If you've been waiting for the perfect business idea to get started on, this issue is a must-read. Newsletters are some of the easiest businesses to get off the ground, & the growth tactics I discuss can apply to all different sorts of newsletters.

Each week I help founders & marketers spark their creativity by sharing a new product idea & how I'd launch it.

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A few things from me:

First, welcome to 23 new subscribers who joined this week!

Other than violence in the Capitol, the big news this week was Bitcoin, which broke $40k before crashing to $30k & re-stabilizing around $35k. I have about half of my net worth in Bitcoin & still think it'll hit 6-figures by the end of 2021. With Twitter (& most platforms) banning Trump, & WhatsApp moving away from privacy, decentralization & power dynamics are front-and-center.

So...to stay up-to-date on everything crypto, I subscribe to The Crypto Wrap by my friend Kim. It's basically a weekly Morning Brew, but on cryptocurrency. If you're at all interested in learning more about the space, I highly recommend signing up here!

Finally, I'd love to know what you hate most about the newsletter. Reply & let me know!

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Today's product idea touches on two exploding trends: chess & audience-building.

(Note: even if you're not very interested in chess, keep reading. Much of what I say applies well beyond chess.)

Let's get into them.

Exploding Trend #1: Chess

Let's follow the growth of my two favorite chess streamers, GothamChess & GMHikaru:

Hikaru Nakamura is a Japanese-American Grand Master (the highest title in chess) & one of the top players in the world. Impressively, he streams daily on Twitch & uploads videos to YouTube, & is even signed by TSM, the same e-sports organization as Myth. Most impressive though, is Hikaru's growth. Since April, in just 9 months, Hikaru has 8x-ed his followers on Twitch, & 6x-ed his YouTube subscribers. I estimate his earnings last months from just YouTube ads to be ~$500,000, not counting paid Twitch subscribers & donations.

Levy Rozman is an International Master (tier below Grand Master) who streams under the name GothamChess. 9 months ago, Levy was a small Twitch streamer just getting started on YouTube with less than an thousand subscribers. 7 months later, he had 100x-ed his YouTube channel to 100,000. Fast forward 2 more months, & he's doubled his followers on Twitch to 225,000, & quadrupled YouTube subscribers to over 400,000. Now, he's sold chess openings courses to thousands of his followers.

What's the reason for all this growth?

First, with nothing to do under lockdown, everyone turned to Twitch & YouTube. And then when kids finished school in May & had even more downtime, Twitch & YouTube viewership climbed further. This is when Hikaru & Levy got their first big growth spurt, in June.

Second, Netflix's uber-popular show, The Queen's Gambit was released in October. For the next 2 months, millions of people who played chess as a kid, suddenly had a renewed interest in the game. And whereas the pandemic effect attracted primarily non-working, school-age viewers, The Queen's Gambit brought back an older audience, & one with purchasing power.

With more viewership & media attention, chess is becoming part of the mainstream e-sports community & growing even faster. But whereas the first-order effects are increased viewership on Twitch & YouTube or merch sales, not many other sorts of products are taking advantage of chess' resurgence yet.

Exploding Trend #2: Audience-building

The Internet has let anyone create a personality & attract an audience around it. Once you have an audience, you can monetize with monthly donations on Patreon, OnlyFans, Twitch, or even YouTube, with ads, or by selling your own products (as Levy does with chess courses).

As products become more & more commoditized, audience-building is mandatory. Selling great make-up isn't worth very much if you don't have distribution. Kylie Kardashian was able to build a $1 billion make-up brand in just a few years because of her existing audience of millions of people.

Chess streamers like GothamChess & GMHikaru have used YouTube & Twitch to build their audiences, but another, less glamorous way of audience-building is with newsletters.

The key advantage of a newsletters is that you own your audience. As we saw last week, platforms like Twitter are willing to ban their most high-profile users. Twitch could suspend GothamChess whenever they want & he'd lose his audience overnight. Newsletter subscribers on the other hand, can't be taken away.

That's where this week's product comes in: WeeklyChessTips - a weekly chess newsletter.

Let's take a look at the value proposition:

• WeeklyChessTips is a weekly newsletter that helps casual players stay up-to-date with the chess world & improve their game at the same time. Just a 5 minute read.

How I'd launch:

• WeeklyChessTips is a great name, because people know what you do right away. Set a goal of sending the first newsletter in a week, & focus on getting 100 subscribers in the next 7 days. Please let me know if you decide to build this (or a similar newsletter) & I'll be your first subscriber!

