How a niche newsletter turned its reporting into a data product
Will Richards explained how Overnight Success built a six-figure business with only 5,000 newsletter subscribers.
When Will Richards started compiling news about startups, he wasn’t trying to build a media company. He was simply trying to solve his own information problem.
While working at a family office in Australia, Richards had been tasked with finding promising startups that could become potential investments. The assignment sounded straightforward: track the ecosystem, identify interesting companies, and surface opportunities before everyone else discovered them.
But he quickly ran into a problem. The information he needed was scattered everywhere.
Major financial publications covered some of the biggest funding rounds, but much of that coverage sat behind paywalls. Trade publications covered other parts of the market, but they didn’t have the resources to track every small startup announcement. A seed-stage company raising a few hundred thousand dollars might be incredibly relevant to investors, founders, and service providers — yet never receive traditional media coverage.
“I got deeply frustrated that there was no one place to go that had all this information,” Richards said.
So he built one.
At first, it was just an internal email sent to eight people at his company. Every week, Richards gathered every startup announcement he could find — funding rounds, acquisitions, interesting industry developments — and packaged them into a digest.
Eventually, his boss told him the email had become too comprehensive to keep inside the company.
“He was like, ‘Well, this is too big for us. You need to start sending it to more people or cut it down a bit,’” Richards recalled.
That internal research project became Overnight Success, a newsletter covering Australia’s startup ecosystem. Over the next several years, Richards grew it into a publication with thousands of subscribers, a six-figure sponsorship business, and eventually a data product designed to compete with much larger companies like Crunchbase and PitchBook.
The evolution reflected a broader lesson about modern media businesses: sometimes the content itself isn’t the final product. It’s the engine that creates trust, audience, and proprietary information that can be transformed into something much more valuable.
In our interview, we discussed how he grew within such a narrow niche, why a small audience can still attract major sponsors, and how he’s turning years of startup coverage into a valuable data product.
Let’s jump into it…
Building leverage through media
Richards didn’t come from journalism. His background was finance.
After graduating university with degrees in banking, finance, and design, he started working in private equity, where he got an up-close education in how businesses operate. The firm invested across a wide range of industries — everything from chicken farms to oil and gas companies — giving Richards exposure to how investors analyzed companies.
“I really just enjoy trying to understand how different companies work,” he said.
That experience eventually led him to a family office focused on childcare businesses. The founder had previously made an early investment in a software company serving the childcare industry, and after seeing a successful outcome from that investment, he wanted to find more startup opportunities.
Richards was given the task of helping discover them.
But unlike more mature markets, Australia’s startup ecosystem didn’t have a centralized information layer. In the U.S., investors could rely on a combination of tech media, databases, and a mature venture ecosystem. Australia’s market was smaller and more fragmented.
That gap created the opportunity.
Richards began spending hours every week pulling together information from news sites, press releases, and industry chatter. What started as research for his employer slowly became something that had value beyond his day job.
It also created career leverage.
Richards noticed that many of the young professionals advancing quickly in venture capital weren’t simply submitting resumes. They were building reputations. Some had founded companies. Others had developed public profiles. They had created reasons for people in the industry to know who they were.
A newsletter offered Richards a way to do the same.
“If you don’t have the money, media is sort of the next best option to build that leverage yourself,” he said.
When he officially launched Overnight Success in 2022, he made a deliberate decision not to attach the newsletter to his personal name. At the time, he wasn’t a known figure in Australian startups, and he didn’t think “The Will Richards Newsletter” would carry much authority.
Instead, he built a standalone brand.
He chose Beehiiv over Substack because he wanted more control over the publication’s identity. He created a distinctive visual style built around dark colors and neon pink — something designed to immediately stand out in a crowded inbox.
“I just didn’t want it to feel like every other email you get,” he said.
For a while, though, very few people were getting it.