Hey there 👋,

In this week’s newsletter, I discuss:

• Substack raising from its community

• Antifragile newsletter revenue

• Did a top 5 domain sale of all time just go down?

And please check out our new sponsor this week, 360 Wall St, as sponsorship is a key revenue component for this newsletter.

🧯 Will $5M help Substack’s burn?

As you know I’m a big fan of Substack, they helped me build and sell a six figure paid newsletter back in 2020, and even as late as last month I was still a firm believer in them.

But then I tried beehiiv and quickly moved my newsletters over (consolidating from 6 to now 3). It was clear to me the growth benefits of being on beehiiv vs Substack, and it was worth paying for.

Substack is still free, unless you run paid subscriptions where they take a 10% rake. However, in my experience, paid subs do not work anywhere near as well in 2023 as they did back in 2020. Most newsletter operators will have to run sponsored ads and/or develop their own one-off products instead.

So it wasn’t surprising to see them announce yesterday that they were raising funding again, but to do it via Wefunder certainly was. In my experience of equity crowdfunding (which launched here in the UK a long time before it was allowed in the US) the vast majority of companies on the platforms are there because they couldn’t raise from anyone else.

Many on Twitter think the valuation is extremely high and unfair on their community:

It’s now raised over $5M on Wefunder, but that doesn’t really feel material to the over $82M they’ve raised so far, according to Crunchbase.

And Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge just published a post stating how Substack looks desperate in hitting up retail investors:

You can read the full post here:

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💬 8 Figure Domain Acquisition

Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot just tweeted that he acquired the domain chat.com:

In a post on Linkedin he explains the domain was an 8 figure deal that he purchased personally:

According to Namebio, this puts the domain purchase in the top 5 of all time:

📧 Other Investing Newsletters

Ok, that’s it from me, until next week, be well and share this newsletter to get my referral rewards:

Cheers!

Richard Patey - @richardpatey