year, I gave myself a pretty ambitious goal: reach 10K subscribers by December.

My growth rate last year wouldn’t get me to that target, so I was banking on some big plays going into 2024.

One crazy idea was to buy another audience.

However, I didn’t want to start with a large deal. Instead, I took a stair-step approach to an acquisition playbook (start small and increase in size over time).

So I started compiling a target list and eventually found Category Surfers.

👉 How I sourced the deal

I found that the best cold outreach either adds value first (ideally) or doesn’t start with a hard sell.

Here’s what I sent.
—
📧 My message:
“Happy New Year, Stan! Excited to read more of your content this year!!

Just putting it on your radar. If you ever consider selling Category Surfers, please add me to your list of buyers.

Until then, keep up the great content!”

📧 The reply:
“I'd be interested in selling!”
—
After a few back-and-forth exchanges, it became clear that a deal was worth exploring. Pretty wild!

👉 How much I paid

This is where things get interesting.

Diligence:
• We did an audience overlap and removed any subs I already owned
• We aligned on only acquiring engaged subscribers (based on open and click rates)
• I reviewed how these subscribers were acquired – making sure they weren’t nefariously sourced

Deal terms:
• I paid about $1 per sub
• The owner agreed to remove any copies of the subscriber lists (and not email them)
• The owner also agreed to send several announcement emails + do a social post

🧵Here’s what I learned and what I would do differently 🧵

1️⃣ Co-marketing the acquisition announcement is a growth hack, so create a campaign out of it – I got over 60 subs from the posts

2️⃣ Look for publications that have both a topic overlap and a similar content format – the latter is more important than you think

3️⃣ Price in at least a 10 - 15% churn when setting the valuation – the relative valuation only increases with attrition

4️⃣ Start emailing subscribers in batches, not all at once to save your IP/ domain health

5️⃣ Create a dedicated onboarding flow for these subscribers – you need to educate them/ sell them on WHY you should read your content

This is a brief version of the acquisition. If you subscribe to SaaS Weekly, you’ll get the full details in the newsletter :)