Building a daily newsletter to 2M+ subscribers ft. Rowan Cheung

Rowan Cheung (0:00)

Creator businesses are great businesses, and I can say we're over a figure of annual revenue. You know, we bootstrapped it, and we've been profitable also since day one.

Creator Spotlight (0:07)

Today, we're speaking with Rowan Cheung, creator of The Rundown, which is one of the most successful newsletters covering the AI space. The newsletter has over two million subscribers, and the business generates millions in revenue per year.

Rowan Cheung (0:18)

Two million on the primary daily AI newsletter, and then we're actually over three million now across all the newsletters.

Creator Spotlight (0:24)

Oh, wow.

Rowan Cheung (0:24)

That's also at over 55% open rate.

Creator Spotlight (0:26)

55% is incredible.

Rowan Cheung (0:27)

Yeah, if you find something that's working very, very well, triple the volume there. Just go all out on something that works, because it's not going to work forever. The best ROI long-term is always focusing on something that works.

Creator Spotlight (0:38)

You've interviewed a bunch of big names in this space, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Allman, right?

Rowan Cheung (0:43)

The Mark Zuckerberg interview was my first ever interview, like my first ever appearance on video ever.

Creator Spotlight (0:48)

Is there one or two mistakes you've made that taught you a lot?

Rowan Cheung (0:52)

I made a lot of mistakes hiring, and I don't recommend doing this, but like.

Creator Spotlight (0:58)

Rowan, you were actually one of the earliest Creator Spotlight guests almost a year before I took the reins. So it's nice to bring you back on over three years later. Before we get too in-depth, I want to understand the current scale and consequence of your business. Any sort of recent revenue numbers you could share that will situate the scale of your business at this moment in time?

Rowan Cheung (1:19)

Yeah, I can't share exact specifics, but I can share that it's a real business doing real numbers. I think newsletter businesses and creator businesses typically are thrown under the ringer on not being able to reach big scale, but we've managed to bootstrap three years. I can say we're over eight-figure annual revenue.

We bootstrapped it and we've been profitable also since day one. So creator businesses are great businesses and hopefully we can get into that a little more.

Creator Spotlight (1:51)

Yes. Can you break down your revenue split?

Is it primarily advertising and then there's the university product? How many ways is The Rundown bringing in revenue right now?

Rowan Cheung (2:00)

Yeah. So I'd say there's three primary ways. So the first way is just traditional newsletter advertising. And also now we have social media advertising. We'd bucket that into one.

Then we have education products. We built that on the back of the newsletter business. And then there's also another smaller portion of it, which we call funnel revenue, which we can also get into.

I know there's lots of people that are starting quiz funnels, all sorts of things, and we have some kind of unique ways we monetized it. And yeah, we actually consider it almost like its own product.

Creator Spotlight (2:33)

Yeah. I'm curious about all of these components, but maybe the way that makes the most sense to go through it is to describe your total growth and revenue funnel today. It sounds like you have a pretty dialed in, well-structured system.

Does it make sense to kind of tell the story of the different revenue streams and audience growth through that, or should I go more specific?

Rowan Cheung (2:56)

Yeah, I guess so. So I guess we can kind of tie in the story to that as well. So it really started off just posting on Twitter. Yes. Really just posting organically on Twitter, a lot of organic Twitter threads at the time.

ChatGPT went very viral, and I just so happened to be at the right time, right place with that.

Creator Spotlight (3:18)

You'd already been posting on Twitter for about a year before ChatGPT came out in the AIS.

Rowan Cheung (3:22)

Yeah, it was really right time, right place for that one. And I remember writing a thread on ChatGPT, and it just went super viral. And I said, okay, let's continue doing this.

And I just kind of 3x the output. So a lot of people were writing a thread every Sunday, but I'm like, let's write two threads a day and see what happens. So I was writing 2 threads every single day. And then I said, okay, how can I start a business out of this? And a newsletter business was kind of the first thing that came to mind, made the most sense. It was the best integration from the organic growth. So I would just link the newsletter at the bottom of the threads and say, hey, if you want more, just subscribe to this newsletter. And that was the pitch, and it worked really well at the beginning. And then from there, we were able to be profitable from day one because of Spark Loop.