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.’”
Of course, as Sanchez moved up within the industry, she was granted more leeway in how she spent her free time. In the span of about a decade, she went from analyst roles at places like Vanguard and Goldman Sachs all the way up to managing director at Entourage Effect Capital, a VC firm that specializes in investing in cannabis startups. At that level, there aren’t many people who can say no to her extracurricular activities.
So how did she end up launching a newsletter? It came in three iterations spread out over several years.
The first version was called Selling South and focused on conducting business negotiations across country borders. It mostly consisted of a blog that was monetized through sponsorships and a small conference, and Sanchez was forced to shut it down once her bosses got wind of it.
Her second media venture was a newsletter and podcast called The Struggle Isn’t Real. “I sent out a Friday email that listed things aimed at making someone’s life easier,” Sanchez said. The podcast’s iTunes description asserts that “you were not put here to live an ordinary life, you were meant for something more.” She didn’t do much to promote the newsletter, but it grew organically anyway, with large spikes in signups after she spoke at conferences or made high-profile media appearances. “I think I got that one up to like 10,000 or 12,000 subscribers.”
That went on for about a year before Sanchez discontinued it, mostly because she was too busy with her day job to keep it running. But she kept the subscribers on her mailing list, overpaying for a Mailchimp account that she wasn’t even using.
That list came in handy when the pandemic shutdown hit and Sanchez’s constant travel came to a halt. She used the sudden influx of free time to launch Contrarian Thinking, a newsletter that covers, as it says in its description, “all the ways to build wealth and impact we should have learned in school.”
What does that actually mean? Each week, the newsletter dives into a different niche business that can generate revenue through unconventional methods and a relatively small upfront investment. In some cases, Sanchez will actually test out the business herself. “For instance, I bought a piece of land for $10,000 and put it on something called Hipcamp” -- a sort of Airbnb marketplace for camping -- “and rented it out to some campers.” In other cases, she interviews someone who runs an interesting business and then walks Contrarian Viewer subscribers through how the entrepreneur built their company. An edition published in early April, for example, detailed how a woman named Lisa Song Sutton launched a “mini storage unit” company that generates $120,000 in annual profit. The article is 1,200 words long, contains several photos, and is broken down into four steps.
Sanchez readily admits that her newsletter distribution isn’t ideal; she basically sends out three separate versions of the same article to lists managed on Mailchimp, SendFox, and Substack (she said she’s building out a website that will allow her to consolidate all three lists in a single place). Despite this inefficient setup, the newsletter has grown rapidly. She started out with her 12,000-or-so subscribers left over from her last media venture, and by July 2020 it had grown to 30,000 signups. Today, that number is north of 100,000.
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