How to build an audience business from your expertise

To build an audience business from your expertise, pick a narrow beat you know from your career and say something specific about it. Do it on one platform where your readers already spend time, on a schedule you can keep for a year, and move them onto an email list you control. Then design the offer early. At small audience sizes, services and products earn far more than subscriptions or sponsorships.

What is an audience business, and is it right for you?

An audience business is a company built on the trust of a defined group of readers who come back for what you publish, and then pay you or your sponsors for it.

For a tech leader with 5 to 10+ years behind them, that means a newsletter or media brand about one specific part of the job: B2B pricing, platform engineering, product operations in fintech, growth for developer tools.

Anyone can start a newsletter. Very few people have run a pricing change across 4,000 customers, and that experience is the reason anyone subscribes.

My honest filter is that you have to like thinking in public and be fine being visible. In my Builder Archetypes framework that's the Broadcaster, someone whose voice is the distribution and who enjoys the exposure. If you'd rather sell a defined leadership role to two or three companies and never post, going fractional fits you better.

One more rule. An audience grows slowly, so I wouldn't start one without a job or advisory work paying the bills for the first year.

How do you pick a beat and a point of view?

Pick the narrowest topic where you have real experience and a specific group of people has a problem that keeps coming back. Then take a clear position on how to solve it.

A beat is the subject you cover. A point of view is the belief that makes your take different from everyone else writing about the same thing.

"Leadership" is a category. "Engineering management at Series A to C startups" is a beat. "Engineering managers at that stage should stay hands-on for another year" is a point of view. The beat tells readers whether it's for them, and the point of view gives them a reason to pick you.

Find the beat in your career

Start with the problems people already ask you about: in Slack, over coffee, on the calls you took as a favour. Keep the ones you've worked on more than once and seen go wrong. Those give you real stories and real numbers to write from, and readers can tell.

Then put each candidate through three checks:

• Depth. You should be able to list 50 issue topics without researching. If you run out at 15, the beat is too narrow or too far from what you've actually done.
• Buyers. Your readers need budgets, or need to work at companies that have them. Heads of growth at SaaS companies can support sponsors, services and products. Students mostly can't.
• Staying power. You'll be writing about this every week, so pick something you'll still care about in three years.

Write the point of view in one sentence

April Dunford's positioning work applies to media too: readers judge you against the alternatives they already have. If those are generic newsletters on your topic, your point of view is the thing they can't get there.

My test is simple. Write it as a sentence a smart reader could disagree with. If nobody would, keep going.

Which platform should you start on?

Start on the one platform where your readers already spend their working time, and repurpose from there. For B2B tech audiences that's LinkedIn plus an email newsletter. Podcasts and communities work better as a second step.

The two do different jobs. LinkedIn decides who sees each post, which gets you in front of new people fast and means your reach can change without warning. Email is yours and every issue lands in the inbox, but nobody discovers you there. So use LinkedIn to get found, and give people a reason to join your list.

• LinkedIn suits B2B beats read by managers, founders and buyers. I built an audience of over 15,000 followers there, and it's where I'd start again for a B2B beat.
• A newsletter on beehiiv, Substack, Kit or similar is the asset you keep. Start it on day one, even with a tiny list.
• A podcast grows slower. Its payoff is the relationships you build with guests, some of whom could become clients.
• A community is the hardest place to start, because it needs an existing audience to seed it.

My rule is one primary platform and one owned channel. Spread yourself across five and you'll lose the cadence on the one that matters.

How often should you publish?

Publish at the highest cadence you could keep for 12 months through your busiest quarter, on a fixed day, in a fixed format. With a job or clients, that's one newsletter issue a week and two or three posts a week on your main platform.

Readers build a habit around an issue that shows up when they expect it. That habit is what turns into opens, replies and, eventually, sales.

What keeps you publishing through a bad month:

1. A fixed shape. Same day, same structure, similar length. One main idea, one example, one takeaway. The format is already decided, so your energy goes into the idea.
2. A buffer. Always keep one finished issue in reserve for the week you're sick or travelling.
3. A topic bank. Keep a running list of the questions readers ask. Replies to your issues are the best source of next month's topics.
4. Repurposing. Every issue becomes several posts on your main platform, each one pointing back to the newsletter.

If you want to work this through for your own beat, the Founder Content agent in The Stack gives you your content pillars, point of view, platform choice, cadence and repurposing plan in one document.

How do you grow a newsletter?

