Rollup #A: Solopreneur Rollup

As you build a portfolio of companies, you understand what is inside of your strategy and what isn’t— it’s part of the fun of having many businesses.

Further, you find parts of the portfolio and businesses that are great, however, they aren’t great for what you’re looking to accomplish.

A while ago, we started to build multiple roll-ups of newsletters and one of these rollups were in the solopreneur niche. In total, we acquired 6 different newsletters inside of this rollup and they include newsletters between 2,000 and 22,000 subscribers.

As a business, we have multiple newsletter rollups, one more deeply in the marketing/business niche, along with one in the spirituality/lifestyle niche and thus far, we’ve seen massive potential with these 6 newsletters.

The problem? They are too small for our portfolio and due to this the R.O.I potential is simply not there for us.

However, for someone who already has a business serving this audience, or someone who is already operating newsletters or is looking to do that, this is a “must have”.

We’ve built the systems.

We have active funnels with proven lead metrics (including $0.94/leads from Facebook at scale).

Further, it’s easy for someone to easily only hire 1 person and be able to run this as their entire operating AND it has proven revenue from both affiliates and sponsors…

Am I selling this yet? 🙂 

We have everything setup and ready to go, however… if we put $1 into this, it’s $1 we don’t have for the rest of our portfolio and while we understand the dynamics of this roll-up, we simply need to focus on other parts of our portfolio.

If you’re interested, simply email [email protected] and give me a little background of yourself, if it feels good I’ll send you the information.

This should give you an important lesson as you build businesses…

1. A business may not always be the business you want, however, it may lead you to understand what you do want. Through acquiring these businesses, it allowed us to know what type of newsletters and media we did want.

2. Further, it allowed us to understand the sponsorship game further which allowed us to launch sponsorships.com, alongside of newsletters.co. Without doing this, we would have never understood the industry well enough.

3. It allowed us to understand what size of a “bet” we’re willing to take along with how much ROI is needed in order for us to partake. In this case, we bet too small and in betting too small, the ROI simply would never be enough for us to apply effort.

4. It allowed us to build an operating system for being able to operate newsletters, a massive part of our business model, which reiterates just how important it is to innovate, as through doing this, it’s allowed us to nearly perfect the model of delivering highly valuable content to engaged audiences.

5. It allowed us to test at-scale some really great growth strategies, some that worked and some that didn’t. We then took these and applied them to our larger properties, with even more success.

That’s it for this quick email 🙂 Have a great weekend.

- Scott