Private Equity Analyst baut 800K Newsletter während COVID auf, $70K/Monat

Sahil frames the newsletter's actual launch as formalizing something that already existed rather than a from-scratch idea: before the first official Curiosity Chronicle issue, his Twitter threads were already being emailed out weekly to a following that had grown around them.

“went out to a few thousand people who had been receiving my tweet threads in email format each week”

The first newsletter issue went out to a few thousand people who were already receiving Sahil's Twitter threads by email each week, not to a cold list.

“went out to a few thousand people who had been receiving my tweet threads in email format each week”

The newsletter itself was never sold to readers. Revenue came from a single sponsor slot inside a free issue, and the first such slot anywhere in Sahil's own archive ran on 10 May 2021, four days before the first original Curiosity Chronicle issue, in a retrospective of his first year of writing. The slot went to Athletic Greens, a product he says he had used daily for ten years. Sponsor slots then became a regular fixture from June 2021 on. No founder-authored source states what that first slot paid or how the deal was struck.

“Today's newsletter was brought to you by Athletic Greens.”