How Ian Vorbach of SpaceDotBiz Gets 50% Open Rates

Space: The Final Frontier.

While there are endless exploration possibilities beyond our atmosphere, one space expert has decided to take people along for the ride: Ian Vorbach.

He’s a space and financial wiz who has joined the two worlds together within the fringe universe of space investments.

And his results are impressive – he’s built up a highly engaged space investment newsletter with an open rate over 50%.

We recently sat down with Ian Vorbach, the founder of the SpaceDotBiz newsletter, to discuss how he managed to create a space for himself in a unique sub-niche and create an engaged readership.

Ian was enthusiastic to share how his passion for the space industry accelerated his audience engagement. He shared plenty of advice for creators on his content strategy, finding his community within other digital communities, and how diving into a small niche is the key to owning a space.

If you’re interested in starting your own newsletter or you’re trying to improve your own publication, then keep reading.

Ian’s story is unique in that he built his newsletter from the ground up by focusing on highly curated content rather than a daily newsletter.

The SpaceDotBiz Backstory

Ian Vorbach is not like most people. He’s half spaceman and half business wiz.

He has a Masters in Aeronautical, Astronomical, and Aerospace engineering from Stanford University.

Not to mention, he also has an MBA from the Wharton School.

We asked Ian to share a bit about his background and what led him to create such a niche newsletter.

He shared, “My background is in aerospace engineering and rocket propulsion engineering, but I also have a business background in startups and in the space world.”

“I [also] have an MBA from Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania. I live in this world between building space technology, selling it, and finding the business for it. My newsletter is called SpaceDotBiz, and it's about startups in the space industry and investing in startups in the space industry.”

Ian shared that it was his passion that drove him to launch his own newsletter.

“It really came a lot out of my own interests. I was just really passionate about this world. I live in this world. I'm a co-founder of a startup in the space industry. And what got me writing about it was [that] I was doing my MBA program at Wharton, and I had kind of become the space person at school because I was just thinking about this and living this, and it was a unique niche within the general finance community.”

Talking Space: Offline to Online

Like many people who start a newsletter, Ian realized he was the person his friends would always come to with questions about his passion.

“I had a lot of friends asking me, ‘How should I be thinking about the space industry?’ This was maybe 2020. I was having a lot of similar conversations about how I was thinking about the industry, major players, and companies like SpaceX, and where are they positioning themselves, and where do they want to go?”

“The conversations were so similar. I thought, ‘What if I just write this out, and I have something I can share, and it almost becomes a more scalable way to have the discussions that I'm already having?’ The newsletter was really born out of that. I just enjoyed it so much.”

So, Ian took his conversations online with a newsletter to connect with more people in the small niche.

“Fortunately, there was early traction—a very small amount of traction—but it was there… Like 50 people at first who were just very passionate about this, and it's just sort of organically grown from there.”

Similar to others’ stories in the newsletter world, he started on Substack but switched over to beehiiv after hearing about it online.

“[The newsletter] started in late 2020, and then I moved it to beehiiv really early—I think in February or March of 2022, so maybe 15 months ago.”

Grinding Away to the Inflection Point

Ian describes his experience with his newsletter as a “grind.” While he lived and breathed this startup space world, it’s still work. He knew that if it was going to work, he’d have to put in some level of sweat equity.

He shared, “It starts off very much as a grind. So you really have to enjoy whatever the topic is. I've had a few friends who have started writing since I did. Some of them have continued doing it and some of them haven't. And what I tell people is, ‘If you can have the perspective that this is something you see yourself doing for five or ten years, that's really what you want to have.’”

Ian shared that the key to getting through and working away when you don’t want to is by picking a topic you love.

“There's going to be extended periods of time where you're like, ‘Why aren't I growing the way I want to?’ And in that case, it's really just got to be an interesting thing for you to keep doing.”

Eventually, Ian’s hard work started paying off. Eventually, he reached his inflection point–a point at which a change in the direction occurs on a curve.

“It took me about two years to get to my first 1000 subscribers,” he shared “It was a pretty gradual process, with periods of time where an article would get picked up by someone and that would get a little more traction. I'd get maybe a hundred subscribers or fifty subscribers [that way].”

“Those were big moments for me. Since then, it's hit an inflection point. It took me another six months to get to 2,000.”