You grow a newsletter with a handful of repeatable methods: converting followers from a social platform, a lead magnet, reader referrals, swaps and recommendations with other newsletters, and appearances in front of someone else's audience. I'd pick two, do them every week, and track new subscribers by source.

Turn followers into subscribers

Put the subscribe link everywhere the platform lets you, like your profile and featured section. When a post touches a topic you've covered in depth, mention the newsletter.

Offer a lead magnet

A lead magnet is something useful you give away for an email address: a template, a benchmark, a short email course. The best ones upgrade a piece that's already popular, like the spreadsheet behind the pricing post or the full question list behind the hiring post.

It should also point towards what you'll sell later. The Lead Magnet agent in The Stack designs one with you, including the bridge from the free piece to the paid offer.

Use referrals and cross-promotion

Ask readers to forward the issue. One line, in every issue. Newsletter platforms have referral programmes and recommendation networks where newsletters suggest each other to new subscribers. Swaps with writers on adjacent beats work well, because their readers already read about your topic.

Show up in other people's channels

Guest posts, podcast interviews, talks and co-hosted webinars put you in front of people who already trust the host. For a tech leader these are the easiest ones to get, because hosts want operators with real experience.

How do you make money with a newsletter?

You make money with a newsletter through five models: sponsorships, paid subscriptions, a paid community, digital products, and services like advising, workshops or consulting. They start working at very different audience sizes. With a small, specific expert audience, the higher-priced models pay first.

Where the table has a number, it comes from beehiiv's public reports. Everywhere else I've left numbers out, because I haven't found public benchmarks I'd trust.

What the data says about paid subscriptions

beehiiv's State of Paid Newsletters 2026 report uses first-party data from thousands of publications. It puts the median free-to-paid conversion rate at 0.62%, the median monthly price at $10 and the median yearly price at $100. The top 10% of technology newsletters convert 5.55%.

Two more details from it. The typical creator launched a paid tier 45 days after starting, and subscriber count doesn't meaningfully change the price.

Run the medians and the maths looks like this:

Now compare an illustrative services offer. Say 2,000 people read your newsletter on B2B pricing, and you sell a 3,000€ pricing workshop to their companies. Two bookings a quarter is 24,000€ a year. At the medians above, 5,000 subscribers pay about $3,700 a year.

That's why I'd put a service or product first, and add subscriptions or sponsors once the list is big enough for them to matter.

The first dollar comes faster than people expect. beehiiv's State of Newsletters 2026 report says the median newsletter launched on the platform in 2025 earned its first dollar in 66 days. A living income takes a lot longer, and how much longer depends on the offer.

Why do audiences without an offer stall?

An audience without an offer stalls because readers have no next step, you can't tell whether the work pays off, and motivation fades after a year of unpaid weekly publishing. If you're good at content, this is the trap I'd watch most closely.

It goes like this. Followers go up, people leave kind comments, and selling starts to feel like it might spoil the goodwill. So the offer gets pushed to "when the audience is bigger". A year later there are 8,000 followers, no revenue and no idea what anyone would pay for.

• Decide the first offer before issue one. You can change it later. Knowing it shapes what you write and who you write for. If you don't know what to sell yet, start with what to sell after a career in tech.
• Mention it from the start. A one-line footer ("I run pricing workshops for Series A SaaS teams, reply if that's you") teaches readers that you sell something.
• Treat replies as research. When readers ask for help with the same problem more than once, you've found a product. Bob Moesta's jobs-to-be-done interviews help you find out what made them ask.

If your offer is a template, course or toolkit, the guide on how to sell digital products covers packaging and pricing.

How do you start a media company alongside a job?

Start a media company alongside a job by treating it as a weekly publishing habit for the first six months: one beat, one platform, one newsletter and one offer. Add people or formats only once readers and revenue justify it. And before you publish anything, check your employment contract for rules on outside work.

1. Weeks 1 to 2. Choose the beat, write your point of view sentence and list 50 topics. Write the first offer in one paragraph. Set up the newsletter and a simple subscribe page.
2. Weeks 3 to 4. Write three issues before you announce anything, so you start with a buffer. Build one lead magnet from your strongest topic.
3. Weeks 5 to 12. Publish one issue a week and two or three posts a week. Ask for forwards in every issue. Line up one guest appearance or newsletter swap a month.
4. End of week 12. Look at subscribers by source, the issues with the most replies and the questions people asked. Pitch the first offer to the readers who replied most.

By then you'll know two things: whether you enjoy the weekly rhythm, and whether readers respond to the beat. At this stage that tells you more than the subscriber count.

Questions people ask