• Next, pick an email platform. I use SendFox as it's powerful, inexpensive, & intuitive, but you can use MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, or any number of platforms. If you'll eventually want to grow by offering free email courses (as I discuss below), make sure your platform can do that.

• For your first 100 subscribers, try engaging in the chats of chess streamers & by commenting on YouTube videos. Don't directly self-promote, but just by commenting & engaging, viewers see your profile name, & will be intrigued to click on your profile for more.

• Another tactic is to reply to large chess accounts on Twitter shortly after they tweet. By having a witty response, or offering a helpful, educational tip, you can get thousands of impressions. This is something I do to build my own audience. Here's me doing it yesterday on a tweet from Naval, who has 1.1 million followers.

• Now, for the actual content. Writing about chess (or any niche topic) weekly isn't as hard as it seems. A Twitter list of key chess personalities (streamers, GMs, etc.) would be an easy inspiration feed for the newsletter. You can also pick a chess game from a GM & show why one of their moves was good or bad. You don't have to (& probably can't) come with the analysis yourself, but lots of other people on YouTube will have already analyzed the same game.

• After you've published at least one issue, reach out to small chess streamers on Twitch & ask to collaborate with them. For example, if they let you promote your newsletter on stream, you'll mention them in your next issue. You can even explore doing an interview with them for newsletter content.

How I'd scale:

• One the most effective tactics for growing my own newsletter has been free email courses (I have one on LinkedIn, & other on resumes) & the same tactic could work well for WeeklyChessTips. A simple automated email sequence (on beginner chess concepts, or intermediate chess openings, for example) is much easier to make than a paid chess course. Courses get people to sign up by promising very tangible value, & set it up so that once they finish the course, they get added to your newsletter.

• Once you reach, say, 10,000 subscribers, you might be able to collaborate with larger streamers. Just as with the smaller ones, you can do simple cross-posting (I promote you, you promote me) or go further & do an interview, or profile of them as content. Here are a few names to consider: GMHikaru, Chessbrah, GothamChess, Anna Chess, GM Naroditsky, the Botez sisters, Eric Rosen, & Alireza Firouzja.

• Host tournaments with prize money. You don't have to offer as much prize money as you'd think. A chess tournament I watched last night, which Hikaru got 2nd place in, had a grand prize of just $700. This sort of event takes considerably more planning than a simple streamer collaboration, but if you pull it off correctly, could massively impact subscriber numbers.

• Eventually, you'll need to think about monetizing. If you're targeting a casual fanbase, it will be more difficult to convert subscribers to paid, & so means ads & sponsorships may be your best bet. Depending on your inclinations & audience, you could even consider starting a YouTube channel, or selling merch or premium paid chess courses, as other streamers do.

Why it would work:

• Neither Chess.com nor lichess.org, the 2 main online chess platforms, have a newsletter that I can find. And chess24.com, a German chess media company, also doesn't seem to have a newsletter. Huge opportunity here.

• As I discussed at the beginning, newsletters are just getting started. And if you're able to build a great audience, so many doors will open for you. If you have the attention of people today, you'll have their money (or the money of the sponsors who want to advertise to them) tomorrow.

Why it might not work:

• The biggest bear case for WeeklyChessTips would be if a prominent chess streamer or player decided to start the same thing. It would be hard to compete with an established personality. So, the race is on to build an audience & become your own personality before that happens.

Before I end, 2 more thoughts:

• Everything I mentioned of these tactics could just as easily apply to a newsletter about kombucha, or about higher education. Niche newsletters as a whole are a great opportunity & I guarantee there's a newsletter idea that would be worth testing out for your company or your own personal brand. If you'd like an idea, reply & I'll give you a suggestion.

• If you start a newsletter targeting a B2B audience, like higher education administrators, or kombucha marketers, you're probably better off making it paid, & charging more than your gut tells you. Why? People are willing to pay for good content that makes them better at their job, & many will be able to deduct it as a business expense. For more, check out Sam Parr (Founder of The Hustle) on the Creator Lab podcast with Bilal Zaidi. He shares all the exact steps he'd take to start a paid B2B newsletter.

Question for you: what topic could you write a newsletter on to grow you business or personal brand?

Cheers,

Luke

P.S. As always, respond with the biggest challenge you're facing & I'll try to help how I can!

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