“There are people who post something, and they have an existing audience, and they have a thousand subscribers in their first week. That was not my experience. But I'm living in this world professionally already, so there's really nothing else I want to write about. There's nothing else. It's a grind, but the people have been very passionate about it.”

50% Open Rates

While Ian’s growth is accelerating, that’s not all. His passion for the industry, and his ability to create high quality content, has led to some incredible engagement metrics.

He shared, “I've had an over 50% open rate since I started it.”

“One of the things I started doing recently to try to maintain a good open rate is to unsubscribe people who are not reading it. And I’m trying to remember that the total number of subscribers is a vanity metric and you're really more focused on engagement.”

Fortunately, he chose a niche people already love.

“I mean, people think space is cool. Fortunately, I've got that going for me. And, this intersection is very niche, but these communities do exist. So, I'm my own marketer. I try to find the Reddit communities and the Facebook communities where people are interested in this stuff, and I try to drop it in.”

Side Benefits of the Newsletter

Starting a newsletter comes with a wide array of benefits. While the most obvious ones are your ability to build an audience and the opportunity to make an income, there are some unique, hidden benefits that not many people tend to share. Thankfully, Ian opened up the door to some of the other positives that come along with creating a newsletter.

One way Ian’s benefited from his newsletter is by being able to get close to those he wants to learn from.

He commented, “There are a few ways the newsletter has benefited me. About a year in, I started doing interviews, and I just wanted to talk to people who have had success in this industry.”

“There are not a ton of people who have figured out how to build a space business and maybe even sell it—and do so in a way that your investors make money and your teams make money. I just started reaching out to those people and said, ‘I have a newsletter. I talk about this stuff. I'd love to share your story.’ It let me learn from people I wanted to learn from.”

Ian also shared how the newsletter has opened up the door to building relationships and connections with others in the niche.

“[The newsletter] gave me a reason to get in touch with them. I'm in people's inboxes every month, and it gives them a reason to reach out to me. Any of my subscribers can just reply to one of my newsletters, and if it's of interest to them, they can reach out to me and we can hop on a call.”

“It’s a nice way to keep in touch with people without having to constantly remember, ‘Who do I want to keep in touch with?’”

“It gives those people a reason to get in touch with me. So it's really been a relationship-building process and an audience-building process.”

While Ian hasn’t decided to flip the monetization switch on yet, he has certainly had his fair share of valuable money-saving perks thanks to the success of his newsletter.

He shared, “I haven't monetized it yet, and I don't have immediate plans to. The one thing I have done is allowed conferences to advertise on my newsletter in exchange for free tickets for myself to conferences. Some industry conferences can be particularly expensive. But that's the most that I've really monetized it.”

Focusing on Content & Growth Before Monetization

For Ian, there’s nothing more important than creating a valuable newsletter that’s unique and offers something different to his audience than what they’ve already got. Before turning on monetization, he was to ensure the newsletter is focused on quality and that he continues driving growth.

He shared, “I've thought a lot about, ‘How do I do the newsletter as a business in the future where I’m still excited about it?’ I wanted to always maintain it that way, even if I have advertisers, even if I have other people contributing to the business.”

“I spend time thinking about that, and I think there's a lot of learning for me to figure out what that looks like because people do thread that needle. They make excellent newsletters where they share their opinions, and they find ways to monetize it in a way that lets them keep the original thesis around it.”

Ian shared how tools like beehiiv make it easy to build a successful newsletter nowadays thanks to the native growth and monetization features available.

“I think it's a testament to how good the tools are. Like beehiiv right now, where someone like me, who doesn't really know what the business is, has been able to build an audience anyway, just because all I have to focus on is the content.”

“I'm tapping very minorly into the beehiiv Boost program and things like that. As much as I can keep just doing content, and the monetization is not something I'd have to become an expert on, that would be great.”

Enjoying this Creator Spotlight? Learn how Rowan Cheung from The Rundown grew his following to over 400,000 readers in only four months.

Quality Over Quantity

Most newsletters today are standard news-style aggregation publications. They take the biggest news stories in the industry and break them down into a bite-sized newsletter to help people quickly know what’s going on.

However, for Ian, he didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing. Instead, he wanted to create original, curated content–even if it meant publishing less frequently.

“I always want the newsletter to be a home of information that doesn't exist anywhere else. So if I have a relationship with someone that I think has an insight that hasn't been shared online, I want to try to get that out there some way, whether that's through interviewing them or just talking with them and turning it into a piece that I write about.”

