0 to 14k Subscribers in Six Months

Six months after launching Leander Scoop, TJ Larkin sat down alone to look back. He and his wife now run two local newsletters north of Austin with about 14,000 subscribers between them. This episode covers what worked, what didn't, and the money question he hasn't answered yet.

Why we picked North Austin

TJ lives in Liberty Hill, Texas, right next to Georgetown, which he calls the number one fastest-growing city in the US, and Leander, which he puts at number three. That made the North Austin area the fastest-growing part of the country. It was a coincidence. He didn't know it when they moved there.

The newsletter idea had been in the back of his mind for a couple of years. By early last summer he saw that they already sat in a big suburban area that didn't get covered well, with new people and new businesses arriving all the time. It looked like a no-brainer.

Two newsletters, and a lot of doubt

Leander Scoop launched in early October and covers Cedar Park and Liberty Hill, the west side of the north suburbs. About five weeks later they started a second one for the east side, called Georgetown Scoop. The plan had been to cover all three major areas.

A month or so after that they saw how much work three would be. They folded Round Rock, the biggest city north of Austin, together with Georgetown and kept two. TJ is still conflicted about it.

Round Rock started two months later but grew faster. The ad was identical, it just cost less per signup, probably because the city is bigger. Behind the scenes there is a full-time VA who does a bit of everything, plus the VA's sister for two hours a day pulling events. TJ's wife writes and edits.

A newsletter is not the business

TJ's reason for doing this was simple. He had tried to build an audience in crypto and in AI, and found both brutally competitive. A local audience is much easier, because your target is small and almost nobody is going after it. The cost is the cost: 50 cents to a dollar per person, and that's just what it is.

The bigger lesson of the last two months is to stop calling it a local newsletter business. Morning Brew and B2B newsletters can make a fortune from email alone because each reader is worth so much. A local reader isn't. So we are building a local media company: Instagram first, a podcast (TJ has recorded about four episodes), and a full news website once Beehiiv's website platform is ready. Others are adding events or physical products, like Mike Kauffman's Monopoly board.

What goes in an issue

Each weekly send opens with news, then restaurants, then a local business, then a fancy house, because people always click fancy houses. All the events go at the bottom. A new "event of the week" image sits at the top, which TJ plans to sell for around a hundred dollars.

The design is built in Canva and kept playful, because they are not journalists and not hard news. Silly GIFs get a lot of compliments. They also started polls, like "What's your favorite restaurant?", and a survey that appears the second someone subscribes.

Two things surprised them. Links take up a lot of data, and a send that goes over the size limit gets cut off. They were over it for about the first month. And rather than just saying "follow us on Instagram," they now embed a post as a scrolling GIF, which is far more likely to get a click.

The ad math: 70 cents down to about 40

For the first two or three months, ads cost about 70 cents per subscriber. Then Jas Singh of the Winnipeg Digest shared a tip, and it cut that nearly in half almost overnight. TJ had been sending people to a custom landing page full of information about Round Rock and Leander. People who see a lot look at everything and sign up for nothing. Now the ads go to the plain Beehiiv signup page: the newsletter name, a box for your email, nothing else. Jas covers the same fix on his own episode.

Round Rock hit about 18 cents for a week. These days it runs 35 to 40 cents, and Leander runs 50 to 60. Across the whole six months TJ figures the average is about 40 cents.

Free growth was small. Posting in their large HOA group brought 100 to 150 signups in the first couple of days, and a few other Facebook groups added about 100 more. Reddit added a couple. SparkLoop, a referral tool, didn't work for local: too little money for the risk of annoying readers.

Zero ad revenue at 14,000 subscribers

The big question is sales. The answer is zero. TJ says he hasn't put much effort in, so it's no surprise. The early inbound was people who couldn't afford it, like notaries and the little pet store on the corner. Lately two or three real-looking companies reached out, he emailed them, and never followed up. He plans to call them.

His advice is not to follow his example. The companies you want have bigger budgets, but they're harder to reach. The nail salon owner is easy to get on the phone, but wants to pay the least and asks the most questions.

They always run ads in the newsletter anyway, even free ones for friends' businesses. Real ads show other businesses it works, and readers get used to seeing them.

What we'd do differently

If TJ could go back, he would lean toward one newsletter. Parts of Leander are a longer drive to Round Rock than to downtown Austin, so covering Williamson County cuts against the "everything is 15 minutes from your house" promise. But two newsletters double the workload and split the audience, which would be 14,000 in one place.

He also wishes they had pushed harder on organic growth in Reddit and Facebook groups. The negativity hit his wife harder than expected, so they backed off. And they need to send more often. Twice a week would split the events and the length problem, give more ad space, and build the habit around the brand. He thinks three a week is where they end up, which also leaves room for personality, like family photos, that AI can't copy.

The negative CAC idea is the one TJ is stuck on. SparkLoop would have paid him more per subscriber than ads cost, but it didn't work locally. So he is looking for a product or service for the welcome email that isn't obnoxious but gets enough clicks to pay for the subscriber. Christmas light installation was a short-term example he gave. He covers it in more depth in a later episode.

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