How a VC investor grew her newsletter to over 100,000 subscribers
Codie Sanchez finds interesting ways to make money and then reverse engineers them for her audience.
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There’s a somewhat common career path in which a journalist actually transitions to the very industry they cover. MG Siegler, for instance, got his start as an intrepid reporter for TechCrunch and spent five years at the publication covering VC-funded startups before being hired by Google Ventures as a general partner in 2013. Kyle Russel followed a similar journey, writing for outlets like Business Insider and TechCrunch before accepting a role at Andreessen Horowitz in 2015.
Prior to jumping on the phone with Codie Sanchez, I assumed this was the route she had followed as well. Her website bio described her as a “reformed journalist turned institutional investor,” and so one of the first questions I posed for her was whether she broke into her industry as a financial journalist.
I couldn’t have been further off. “I covered war zones,” she told me. “My region was Latin America, so places like Venezuela and Argentina, basically anywhere where there was conflict amongst humans.” The job burned her out relatively quickly. “As a 25-year-old I got pretty jaded to journalism in general and just felt like, gosh, my last name is Sanchez, and their last name is Sanchez, but their life looks just so much different from mine. I tried to figure out what that difference was and determined that it was entirely monetary. And so that's why I got into finance originally was to understand that dynamic and maybe make some sort of a difference.”
Still, the journalism bug hasn’t left Sanchez completely; every week she sits down to write a several thousand word newsletter that now reaches the inboxes of over 100,000 recipients. Not only has it raised her profile within the VC world, but it’s quickly becoming a powerhouse business of its own, driving six figures in revenue. In our phone call, Sanchez walked me through why she launched the newsletter and how she’s approaching monetization.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Launching the newsletter
Sanchez’s experimentation within the newsletter space came in fits and starts, partially because many of her employers didn’t like that she had a side hustle. “They hate when their employees have personal brands,” she said. “They don't want you to have any of your own marketing. Their philosophy is, ‘we pay you really well, so shut up and do the work.’”