Sharing others’ content isn’t just a marketing strategy – it’s a commitment to bringing value to his readers.

“That's really important to me—that [the newsletter] is not an aggregator of information, it's a location where unique information lives. So, some of it's who I know and people who I think have information to share that they haven't had an avenue to do that. “

Of course, quality doesn’t always come quickly, even for someone who’s passionate about the subject.

“When I just write a piece about something I'm interested in—what do I think I'm going to be excited enough about to write a piece, edit it multiple times, and just look at it so many times that I'll have to do it? It takes probably 10 to 20 hours to get a really thoughtful piece put together. For every piece I write, I probably have ten drafts that I’ve just never completed.”

Ian shared that creating content isn’t always a simple, streamlined process. There’s a creative element to it that requires some level of patience and knowing when to strike while the iron’s hot.

He shared, “I try to do some combination of letting myself feel excited about something and inspired. Not every day feels like a writing day. I trust there will be days where I wake up and I'm like, ‘I really want to think about this and write about it.’”

“When that happens, I try to drop whatever else I'm doing. I feel like the inspiration side of things is the least predictable. Sometimes that's on weekends, sometimes it's mornings. But, it's got to be interesting to me—exciting to me. I have to feel like there's something unique in my perspective on it.”

While breaking news-style newsletters have their place in this world, Ian has the self-awareness to know that isn’t the type of content he intends on creating. Rather, he wants to ensure his content is unique and of the highest caliber.

“There are people who do an amazing job of curating content, but in my opinion with that (and I may be wrong), you have to be so available to that world because you never know when the time's going to come up that something's going to happen, and you have to be timely. And I can't promise that I'm gonna be that.”

Keeping his stride means remaining consistent about his strategy without giving in to comparison.

“I have to remind myself not to compete on curation or breaking information. There are people who are so good at that. I'm never going to be able to offer [my audience] what they can do.”

The Ups & Downs of Finding Subscribers in Niche Communities

We asked Ian how he was able to find his audience online and start turning them into subscribers, especially considering how niche his audience is.

He shared, “The first step was just friends, and that maybe got me to 50 people. There are Reddit communities that I post in. I actually think it's better to start with places where it's less anonymous. In anonymous communities, they tend to be less supportive and a little more ruthless. If I know I'm going to post something that's going to end up on Reddit, I have to really make sure I believe a lot in what I'm going to say.”

“I've had a post recently that I put on Reddit, and it blew up, but it only got like two subscribers because it's hard to get people from those platforms over to what you're doing. It's just a grind, but that's part of it. And it's fun if you're interested in the topics.”

He shared that Discord and LinkedIn have been valuable places he’s gone to spread the word for his newsletter.

“Discord communities are great, and especially if you're in the business world, it’s an interesting overlap now as Discord is being used for investment communities. There's a space stock investing community on Discord.”

“LinkedIn is actually really great right now because I get to lean in on my personal brand. People know me because they've connected with me. There's already some sort of value or attribution so they can see who I am and they can see my background.

Networking With Other Newsletter Creators to Grow

Ian says another way he’s grown his list is by connecting with other newsletter creators in the industry.

“There are great news space publications already. I can find something that's of value to someone who's writing in this world, and I can give them a piece of content that can go in their [newsletter].”

“There's a great writer in the space world who writes for Ars Technica. A few of my earlier bumps in growth were in his weekly newsletter. He aggregates content. I would DM him on Twitter and say ‘I think this might be relevant for you.’”

“I’m trying to add value to the people who are already doing this—people who don't see it as competitive.”

Another powerful part of beehiiv's network is that there are other newsletters in your topic area that you can collaborate with. For example, the largest digital media brand in the space world, Payload Space, is on beehiiv and recommended me when I joined beehiiv. That has been really powerful. In fact, the Payload team convinced me to switch from Substack to beehiiv in the first place because they pointed me to all the tools beehiiv offers.

Content vs. Growth

Newsletter creators typically focus on three things: content, growth, and monetization. The most challenging part to figure out, though, is how much you should prioritize each one at each stage of your journey.

Ian shared, “I would focus on a 75% content, 25% growth strategy. If you're writing stuff where you're just focusing on growth all the time (and the content is just a thing to have out there), it's hard to change people's perspective that you're a commoditized piece of content to suddenly you're a really high-value piece of content.”

