How Richard Patey Built a Newsletter Empire With Multiple Exits

Building a successful newsletter is incredibly rewarding…But it’s no walk in the park.

That’s why doing it twice is an incredible feat.

But… running up to six newsletters at once? That takes a lot of thought, strategy, and structure. Not many can pull that off.

Yet, Richard Patey has done it. And, he’s even sold a few of them for some substantial paydays.

We recently sat down with Richard Patey, founder of the Digital Asset Investor newsletter, to discuss how he’s launched, monetized, and sold several newsletters over the years–and why he switched his newsletter empire to beehiiv.

Richard was eager to share his strategy behind running several newsletters simultaneously, his journey as a content creator in different mediums, and why he moved all of his newsletters over to beehiiv to accelerate his growth.

In today’s Spotlight, we will cover:

• Starting, scaling, and selling newsletters.

• The specific platform Richard used previously and how he thinks through newsletter sales.

• How he structures the 6 newsletters he runs, and the toolkit that enables him to do so.

• So much more on breaking into the online world, monetizing, and how to flip a current newsletter to launch a second one.

If you’re looking to launch your own newsletter or trying to expand your business as a digital creator, keep reading. With over a decade of experience as a creator, Richard has plenty to share about how to succeed.

And for more, be sure to check out two of his many newsletters here.

Origin Story: 10+ Years in the Content Game

Richard is no rookie in the newsletter game.

He’s a veteran creator with over a decade of experience earning a living from his online ventures. He’s dabbled in everything from SEO to affiliate marketing, blogging, email marketing, sales funnels, and more.

One thing’s for sure. He knows how to create money trees online that provide recurring revenue.

He recalled, “I've been working online for more than ten years. But ten years ago I had a personal website richardpatey.com that I'm bringing back to life now as an SEO play. I had a newsletter there running from like 2012.”

“[I ran it] in the traditional way, where there's an opt-in and lead magnet as an incentive to to sign up to my list. Then I would just email out links to new blog posts that I did, the emails were really short.”

“That's the way it was done back then. My focus was on growing content, websites, blogs, ranking in Google, and monetizing mainly through affiliate marketing. So most of my online career has been ranking content sites with SEO, making affiliate commissions, and primarily promoting software products.”

2017: Selling His First $5,000-Per-Month Site

Richard was able to bring in traffic to his sites through SEO-driven content. But, the part he excelled at was turning visitors into dollars. Not only was he able to make a full-time income from a software review site called funnelengine.com; he even managed to sell it for a nice payday.

He shared, “2017 was the first content site exit that I had. I was promoting funnel software called ClickFunnels, as well as SamCart, and a bunch of other ones, including the email software, Drip.”

“I was promoting those as an affiliate, making affiliate commissions, and grew that to $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 a month. I sold that through a website brokerage. It's kind of interesting, looking back, because I actually had a really killer lead magnet that was offering free funnel templates for ClickFunnels users.”

“I got like 15,000 emails through a homepage squeeze page back in the day. And I didn't understand the value of that at all. The email list was driving the vast majority of revenue. It was funny at the time because I kept pruning that email list down to under 5,000 subscribers… I didn't want to go into the bigger plan on Drip!”

He shared, “The email—it wasn't a newsletter. The emails that I was sending were all kinds of affiliate offers. That was what was driving revenue. So the newsletter was the business back then. But conceptually, it was still a website. So I sold that business as a website.”

“That was a massively under-leveraged asset,” he admits. “I sold the website—the pages that were ranking in Google. I sold the email list. And, I sold my affiliate accounts (that provided recurring revenue). I massively undersold that. But it was my first exit.”

2020: Paid Newsletter to a Six-Figure Exit

After the sale of his site, Richard became obsessed with the whole process of buying and selling websites. He began looking at them as assets that could be invested in. But, instead of creating another website to promote affiliate offers, he decided to dive head-first into the premium newsletter game.

He shared, “We get to 2020 and I'm quite early to Substack. I launched a newsletter for website investors. So I had sold a website. I then started working with the buyer of my website. We went and did some other deals together. We did some other acquisitions together.”

While most paid newsletter creators charge $5 per month for an upgraded version of their free newsletter, Richard positioned his as a premium publication and was able to charge ten times that amount.

“I worked with other investors who were interested in buying websites. So I launched the website investing publication on Substack. It was a paid subscription for $50 a month. I got over one hundred people on that. I then launched a free newsletter—what we consider an editorial newsletter.”

Richard commented that one of the reasons this website investment newsletter did so well was because he was simply the first one there.

“I was the first one in my niche to do this. It was a summary of all the news in the space—what other people were writing on their blogs—and then giving my thoughts. I monetized that through sponsorships and through affiliates—website marketplaces and website brokerages.”

