Growing My Newsletter Side Hustle By Launching A Website

Qin Xie

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Published: March 24th, 2022

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Qin Xie

Founder, Money Talk

$160

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Money Talk

heymoneytalk.co.uk

from London, England, United Kingdom

started May 2020

$160

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Qin recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on Money Talk? Check out these stories:

1. How My Finance Newsletter Hit $1,000 In One Month [Update] (2024) ➜

2. On Starting A Reader-Funded Newsletter About Personal Finance (2020) ➜

This is a follow up story for Money Talk. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I’m Qin Xie, a journalist and editor based in London. In May 2020 I launched Money Talk, a smart newsletter that’s designed to help you save money and grow wealth.

Although I managed to secure paying subscribers straight away, I quickly realized that in the UK, a paid newsletter in the personal finance space isn’t going to work so I had to rethink my strategy. In December 2020, Money Talk became a website and newsletter. Less than a year after launch, it was shortlisted for Headlinemoney.co.uk’s Blog of the Year.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Money Talk is very much a side hustle for me at the moment. That means I’m only spending one day a week on it - usually, a Saturday - and I’m not pressured into putting in all my spare time. Because of that though, its growth has varied over the last 15 months.

When I launched the project in 2020, I was on furlough so I had a lot more time - time to work on the content and time to promote it on social media and beyond - and I was seeing steady growth in the number of paying subscribers. Even when I first returned to work after furlough, I still had a fair bit of spare time because things weren’t fully open in the UK yet so there weren’t as many distractions in life.

That said, things were certainly shifting. In the months that the lockdown restriction eased in 2020, open rates for the newsletter were lower and people might take days before opening the latest edition. It was a sign that I had to make some changes to make this newsletter work. Plus, conscious of the dwindling availability of my own spare time, the newsletter also had to evolve in a way to suit me.

That’s why I moved to the website-first model where only premium subscribers get the full content (plus some extra frills) in their inbox - everyone else had to click through to the website. It meant that I could use the newsletter to continue to build my readership but also gain advertising revenue that’s hard to achieve until you have a much higher subscriber base. Plus, the newsletter now has a great clickthrough rate.

In January 2021, I went freelance full-time after finishing my contract. I had wanted to use the opportunity to grow Money Talk more, and spend two days a week on it while working four days to pay bills and expenses. As it turned out, my services as a freelancer were in high demand and I’ve been working five-plus days a week, meaning Money Talk remains a one-day-a-week project.

At this point, I was working flat out, sometimes seven days a week for weeks at a time. I needed to change the approach to content so it was less labor-intensive - that meant fewer stories per newsletter but each with greater depth. This, I think, is more useful to the reader but perhaps less valuable to premium subscribers, which is why I also decided to lower the subscription fee. Fortunately, since tweaking the content to suit me better, it’s been much easier to find great content every week and the number of subscribers is growing much faster than before.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

Getting honest feedback from my subscribers has been essential to the growth of Money Talk - and that’s something I took away from Y Combinator’s Startup School. In asking them about what they found valuable in Money Talk, I was able to tweak it in a way that worked for me and them.

It’s important to look for opportunities to talk about your business but never be pushy. And it certainly shouldn’t be at the expense of having a good product.

The other thing is that the media landscape in the UK is very different from the US, where many of the successful newsletter authors are based. In the US, readers are more ready and willing to pay for news and there’s a bigger potential readership. In the UK, newsletters can be successful - but they are much more likely to be B2B rather than B2C. And certainly, I’d need to spend a lot more than one day a week on it.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

I’m working on a couple of big projects in my freelance life that are taking up most of my free time and that won’t change for the next year. I think this is a good thing - it gives me more time to build up the readership for Money Talk and have a serious bank of great content. Think of it as an incubation period, except I don’t have to worry about funding the startup phase.

I’m already seeing steady growth in ad revenue from just Google ads and I’ve run a handful of sponsored newsletters. All of these are on top of the revenue I get from paying subscribers. In the next five years, I think this will grow to the point where I can afford to spend more time on Money Talk without worrying about whether or not I have enough income to cover the bills.

Have you read any good books in the last year?

I haven’t had much time to read but the podcast I’d recommend is The Squiggly Careers Podcast, which is all about navigating a world where we won’t have the same job, with the same company and in the same industry that people traditionally expect. Instead, we might shift forwards, backward, and sideways to achieve job satisfaction. It asks really interesting questions and gets me to think about how I navigate my working life as well as how I can build Money Talk.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Every business is different and while you always read about the businesses that go from zero to success, most startups aren’t like that. And, for many people, it’s a long slog with seemingly little progress, and then suddenly all the good karma you’ve accumulated over time just suddenly helps you to take off.

It’s important to look for opportunities to talk about your business but never be pushy. And it certainly shouldn’t be at the expense of having a good product.

And of course, just because you’ve launched your product, it doesn’t mean it has to stay the same. You can launch it again and again, tweaking it until you’ve found the right product fit.