Shaan Puri made $50k/month from a newsletter… then shut it down 🤯

Wild story, he shared this on his podcast recently. It's a really good example of a few indie hacker principles that you'll find repeated ad nauseam all over Indie Hackers, but that few ever actually do:

1. Charge more.

Shaan charged $155/month for a newsletter. 😲 The vast majority of newsletters are either free or $5-10/month. "But nobody would ever pay that for my product!" Well, if you want people to pay more, there are two step: (1) offer more value, and (2) escape the competition.

The easiest way to offer more value is to help people make money. Don't just kinda sorta help them. Relentlessly help them. And be clear and explicit about numbers. Shaan was helping his subscribers go from $0 to $1M in a year. How is that not worth $155/month?

2. Be helpful on the internet.

Shaan has well over 1000 true fans. He's constantly putting out free information via his Twitter account and, especially, his podcast. He works at it constantly. His podcast comes out usually 2x/week.

And he doesn't do a lazy, mediocre job. He puts in the time to identify what's useful and entertaining to listen to, does a bunch of research on stories and strategies, and shows up ready to deliver value. 99% of podcasters I know don't do any of this, and spend very little time improving their shows. As a result, people trust Shaan. He's built up his credibility.

When he says he can teach you, you believe him, because he's already taught you for free.

On a related note, I think education is consistently one of the best B2C industries out there for indie hackers. Consumers aren't going to pay much for your to-do list app, but they will pay a lot to learn. Why? Because it's very clear that learning helps them make more money and accomplish other goals in life. People will pay $40,000/year for school just have a better shot at getting a decent job. (They'll also pay a ton for housing, transportation, and healthcare, but those aren't easy fields to break into when you're a tiny indie hacker because they're physical, not digital.)

Education gets a bad rap. People think it's just a huge circle jerk of charlatans selling crappy courses, and some day the whole thing will implode in on itself. They're wrong. Education will continue to grow as an industry as hundreds of millions more people move online to make a living. Plus it provides more real, meaningful value to people than the vast majority of SaaS apps. Ignore the crappy educators. Judging any industry by its lowest-quality participants is a great way to miss an obvious window and opportunity to do something great.

3. Always be parlaying.

As I'm fond of pointing out, IH started as a blog, and now it's a huge community of startup founders, maybe the biggest. Instead of trying to climb a huge mountain right out of the gate, you should start small. Climb a small hill. Then use your height advantage to jump over to an even taller hill. Then repeat the process.

Shaan built a bunch companies with lots of failures and successes, which gave him a ton of knowledge and experience. He also took that time to meet people and make friends. After that, people knew, liked, and respected Shaan, and wanted to collaborate with him. He'd climbed hill #1.

He parlayed those advantages into launching a podcast with Sam Parr, who has a huge newsletter (The Hustle) he could promote the show to. He never could've done this out of the gate. He needed the clout first. He needed to climb hill #1 to be able to parachute over to hill #2. At this point, Shaan had the means to build a big distribution channel for himself.

He busted his ass, iterated, and kept improving the show's format. After recording many dozens of episodes, he found a formula that worked. After hundreds of episodes, he built up a huge subscriber base of people with high amounts of trust and affinity. He'd climbed hill #2.

He parlayed his distribution and reputation advantages to advertise a very expensive newsletter and convert hundreds of people. In other words, he'd parachuted over to hill #3. Again, he never could've done this without climbing hill #2. He could now sell a course because he'd taken the time to build an audience.

Most people are impatient and try to go straight to the biggest hill, where they make very little progress and then quit. Others climb a small hill but never leave it. You have to do multiple things: start small, be very aware of which kind advantages you're accruing as you climb your hill, identify which hills are now possible to jump to given your new advantages, and then make the leap and repeat the process.

Yep. I was a member of Shaan's short-lived experiment. It was called All Access Pass.
He could charge that amount—and people like me were willing to pay it—because he was super focused on providing value. Most newsletters—paid and free—solely consist of the author sharing his or her thoughts on topics relevant to their industry and/or aggregating and curating links relevant to the same industry. Shaan didn't want to just share his thoughts, he wanted to build a business (three actually) and do it completely transparently for his members, including emails he'd send to vendors or investors, record conversations he'd have about sourcing a product from China for his ecommerce project, etc. His focus was on helping people execute, which is of incredible value and not much more rare. But his argument for shutting it down made a ton of sense, too, given his goals. It was a great experiment.

Hi, I am new to indie hackers, I was wondering if somebody could share from the newsletter put together by Shaan Puri. I am very interested in some of the steps he may have taken as I consider myself to start a business.

Cool!! , what was the newsletter name?

cool!

Woah!