How Eric Newcomer scaled his startups newsletter into a $2 million business

The former Bloomberg reporter is hyper focused on serving an affluent and influential audience.

In 2013, Eric Newcomer had to conduct one of the most difficult phone calls of his adult life. He had recently received a job offer from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and even though the role would have been a major step up in his burgeoning journalism career, he had to tell the newspaper he wouldn’t be taking the position.

Not long before that phone call, a Wall Street Journal tech reporter named Jessica Lessin had quit her job with the ambition of launching a bootstrapped publication focused on the tech industry. Both she and Newcomer had attended Harvard University — though she graduated several years before him — and they were put in touch via their alumni connections. Newcomer didn’t have any experience in reporting on the tech world, but Lessin was on the lookout for a “hungry young reporter,” as he put it, and she invited him to join as the first employee of this new venture.

By that point, he had already received the Philadelphia Inquirer offer and was understandably torn. Lessin’s venture was a big gamble and could easily fail, but at the same time he wasn’t blind to the turmoil inflicted on local newspapers, which by that point were already experiencing extensive contraction and retrenchment.

Ultimately, he decided to take the job with Lessin. “It just seemed like the most exciting option,” he told me. Both his grandfathers had owned small businesses, and he figures that a strain of entrepreneurship runs in his family. Not only would he be working for a startup, but he’d be covering an industry that was regularly spinning up new companies with multi-billion-dollar valuations. The opportunity just seemed much bigger.

So in mid-2013 Newcomer moved to California and started writing for the outlet that Lessin eventually named The Information. While he’ll never know what would have happened if he’d taken the Inquirer job, it’s clear he made the right choice. After nearly eight years of tech reporting for traditional publications, he struck off on his own in 2020 to launch Newcomer, an eponymous newsletter that covers the startup and venture capital world.

Today, his company is on track to generate $2 million in annual revenue, with the largest chunk of that money coming from a bi-annual conference called the Cerebral Valley AI Summit. Not only has he brought on someone to lead his business operations, but he’s also slowly expanding his reporting and production staff so he can cover the startup scene even more extensively.

In a recent interview, Newcomer walked me through his decision to leave traditional media, how he built his subscription business, and why live events presented an even bigger revenue opportunity for him.

Let’s jump into my findings.

Learning the startups beat

Newcomer caught the journalism bug at an early age. In elementary school, he rotated in as an anchor for the morning newscast, and he later became the editor of his high school newspaper. At Harvard, he wrote for the Crimson and interned at places like the Macon Telegraph, the Sun Sentinel, and the Tampa Bay Times. After graduating in 2012, he landed a summer fellowship at The New York Times, where he covered local news.