🍿 How a boring B2B newsletter makes $1 Billion a year by niching down....

Welcome

Whats up! Welcome to Wouters blog. 

Boring businesses are all the 'rage' now a days. And newsletters inherently aren't super exciting.

It's just a digital newspaper.

Now building a $1 Billion dollar anything is hard! let alone a boring business. But Agora seems to have cracked the da-vinci-billion code.

In todays newsletter i'm going to show you exactly how they make their money and i'll talk about:

• The hedgehog concept

• Growing subscribers

• The Ripple Effects

• bonus: A sales secret from last week

Happy Monday, let's get it!!

P.s, I’m building this newsletter in public! If you want to see the behind the scenes, follow me on twitter..

Follow me booty here lad.

BREAKDOWN
The HedgeHog Concept

So Agora has a key revenue source which is their >22 subscription based newsletters. The entire company is focused on just 2 industries.

Finance and Health. (Both lucrative niches)
Each newsletter ranges from $100 a year to as high as $5,000 a year (see here for full list)

The beautiful thing about Agora is that despite being in "only" two industries (Finance & Health), they niche down hard.

Because of this 'niching down' Agora provides incredibly detailed financial news to audiences. These audiences are incredibly niche and as such more high value.

This does make it more costly to create content. Since you have to hire experts to produce the content, to market it and so forth. But, the benefit is you serve a single clear customer.

So basically Agora uses this formula:

Communicate complex topics, in a simple way, to a single customer/reader profile = profit

And just charges a shit ton of money for access to the content! Therefore, great content aside, Agora must do an above average job of marketing.

GROWTH
The Agora model to grow your user-base

Agora needs more users to make more money (duh), but in 5 years from 2015 to 2020 they added $500M in revenue.

That means they needed significant inflows of traffic to even capture enough subscribers.

The first way Agora drives traffic is through advertisements and co-promotions in their existing newsletter audiences. (Remember the 2024 playbook i wrote about?)

Then, given enough inflow of traffic, Agora's model is to offer a very low priced 'tripwire' offer. Then a high value product like the newsletter at a discount.

Given this they convert a decent chunk of folks. Now they can start tracking. After observing specific behaviours Agora uses triggers to upsell folks into memberships. Whilst downselling folks even when they unsubscribe.

Importantly, Agora nurtures all these subscriber relationships by having enough products/automations to cater to specific needs.

TAKEAWAY
Ripple Effects

You might not have heard much about Agora -- that's by design. They like to keep things under wraps.

There is a lot to learn from but hard to do so givent hat secrecy.

They're raking in a cool $50M+ every single week! Now from just today we've learned about the Hedgehog concept, Agora's growth model and the upsell like crazy playbook.

Would love to hear if anyone has other takeaways, email me by replying to this email if you do!

They are regarded as ‘masters of upselling’ and are very well known in the industry, with business growth advisor Pete Boyle saying

Now to sign off here is my sales secret of the week:

Sales Secret
10x your sales leads within minutes..

SO today i'm going to do some shame-less self promotion, and tell you about Open Rates. It is the tool that helped a Newsletter (like yours) close a $20,000+ deal , with very little effort.

Now i don't know about you -- but I enjoy making more money with less effort. So i want to tell you about the secret tool that the worlds best newsletters operators use to grow revenue?

The secret weapon is Open Rates. It's a tool that helps you find and convert newsletter sponsorships in your niche.

There’s a limited 3 day free trial right now just for y’all so make sure to get it while you can!

Need Help?
Time to help. Need Sales Advice? I got you..

Are you running a newsletter right now and are looking for an external sales-experts opinion on wtf is going on?

I’ve helped sell millions of dollars worth of newsletter advertisements. IF you want consulting advice i’m available for calls.

Reply to this email if you’re interested with your problem(s) + budget.

wait…
BEFORE YOU GO!

Don’t forget

Don’t forget to come back for Fridays newsletter where I will cover:

• The weekly newsletter media breakdown!