“I then sold that newsletter. I built that really quickly, with a similar timeframe to the Milk Road, but with a much smaller six-figure exit. I sold that to a guy called Travis Jamison. So that was in 2020.”

After his second sale, Richard continued to explore the digital creator world by branching out into podcasting and paid communities. However, he always found himself coming back to newsletters because of the different income streams available.

“I played around with paid communities. I realized it's actually a lot harder to maintain. I've done a lot of podcasting as well, but I’m not personally looking to host one again as it’s a lot of work. So, a newsletter, for me, is by far the best business model there is. It's the easiest to manage. There are so many ways of monetizing it.”

2021: Selling an Alternative Asset Newsletter to Flippa.com

For Richard’s next venture, he decided to jump on the alternative asset and in particular NFT train right as it was picking up steam in 2021.

“At the end of 2021, I launched another [newsletter] on Substack called Alts Cafe. I had a Discord community. This is when I was getting really heavy into NFTs, and that was my main personal focus. So I was talking about alternative assets like websites, newsletters, crypto, NFTs, and domains. All the stuff that I was interested in, researching, and buying.”

This time, when Richard decided to sell his business, he caught the attention of a pretty big player in the digital world: Flippa.

He shared, “I then sold that newsletter and community to Flippa.com. Flippa is the biggest website marketplace. That was more of an acqui-hire than an acquisition because I hadn't monetized it yet.”

If you’ve never heard of an “acqui-hire” before, don’t worry, you’re not alone. An acqui-hire is similar to an acquisition, in that a business buys another business to expand its empire because of the product or service it provides. But, instead of simply buying the business and taking over the operations, an acqui-hire involves buying a business for the team that runs it.

In other words, Flippa saw how valuable Richard’s newsletter was, and that he was the main ingredient to its success. So, they purchased it–with a clause stipulating that he’s part of the deal.

“I did that within Flippa for six months, and then outside Flippa for another six months. And that finished in February of this year.”

Running Six Newsletters at Once

After his time running the alt asset newsletter, Richard decided to double down on newsletters and essentially create a newsletter empire.

He shared, “So after my six months at Flippa (employed there), I left and started a new newsletter, Acquire, where I was talking about acquiring websites, similar to what I've done before.”

“It was showcasing the top content site website listings across the marketplaces. I did that for six months at Substack. Then I started to consider building different niche newsletters.”

Shortly after Richard decided to launch several newsletters, he began running into a few scaling roadblocks on Substack.

“I was also talking about domains, and at Substack I tried the feature where you could add additional newsletters within your main publication as a section. But it really wasn't what I was after. You couldn't see how many subscribers were part of the separate newsletter. You had no understanding in terms of metrics. You couldn't manually subscribe or unsubscribe people between newsletters.”

“I quickly realized that was not a way to scale my newsletter—mini empire ambition—at the time. So I created a separate newsletter for domains. I then created another one for NFTs and another one for newsletters.”

Catching the beehiiv Buzz

After making some adjustments to his strategy, Richard was running half a dozen newsletters on Substack which he admits was too many. Soon after, he started to hear about a new newsletter platform making noise on Twitter. Eventually, the buzz behind beehiiv became too loud to ignore.

“I heard about beehiiv for quite a while previously, but I knew that Substack had worked for me before, and I was getting quite a lot of recommendations from their platform. But I just kept hearing about more and more people that were creating impressive businesses on beehiiv—obviously, Milk Road sold on beehiiv. I thought, okay, I've gotta try this out. So I created a newsletter on beehiiv.”

“At the time, there were still a lot of what you would call premium sub-domains still available. So, I managed to get “invest.beehiiv.com” I had created niche newsletters on Sustack, but there wasn't any real editorial stuff. I wasn't really covering news, and the emails were pretty short. I realized that I wanted an editorial newsletter again.”

So, Richard pivoted his newsletters into editorial-style publications. At the same time, he launched his own digital product—a course on running and selling newsletters.

“I was starting to create a product, which is called The Newsletter Is the Business. I realized I was talking about how to build, monetize, and sell editorial newsletters. But, after leaving the one that I was doing with Flippa, I realized I didn't have an editorial newsletter, so I wasn't actually doing what I was going to be teaching.”

That’s when Digital Asset Investor was born.

“So I set up invest.beehiiv.com. I started writing about all the different digital assets that I'm interested in, and quickly realized the beehiiv platform is superior in many ways over Substack. I went on the top plan, the Scale plan. I just thought, ‘Well, this is just too powerful. I need to move everything across.’”

Consolidating Newsletters on beehiiv

Richard soon realized that simultaneously running a handful of different newsletters wasn’t sustainable. So, he decided to consolidate a few of them.

