🧠 Newsletter Mergers

Hey there 👋,

At the start of the month I featured the acquisition of Big Brain by The Neuron in my Media Assets newsletter:

At the time, I asked Pete Huang, the co-founder and co-acquirer, how this deal came about, here’s his response…

How did you get into newsletter businesses?

The Neuron is our first newsletter to get to this scale. Noah and I independently have long been naturally drawn to content and have been publishing online in various capacities over the last few years.

How have you been able to grow TN to over 200K subscribers?

This has taken the bulk majority of 2023. We spent most of our time focusing on LinkedIn and paid acquisition.

Why did you choose to acquire BB vs using that money for paid acquisition for TN?

From a business perspective, we were focusing on the higher demonstrated intent. These readers were already used to receiving an opening an AI-related newsletter every couple of days, so we figured it'd be a promising place to look.

Was the deal done privately or through a marketplace?

We've known Alex for the better part of the year. We come from a lot of similar contexts in the startup and tech industry so have plenty of mutual friends and contacts. In addition to that, I think all of the people behind the AI-related newsletters that have reached some scale started at similar times and all have chatted with one another, so this year has sorta been one big shared experience - we all know what we've been through. Eventually, the conversation turned to an acquisition and we ended up moving quite fast from there.

Will you be moving subscribers of BB over into TN or keep running it separately?

We've already migrated Big Brain subscribers over to The Neuron.

Any future growth or exit plans?

All eyes on growth. So much to do (and so much we get to do) that we're really excited about.

I expect a lot more newsletter M&A to happen over the next 6-12 months due to an increase in supply and a compression in sponsorship CPMs.

This may also mean that some smaller ones are NGMI which Jens would be targeting if he launches a marketplace:

Ok that’s all from me this week, I’m still super deep into AI automation and will likely have an update next week.

Until then good luck playing the game of letters.

Cheers!

Richard Patey

ps if you need help sourcing, summarizing and formatting stories, check out my $499/m weekly content package at Letter Operators.

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Disclaimer: Not financial or business advice. This newsletter is strictly for information and education purposes. There are affiliate links to beehiiv in this issue.