He Was Offered $635K for a 90-Day-Old Newsletter

Greg IsenbergSerial Entrepreneur $635,000+ approximate worth of You Probably Need a Robot
Published September 4, 2023 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

Greg Isenberg tweets…

Someone offered me $635k to buy @youneedarobot

– 60,000 newsletter subscribers
– Agency that helps with AI/automation
– 15k+ Discord
– Free/paid course called 5 tool 5 days that just launched […]
– Launched 90 days ago

Should I sell it?

He didn’t sell it.

You Probably Need A Robot is yet another AI newsletter. They were a little late into the AI space but still managed to get traction.

It all started with a Discord community back in February, when Greg tweeted

Just launched a free community for people looking to use AI to boost productivity to grow wealthier and happier

It’s called You Probably Need a Robot

He then launched the newsletter the following month which started out daily and became weekly.

Here’s a recent edition.

The format…

Tool demoHow-to sectionLatest news in AI

How did Greg grow his community and newsletter so fast?

He lays out his playbook in this thread.

A key step was finding a “superniche”…

You want to find something that’s growing yet underserved

You can use platforms like Redditlist.com to find growing niches and super niches

Once you find a niche, you want to find your superniche (aka subniche)

I do this by sorting by hot/top posts

Example: in the AI subreddits, I sorted by hot and top posts. Once I did that, I realized that many of the hottest AI convos were about productivity

Voilà, I had found my superniche.

However, I think Greg tends to downplay what was surely a key factor in growing his business so quickly: having 300K+ followers on Twitter to start with

Prasid Pathak has a nice deep-dive on how Greg built that audience.

In short…

Greg gained lots of experience working in (and founding) startups.Joined Twitter in 2008 but it was 2019 before he started building a big audience there.Mostly grew his audience with insightful threads and hot takes.

One hack you might be able to use comes via this (since deleted) tweet from Greg last November

A young couple tracked the effects of 10 different 30-day sleep quality experiments over the last 18 months (web archive)

Prasid’s take…

Greg’s second most-liked tweet… 

Interestingly, this was not original content: it was from a Reddit post that had appeared on the subreddit r/dataisbeautiful a few months earlier. Greg’s talked at length about unbundling Reddit or studying Reddit to understand what the community wants/needs. I suspect he noticed how well this Reddit post did, and then looked for a way to craft his own spin on it. 

(Also worth noting that Greg monetized that tweet with an affiliate link in a follow-up)

Easy enough to do this for your own niche: find posts doing well on Reddit, then repurpose or react to them on social.

Once you’ve built up a good-size audience, there are many ways to monetize

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