25-Year-Old Substacker Earning $500,000/Year

Edwin DorseyFounder of The Bear Cave $500,000 annual revenue
Published April 3, 2023 by Niall Doherty

Edwin Dorsey tweets…

Launching a Substack changed my life. After three years:

~1,100 paid subscribers
~40,000 free subscribers
~$500k ARR

Edwin’s Substack newsletter is called The Bear Cave. 

One testimonial for it reads…

The Bear Cave exposes fraud through a mixture of investigative reporting, financial analysis and qualitative research. The best newsletter for short ideas and corporate wrongdoing.

Free subscribers get 4 emails a month and paid subscribers get an extra 2. The paid tier costs $44/month or $440/year.

Incredibly, Edwin was only 21 or 22 years old when he launched the newsletter in early 2020

But as he revealed in an interview later that year, he’d long been obsessed with his subject matter…

Dorsey got hooked on investing in elementary school, when his grandmother put some money for him into an E-Trade account. “I honestly think if you asked me in third grade what I wanted to be, I would have said investor.” He started writing for stock-research platform Seeking Alpha as a teenager and “cold-emailed so many people,” trying to set up meetings.

(FYI, third graders are usually ~9 years old.)

Still pretty incredible that someone so young has done so well in this line of work.

Seems Edwin’s choice of niche has a lot to do with that.

He writes…

Do something UNIQUE. You want to be the only person who does what you do. Build a personal monopoly. No one wants more email, so you need something unique and differentiated to make it work

Internet niches are bigger than you think […] Passionate about agricultural tech? European bonds? Fine wines? Women’s Soccer? Each of these would work if you’re passionate and dominate it

The thing is, I’m not sure Edwin’s newsletter is all that unique. At first I thought it was basically a newsletter version of the Coffeezilla YouTube channel. 

That may or may not be true, but it has me thinking: there are probably a bunch of popular YouTube channels that you could do a newsletter version of, or vice versa.

More generally, do you see something working in one format that might work well in another?

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