“I had like six newsletters at the time that I was running, which was starting to burn me out. A really great feature, with beehiiv, is the fact that on that top plan, you are limited to three newsletters, which is ideal. So I merged a bunch of newsletters together and migrated them over to beehiiv.”

“I merged the website one and the domain one. That's acquire.beehiiv.com (Acquire The Web).”

“I merged the one about newsletters and the one about creators, and that's now create.beehiiv.com (Creator Funnel).”

“And, the NFT one and any other one that I had became invest.beehiiv.com (Digital Asset Investor).”

Enjoying this Creator Spotlight? Learn how Rowan Cheung from The Rundown grew his AI newsletter to over 150,000 subscribers in only four months.

Scattering Newsletter Seeds

We asked Richard how he’s managed to start so many successful newsletters. His secret is that he always uses a portion of his current newsletter list to seed the next.

The reason he’s able to do this so well? Richard has made himself a major part of his newsletter brands.

He shared, “I always import a core list that I already have. So every email is from me as the “from” name. So, it doesn't really matter what platform, which newsletter, or which subdomain I'm emailing from. It’s just another newsletter from me.”

“As long as you're careful and respectful in doing that, and you're not spamming people… and as long as you're providing value in terms of why they signed up, then I don't think that there's an issue. You can start very niche, and then you can go wider and cover a bunch of niches.”

Richard shared how there are a few different ways you can create a new newsletter without having to start over again from scratch.

“The other way of doing it is, you have a weekly newsletter. And then, you set up a new newsletter that’s daily. Or, you're sending daily and then you send a brand new newsletter—separate website, separate subdomain, that's at a different schedule, and they're two different newsletters that you can monetize.”

While many people can’t imagine starting a second or third newsletter, for Richard, it’s the best way to go. With his unique strategy, you can essentially double your business without having to double the time or effort you put in.

“There are a lot of benefits to having more than one newsletter. You have a lot more ways of monetizing. In terms of sponsorship, you get a lot more ads. You go from one to two newsletters and you can double your ads.”

“It's very hard and very slow to get scaled. I always seed new newsletters with a thousand subscribers to get going. Then, you can see what's working and what's not.”

Using beehiiv Boosts to Grow the List

We asked Richard what he’s doing now to grow his three newsletters. He shared that his favorite new method is beehiiv’s Boosts. You can use beehiiv Boosts to gain new subscribers automatically by getting recommended on different beehiiv newsletters. Additionally, Boosts works inversely: by recommending other newsletters, you get paid.

“As soon as you start making money, reinvest that and try to get a flywheel going. So I am on Swapstack. I'm paying five bucks for a subscriber there. And now, I’m running some budget with beehiiv Boosts, which is cool.”

One of the reasons Richard has succeeded at his scale is that he doesn’t just think about his newsletters as newsletters. They’re businesses.

“Just start reinvesting money wherever you can. I've done paid ads in other people's newsletters, but I personally prefer to pay by setting a CPA (cost per acquisition).”

“Boost is awesome because you're getting a genuine subscriber at the price that you're happy to pay. It’s a no-brainer.”

Getting Practical: Advice on How to Sell Ads & Other Monetization Routes

Richard has plenty of advice for creators looking to sell ads DIY-style to kick-start monetization.

“To maximize the amount of revenue you can drive from sponsorships, it's better to try and sell ads in terms of CPM (cost per thousand) because you're selling the brand placement. You're not just selling in terms of a cost per click or a cost per subscriber. You can make more money if you can sell the brand aspect of what you're doing.”

“It depends on the niche,” he adds, “but you're going to need at least a couple thousand subscribers before you can make anything material.”

He shared that selling ads on your own is something you’ll have to learn if you want to succeed with it. Otherwise, you can use services that make it easier, like beehiiv’s Ad Network. Or Passionfruit.

He shared, “Selling your own ads is a skill that you learn. But, there are tools that you can pay for to make it a lot easier for you. So I use software called Passionfroot, and you basically just set out your offering as a storefront.”

“I price it on opens,” he explained. “So if I have 2,000 subscribers, a 50% open rate, I have a thousand opens per send. In the niches that I operate in, I'm looking to make at least a hundred dollars per thousand opens, if not double that.”

He says it’s not so easy to convince an advertiser to do business with you if you have a smaller list, or if you’re not getting the best engagement, so you’ll have to sell them on your brand.

“Try and steer them in terms of the brand aspect, because if you only have a thousand or two thousand subscribers, you're not going to be generating many clicks. You may be only getting ten clicks from those thousand people that open the email. A sponsor is not really going to want to pay more, so it takes a lot more skill, and a lot more salesmanship, to navigate there.”

