A Full-Time Job, 10,000 Readers, and a One-Hour Newsletter

Shane Brady has a full-time job and two local newsletters in Ontario. He writes one of them three times a week, and he says each issue takes about an hour. He joined us to explain how: Facebook ads to build the list, a hockey team to anchor the ad sales, and an RSS-to-Slack-to-ChatGPT setup that does the sorting for him.

One small town, a quarter of the adults

Belleville is a very blue-collar town of about 55,000 people, with a rural area around it. Shane started BOQ Today about eight months before we talked and reached roughly 10,000 subscribers. The town population includes children, so he did his own math. By his count, 10,000 is about 25% of the people age 25 and up.

He only targeted a 15-mile radius with his Facebook ads. He found local newsletters through The Coast, a media outlet in Halifax, Nova Scotia that had been running one for years. Then a podcast about local newsletters kept coming up, and one day he decided to just start.

Skipping organic, going straight to Facebook ads

He gave Reddit and Facebook groups about 48 hours before the group admins deleting his posts wore him out. After that it was all Facebook ads.

BOQ Today cost about 89 cents per subscriber across the first 10,000. Kingston is roughly three times the size, and he was paying about 33 cents so far. Both figures are Canadian.

The first couple thousand are the cheap ones, he says, the people who click on everything. Once he passed about 5,000, the cost got closer to a dollar.

A partner in Kingston who works for a revenue share

A woman in Kingston followed BOQ Today, then emailed him to say she wanted to start the same thing where she lives. She did not want to pay the upfront and monthly Beehiiv costs, so they agreed on an ad revenue share. For now she writes YGK Today three times a week for free, and they split the money once ads come in.

Shane calls her a unicorn. She has a marketing and communications background and has written newsletters for other organizations.

The risk is obvious to him. If she gets a new job, moves or loses interest, the newsletter is stuck. He knows her personally and likes her, so the two of them talked it through ahead of time.

How he sold ads without cold outreach

After his first issue, Shane decided he would never send one without an ad. He comes from sales and marketing, and he knew he would never buy a spot in a newsletter with no advertisers.

He gave free ads to three friends who run trade businesses. After two or three of those, two inbound requests arrived, and his fourth issue carried a paid ad. None has gone out without one since.

Around 5,000 subscribers he got uneasy about the lack of money and sold ads to people he would not sell to again. He did not have time for outbound, so he went after a few big advertisers instead.

He landed the local professional hockey team. He sent an email about it at 6 a.m., went to breakfast, and came back to about 15 inbound ad requests.

Today BOQ Today is 90% booked for the next six months. Each issue has three mini signature ads and a banner at the bottom, and a few readers have said that is too many. He may raise prices and drop a slot. Only one Friday banner was left to sell.

Why a flat monthly fee may beat CPM

Shane aims for about a $50 CPM. He has heard of $70 and $80 CPMs elsewhere, but says those will not fly in a blue-collar town. He also thinks some advertisers should pay more and others cannot afford $50.

The bigger issue was explaining it. Business owners asked what happens if he gains another thousand subscribers, or loses 500. He stopped bringing up CPM with some of them.

His fix is a subscription: at about 10,000 subscribers, roughly $500 or $600 a month, and "are you in or are you out." He is thinking of bundling in some Instagram posts with the newsletter slot. As TJ put it, in local media confusing people makes them do nothing.

From three or four hours of research to about one

At the start, Shane followed around 50 sources: news sites, local bars and restaurants on Instagram, conservation groups and government press releases. He spent the better part of three or four hours going through them and tracked it in a Google Forms tracker. He called it kind of crazy.

His fix, a "duct tape together" setup:

He says nobody wants to read a ChatGPT summary of a press release, so the local voice is the part he adds. The event calendar, he says, "saved my life." He suggests it to anyone who can afford one.

ChatGPT knows what his readers click

After six months of three issues a week, Beehiiv had thousands of click data points. He exported the click report as an Excel file and uploaded it to ChatGPT, and built a custom GPT around it. He grouped his content into categories like local, community and sports, and the GPT could read the linked articles.

He then ran deep research on the clicks. It took 25 to 30 minutes and produced a chart of his hottest topics. Food and drink and food reviews were near the top, even though he had cut them at one point. They went back in.

TJ reacted to this one on the spot: a click report tells you something got clicked, but not why, and the AI can read the content behind it.

Fewer unsubscribes, and a subscriber note

Shane's churn had been climbing as the list grew, because the audience was broader and he was no longer speaking to everyone. After he let ChatGPT guide what he ran, his unsubscribe numbers improved a lot. One subscriber wrote that they read it top to bottom and he nailed everything they wanted to know.

He still uses judgment. If he knows everyone in town will care about a story, it runs, even when ChatGPT passes on it.

What comes next

He does not want more days a week, because that means more churn and more work, and he doubts a town of 56,000 has much more news. He wants to branch into more small and mid-size markets, where one person can cover everything in an hour.

Shane has also thought about going to a neighboring town's local media outlet and offering to start a newsletter for them, maybe as a consultation. A couple of outlets near him have asked how he does it. TJ liked the idea: a retainer to teach and set up newsletters for companies that already have money.