I sold my first business

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Morning fam,

Happy belated New Year! It was a heck of a 2024 and I’m more excited and motivated for 2025 than any year I can think of.

In this newsletter, I share my biggest growth hack for email newsletters so make sure to read through to not miss it. This hack alone got me from 0 to 20,000 readers in under 3 months and eventually acquired. This growth hack applicable for anyone starting any type of business.

Before we get started, here’s one thing I can guarantee for 2025:

• I will be posting much more finance, tech, and entrepreneurship content than ever before with an emphasis on getting back to weekly scheduled emails like I use to back in the day

• I will also be expanding my content on Instagram, TikTok, and maybe even YouTube. (If you don’t follow me on there please do)

In 2024 I slacked on my personal content heavily. To be fair, that was mainly because I was focused on growing other social channels, concluding my sailing career, and building out other revenue streams (more on that later) …

But, before we get into what more I have in store for 2025, I want to talk about the most exciting personal announcement of 2024.

I sold my first business, The Drop to one of the main pillars in all crypto media:

Blockworks

Now of course, for many, this announcement may be met with “who cares”. But this was a major life moment for me. My first startup, which I painstakingly worked on for 3 years while being a navigator at on a ship, was acquired by one of the largest crypto media companies in the United States. As always, I wouldn’t be writing about this unless there was free game to be learned from. So here’s how we got here.

The Drop Beginnings

My first newsletter was Rebel Markets (the one you are reading). As I started to grow it, work with brands, sell ads, etc. I learned more of the ins and outs of what a newsletter company can do, and if done right how much revenue they can bring in. I had been obsessed with the stock market since I was 17 years old but had always dabbled in crypto starting in 2016/17, when the first real crypto bull run took hold.

It was first a side hustle that turned into a full fledge business, and here’s how:

It’s November 2021 and alternative assets such as NFTs and other ‘alt’ coins are exploding left and right. Within crypto circles, many referred to this whole subgenre as ‘web3’.

TLDR: Web3 is a decentralized, blockchain-based version of the internet that enables users to own digital assets, interact without intermediaries, and control their data through smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps)

On Twitter, it was absolute chaos, coins, NFTs, and anything DeFi were flying up and down in value at a moment’s notice. Some people seemed to be ‘in the know’ and would make calls but at the end of the day, they were anonymous characters on the internet. Did they get lucky or was there a pattern to the madness? Nobody had a trusted centralized trusted source of news. 

I knew there was an opportunity, or more directly, a solution to this problem. Let’s face it, there are a billion finance newsletters and at the time I couldn’t name a single NFT, altcoin, or alternative asset newsletter. Thus the Drop was born.

Growth

There are three types of newsletters:

👍 Good - A newsletter that sells ads

🫡 Great - A newsletter that sells ads and content

🚀 Amazing - A newsletter that sells ads, content, and grows itself

With The Drop, we provided a daily newsletter that showcased to readers unbiased news about everything that was happening in the space. I lived permanently online at the time and with my team, we did our best to break down the news when it happened at a moment’s notice. We grew the Twitter account to a sizable following by posting updates of the space nonstop and alongside my cofounders we shouted out the newsletter to get the initial subs to flow in along with raffles and other traditional growth hacks. But the largest hack that pushed us from a good newsletter to a great, then amazing newsletter, is what I’ll summarize below.

🔑 My biggest growth hack for any newsletter:

Identify movers and shakers in the space you are working in - in this case, it was web3 projects themselves.

We reached out to projects and made an offer to give a breakdown of their entire company as unbiased as we could. This ‘deep dive’ would occur every Wednesday or Thursday. Naturally, a project would rather not pay and have us do it for free, so we structured the deal in which we would do it for free under several key conditions.

Here were the conditions:

1) Our newsletter would be unbiased and organic. These breakdowns were not a sales pitch to our readers by any means. We broke down what the project did and if you were interested further we provided access that you could check out yourself for further due diligence. Keeping the breakdowns honest was key to fostering trust with our audience.

2) No pay? Then shoutout and raffle. Most projects didn’t want to pay to be written about but were still looking for exposure to our audience. We then offered that instead of paying us they would have to do a raffle to not only our audience but their own (either on Discord or twitter). When the newsletter was posted, this raffle would go bananas on socials and garner us hundreds and even thousands of news subs each time.

📍 In all, everybody wins

• we get more subs for the newsletter

• the project gets written about from a third-party source

• both our community and theirs get an awesome breakdown of the project

• newcomers who subscribe get a chance at winning a raffle and now are subbed to a newsletter about the space

This hack alone got us from 0 to 20,000 readers in less than 3 months and propelled us from a good to amazing newsletter at lightning speed.

After achieving the audience we could sell primary ads, charge a price for deep dives, and have the companies that we broke down share our newsletter to their communities and clients (effectively becoming our own marketing team). With this strategy in place, we were able to clear multiple 6 figures in revenue in the first year of operation.

🚨 Trust: I can’t overstate how important trust is with a newsletter in any type of space. No matter what, we disclosed every sponsorship in the newsletter especially if any content outside the primary ad slot was paid content. Come to find out our readers actually appreciated when they knew a specific section of the newsletter was paid content.

Hardships

Remember this all started as a side hustle.

I was still fulfilling my government obligation as a merchant mariner, commercial sailing half the year on a ship, and had Navy reserve duties from time to time. I spent countless hours in the dead of night (literally floating) writing articles then waking up to drive a ship in the day. It was not easy work. Sometimes I was asked to go live on CNBC and Yahoo Finance to talk about crypto and the web3 space, and as you will see below I used my own bedding as a backdrop to block out the fact that I was on a ship while on the call 😂.

Trust me they found out and thought it was hilarious. 

Let’s also not forget that the growth hack above does require a ton of outbound reach at first to get the ball rolling. I use to spend hours a week in Twitter DMs talking to different projects and founders asking if they’d like their projects to be written about.

In future newsletter articles, I will be breaking down more growth hacks, hardships, and tips and tricks to have your side hustle turn into a full-blown company.

Where is The Drop now?

As stated before, The Drop is now under the Blockworks crypto media umbrella.

Carrying the torch is veteran crypto journalist Kate Irwin who’s leading The Drop ad covering all things web3: gaming, art, music, memes, tokens, apps, and more.

The Drop relaunched at the beginning of this year and you can check out all of their newest articles here. Make sure to not forget to subscribe if you don’t already.

Update: Last year I joined a fintech startup named Autopilot that truly is revolutionizing finance as we know it. There’s a lot more to share and I’m excited to share more in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for my emails that will be coming out!

That’s it for today. Hopefully, you enjoyed today’s newsletter.

If the growth hack I shared to could help a friend help me out and share!

Disclaimer: Rebel Markets Newsletter does NOT provide financial advice. All content is for informational purposes only. Rebel Markets is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor or a broker/dealer. Trading any asset is extremely risky and could result in significant capital losses.