Richard shared that ads aren't the only way to make money with newsletters. There are several revenue paths you can take to earn a full-time income with your newsletter.

“Another way to monetize far quicker is to create your own products. You get 100% of that revenue. If it’s a digital product, it’s basically a 100% profit. You can monetize immediately and potentially make a lot more money than you can make from sponsorships.”

He continued, “Monetize it any way that you can. Sponsorship is a very simple model, especially if you're part of an ad network, like beehiiv. You can just copy and paste an ad and get paid. beehiiv just makes it very easy now, right? The customization that you can do on beehiiv is amazing. Try and apply to the beehiiv ad network. Apply to other people's boosts to make money immediately.”

Making Your Newsletter Desirable to Advertisers

Richard shared how there are a few things you can do to ramp up your newsletter’s attractiveness to potential advertisers, including cleaning your list.

“I started with around 3,000 subscribers on Digital Asset Investor and ran it up to 4,000. After two months, I removed anyone that hasn't opened and clicked within 60 days. So I removed 1,300 people. My open rate was at 40%, but I want to keep my opens above 50%.”

While it may seem counterintuitive to remove people from your email list, it can make advertisers want to work with you. The reason? When you remove people who aren’t opening or clicking your emails, you’ll have a higher percentage of your subscribers who are engaged, which is what sponsors are looking for.

“So I'm now back to 3,500 subscribers with a 50% open rate and a 7% click-through rate.”

Richard also shared a secret to writing your emails to improve your click-through rate—another important metric advertisers are looking at.

“There are ways of structuring emails to generate more clicks, like a shorter email. Emails with a sentence, then link, and sentence, then link. You can get some crazy click-through rates. Because people are clicking a lot within those emails, they'll also click a lot on sponsors. So you can actually drive a lot more ad revenue to sponsors in terms of the format.”

Richard’s Goal: 10x His List With beehiiv in One Year

Richard has his sights on one thing this year: growth.

He shared, “With Digital Asset Investor, my goal is to 10x that within a year. I want to be at 30,000 in a year's time. I'm just going to try the best value channel that I can and we’ll see how Boosts goes. But that way of doing it just makes the most sense to me.”

In terms of the content he's creating, Richard is optimistic about NFTs and the global newsletter marketplace. So, he’s going to center his newsletter content strategy primarily around those two topics.

“I’m going to be continuing to write about digital assets. There are only going to be more people who are interested in buying online businesses. The assets I cover are content websites and newsletters. Newsletters are becoming an asset class that's going to get bigger and bigger. There are more newsletters that are being bought and sold now.”

“NFTs have just gone through 12 months of really bad pain,” he explained. “We're kind of coming out of that. NFTs, in the next cycle, I think are going to be even bigger. So I'm bullish on that. In terms of my branding, I paid a pixel designer to create the logo. It's more branded around the NFT digital asset side than it is online business now.”

Leveraging beehiiv’s Toolstack to Hit the Mark

Richard’s switch to beehiiv is all a part of his plan to grow his newsletter businesses. With a variety of newsletter growth and monetization tools at his hand, Richard plans on leveraging several of them to expand.

beehiiv’s Boosts

“I really hope that you can just scale Boosts, and I can continue to pay $3 to $4 per subscriber and just spend that way. That would be the easiest way for me. I really love the fact that you can pay other newsletters to send you subscribers. If that channel can get me to 30,000 subscribers—10x in a year—then that's awesome.”

“If I can just focus on paying people to send me subscribers from newsletters, that really does seem like the best way of doing it.”

beehiiv’s Automated Journeys

Richard shared how beehiiv’s automation features are helping him generate digital product sales on autopilot.

“A big part of why I chose beehiiv was the fact that you can customize your subscribe flow—you can create a funnel. So I have low-cost “tripwire” products on the thank you page within the welcome email. So a certain percentage of people are buying that, which helps with the acquisition cost. Then I have sponsorship, affiliate, and higher-ticket products.”

“I just love how you can customize the email however you want in beehiiv,” he adds. “It's quite incredible.”

beehiiv’s Referral Program

Finally, Richard is leveraging beehiiv’s referral program to further generate subscriber growth.

He shared, “I’ve recently paid for merch with Slingshot, so I want to try and get the referral program to be a considerable part of the growth.”

“I've got some really great enamel pins and some dad hats to give away, so hopefully the referral part will drive growth, and obviously, that's something that you can't do natively within Substack.”

If you’re interested in following along Richard’s journey, you can sign up for his Digital Asset Investor newsletter.

You can also check out his digital course, The Newsletter Is the Business, to learn how to build, monetize, and sell your own newsletter.