“I think your content really has to be great because people, at this point, know that newsletters are a game to an extent. You're trying to build an audience’ and there are so many newsletters that you have to have high-quality stuff.”

“The right answer, which is hard for anyone to really do, is you have to do both really well. And it's easier said than done. But I think you'll do better leaning more into content than on the growth side because you want to have a really high-value brand.”

“If you can develop a premium brand around a newsletter—like the way people think about the Stratechery newsletter—that is such a rare thing. If you can do that, it's such a unique advantage. If you can create really high-value content, it’s so powerful.”

Start Small, Then Widen Your Niche

Ian believes that the key to building a successful newsletter in today’s competitive newsletter landscape is by niching down.

“What I would say about niches and how I've thought about them is try to start really narrow and just slowly over time get wider in the niche. My newsletter is called SpaceDotBiz. Theoretically, I could write, in the future, anything related to the business of the space industry.”

“But I've started with startups, specifically private companies, seed series A companies, and I'm slowly getting that wider and wider. It's hard for me, as one person, to build something that can cover the entirety of the business—of the space industry. What I would say is just be narrow—really narrow—at first.”

“Mean a lot to a very small amount of people. And then over the years of doing it, you can expand.”

Ian shared that even though he niched down from the start, he still gives himself room to talk more on slightly wider topics–especially as his list gets bigger.

“I started talking about startups and early on, I interviewed an investment banker who helps companies think about SPAC’ing. So, they're overlapping that with public markets.”

“I tend to think about investing in startups as a niche, but I recently interviewed someone who's a startup recruiter. They help these companies think about, ‘How do I attract the best talent and diverse talent?’ It's not explicitly what I started on, but I think as long as it's unique content, it's differentiated, and it's high quality, you can sort of branch out a little bit.”

He even shared an example of how this works.

“If I were thinking about…let's say a world I don't know much about, like crypto. I know there are a lot of crypto newsletters. I know that if I were to start that, I would not compete with the many crypto newsletters. I would think like, ‘What is a subset of that?’”

“How about crypto day traders and a subset of that? The tools that they use. Then, slowly expanding more and wider. But I just need to make sure that at least what I'm doing the first time is unique in some way.”

Goals for the Next Few Months

We asked Ian what his main focus for his newsletter was for the next 3-6 months and he said he’s going to lean more into growth and collaboration with help from tools like beehiiv recommendations.

“I would say growth is what I'm focused on. It's hard to figure out, for a niche, what the avenues are for growth. So one of the things that's great is the recommendations tool on beehiiv, where I get recommended by someone. I know that it's a fairly organic process and they should be pretty interested in what I'm doing.”

In fact, the beehiiv recommendations have been good not only for his newsletter’s growth, but that of his friendships.

“I think the newsletter world has opened my eyes to how collaborative and supportive this can be. Anyone else who's in the space or space investing niche, I've actually become friends with, in a lot of cases, because we recommend each other's newsletters and it really grows much more together.”

“My form of competing is really much more just trying to make sure I'm offering something unique because this world is clearly not zero-sum, which is a really cool thing about it. And I'm new to that as a content creator in some way.”

How to Win: Be In It for the Long Haul

Ian believes one trait will put the odds of success in your favor far greater than anything else: commitment. If you commit yourself to your niche–to your newsletter–and stick to it, you’ll win.

“For me, I have nothing else,” he says. “I have one passion right now. Expect it to be a grind. When I see on Twitter, people who skyrocketed to tons of subscribers, I might think that was normal. And now, doing it myself, I know that's very not normal.”

“90% of people are not going to have a massive audience already built in. I think my story is actually probably pretty common. I don't think what I did is spectacular. If you're willing to take two years to get to your first 1000 subscribers, and post regularly every other week, or every month, I think you'll get there.”

“People will follow unique content. Find something you can do better than everyone else. Maybe that means you’ve got to spend a lot of time writing each one. I do a lot of research on each one, which means I can't post every week or every day.But at least what I do is hopefully unique.”

“Building a newsletter is really like a startup,” Ian explained. “It's going to take longer than you thought, and it's going to be a grind. But definitely, if you can do it for 10 years, you'll win. I guarantee it. If you have that long time horizon, you will do it.”

If you’re interested in following along and learning more about the latest space developments, startups, and investment advice, you can sign up for SpaceDotBiz or read some of Ian’s recent newsletters, like Point-To-Point Rocket Transportation or The US Government's Push for Nuclear in Space.