Hearing a lot about local newsletters in the startup/side hustle world?
I think it’s a bad idea for entrepreneurs to do as a side project
Yet is genius as a second business for a local biz owner
(which is why I'm building inboxfamous.com to build this business for them)
And this is coming from someone who started one as a side project
To be clear; I believe local newsletters are a huge opportunity for 2026 and beyond.
And it’ll likely become an even bigger opportunity in time, as AI creates more online chaos, people will revert to what they can know and trust, which is everything local/provable.
But that does not mean it’s a great opportunity for your typical solopreneur or white collar employee looking for a side hustle. Here’s why:
• It is absolutely a long term play. The odds of significant success in the short term is very low
• And that’s because it takes time and money to get real traction
• First let’s start with money. Even if you can get subscribers for 20-40cents for the first 5k or so (which I frequently have done, but not always), you’re still spending a $3-5k just to get to a viable stage (with software and other tools as well).
Not crazy money, but a lot for someone making $100k or less. And you don’t just stop spending at this point, you still need to keep growing, but now it’s more viable to start trying to monetize. Which I’ll get into later
• Second is time. While writing the local newsletter itself isn’t incredibly time consuming (anywhere from 2-10hrs a week depending on your level of detail), that’s only one small part of the business.
You need to account for all the other things that you’d have to do to make it a successful endeavor; first and foremost is selling ads.
Which is not easy at all, and likely very time consuming.
Second would be putting legitimate effort into social media, which I believe is practically a requirement for long term success.
With just these three, you’re getting close to 25-40hrs a week if going after them hard.
• With the longer time horizon for success (likely 6-12 months) plus start up costs, you’re spending a lot of time and money with very little to show for it in the beginning.
• And that’s the real rub; opportunity cost. If you put that same money and time/effort into something that has the ability to pay off much quicker (like an agency of some kind), it becomes clear that for most, doing something with a quicker path to success and likely a higher upside is the smarter way to go
Given all of that, here’s why 7-8 figure high LTV local business owners should absolutely start a local media company.
• Starting with monetization; unlike traditional local media where almost all revenue comes from ads, you’re primary plan for profiting is by marketing your current business.
That’s via ads inside the newsletter/brand, but also from general personal branding.
Unlike traditional local media, you'll put yourself out there as the face of the brand. Talk about yourself and what you’re doing around town, how you want to help the community, host events and fundraisers, etc.
This is likely where you’ll have massive success over time, being in front of the community every week (or more on social media) and becoming a high status person that provides a ton of value to the community.
When you do that, why would someone google to find a competitor of yours, when they already know and like you?
And for ad revenue, which you should also strive for, again you already have a team that can help with this. Either sales people, or even just cold/warm outreach and processing, you can outsource it.
• Second is time; will take much less of your time because you can outsource almost all of the work. To your team, to my team (if you want to partner with me, check out inboxfamous dot com) or hiring a VA. You have the funds that a solopreneur doesn’t.
• Third is optionality. If you own a local business already, you’re probably interested in buying or starting another local business.
By doing this model, you’ll already have an audience to sell to, partners to work with and a large local reputation.
• Fourth is networking. If you’re goal is to build a powerful local network, this might be the absolute best way to do it.
It’s one to many at first, so when you walk into a room, they’ll likely already know you or your brand. And they’ll be extremely interested in it, because your audience is their ideal clients.
This is especially true for those who are in industries that are boring or have a bad reputation, like insurance agents, realtors, financial planners, etc.
You can stop telling people you’re an insurance agent, and start telling them you’re the publisher of “city” Scoop. They’re interest level in connecting with you will be significantly higher.
Likely more reasons I’m forgetting on why this is such a big opportunity for local business owners, but these hopefully have been enough to convince you.
Now let’s discuss a couple of the obvious changes from AI coming and how they might impact this opportunity:
• The good: will help making content easier. This is already happening and will only get easier. Especially with the Local Newsletter OS software I'm building specifically for this
• The bad: many AI local newsletters have already started and will likely get more frequent.
But they WON’T work like yours because they won’t be truly local and will easily be sniffed out and ignored.
You will build trust by actually being local, being on socials and out in the community where they won’t. I really don’t think this is a significant risk.
• Supposed bad but possibly good: the growing impact of AI on email inboxes. Two issues here, both won’t have much impact on local newsletters.
• AI summaries: these are a big risk to a lot of newsletters that are telling one story or teaching one lesson that can just be summarized.
But a traditional local newsletter has a ton of info and events that just can’t be summarized. Should not be much risk here.
• AI impacting the inbox via crazy amount of spam: This will likely have a big impact on email, but may be a net positive great local newsletters.
Because the companies like Gmail running email, will continue to make it easier than ever to block unwanted email or crazy easy to unsubscribe and block newsletters.
This is very bad for average newsletters.
But if you write a great local newsletter and your readers want to read it, this is good news because they’ll be way less clutter in the inbox.
Meaning they’ll be much more likely to read and engage with it, with so much less there to distract them.
TLDR:
The need for local media is only going to grow. People are going to start to truly reject AI content online when they know that’s what it is, or they’ll be suspicious of content when they’re not sure.
Following brands and people that they can know/like/trust will becoming a priority.
You can be that for them for all things related to their local community.
**If you are a 7/8 figure local business owner, with a high LTV B2C business, and want me to build and run this entire business for you, DM me or go to inboxfamous.com and fill out the form.
