This Beauty & Business Newsletter is Worth $200M!

Read time: 3 minutes

Good morning! It's Monday, July 11th - Today we’re diving into how Daniella Pierson grew her side hustle newsletter into a $200M business. Let’s find out what drove her success!

THE FEATURE

This Beauty & Business Newsletter is Worth $200M!

Daniella Pierson founded Newsette in 2015 as a sophomore at Boston University.

After graduating, Pierson quickly grew her newsletter side hustle into a $200M business that distributed content on business, fashion, and beauty to a female subscriber base

What’s the Business?

Pierson’s vision for Newsette was to create a newsletter that appealed to incredible women and empowered them with inspiring content. However, Pierson admits that she was initially an awful writer, but she did have a secret weapon– a business degree and impressive entrepreneurial wit.

She amassed 14,000 subscribers in her first year by soliciting her social media connections with an unpaid ambassador program that appealed to college students with spotty resumes. Through the program, anyone that referred 10 people to Newsette would be labeled an official ambassador and could list it on their resume and LinkedIn profiles.

With her subscriber base, Pierson took Newsette to the next level with influencer marketing. In each of her newsletters, she began including exclusive interviews with women that had ~50,000 social media followers. By creating a network of somewhat notable influencers, she climbed the ladder and secured big interviews with celebrities like Selena Gomez and fashion designers like Diane von Furstenberg.

At its core, Newsette is an affiliate marketing company that helps direct-to-consumer brands sell their products. Pierson’s big break came after Ulta Beauty, a top makeup brand, made a six-figure deal with Newsette to be featured in sponsored advertisements.

Through this business model, Newsette generated $13M in sales for the first quarter of 2021 and made an estimated $40M that year.

The Innovation

Invest in Employee Recruitment

Pierson was initially reluctant to hire employees because she didn’t want to dilute the intimate connection she had with her subscriber base, but Newsette’s growth necessitated more help.

To ensure Newsette maintained its brand image and high-quality content, Pierson rolled out an extreme strategy to get great references. For one month, Newsette offered $10,000 to any subscriber that referred the company’s next employee. This program spent $40K to recruit 4 new employees in 2017, which was a significant amount of funds in the newsletter’s initial years.

Despite Newsette’s current $200M valuation, her team has only expanded to roughly twenty people. Pierson believes that having a small and highly qualified team with a narrow focus has driven much of Newsette’s success.

Curated subscriber list

While other newsletters simply focus on acquiring as many subscribers as possible, Newsette has 500,000 readers and works to keep it that way.

Pierson is constantly evaluating subscriber data on open rates, read rates, and click-through rates. This allows her to purge inactive subscribers from her newsletter and maintain the best 500,000 subscribers on her list.

With a base of 500,000 extremely active subscribers, Pierson can present impressive statistics to Fortune 500 companies and acquire them as clients. Her pitch is simple: $100,000 in ad spend with Newsette will lead to significantly higher engagement levels and ROI than other mediums.

The Playbook

Pierson’s success shows that you don’t need venture capitalist investments or impressive connections to start a business– you just need entrepreneurial grit. Here’s a step-by-step on how Pierson grew her newsletter:

• Attract your initial client base via word-of-mouth marketing

• Create a referral program that rewards ambassadors

• Connect with social media influencers in your area of interest

• Leverage your subscribers and influencer network to secure brand partnerships

• Invest heavily in employee recruitment

• Acquire big-money clients by meticulously maintaining an active subscriber base