Contrarian Thinking : Comment Codie Sanchez a construit une newsletter avec 750K abonnés et un portefeuille d'affaires de $100M+ à partir de zéro

Codie lost $50,000 on the first business she bought, years before Contrarian Thinking existed. She now publishes the deal as her formative failure and draws nine deal-making rules from it.

“Losing $50,000 buying my first business.”

She bought a turnaround instead of a business that already made money, which meant inheriting the previous owner’s cash burn, broken systems and demoralized staff.

“Buying a turnaround means you’re buying someone else’s problems - cash burn, broken systems, demoralized teams.”

Before Contrarian Thinking, Codie built a large asset management business inside an employer’s firm. Once it got big the firm moved to take it over and she walked, counting the outcome as a loss of more than $3.5m.

“I built up a pretty big asset management business for a firm.”

She owned none of what she built, so none of the upside was hers to keep once it mattered.

“get your own chips. If they’re on loan from the house you never really owned them in the first place.”

On day four of the newsletter launch she tried posting into Reddit communities to find subscribers, and moderators removed the posts from three of them.

“Tried Reddit & failed, got my posts deleted from 3 groups.”

She puts it down to not knowing the platform’s norms rather than to a diagnosed strategy problem, and did not iterate on the approach.

“I know nothing about Reddit and feel like a boomer doing a Tik-Tok video”

She set the newsletter up on a cheap Mailchimp account on day two and abandoned it by day five, moving the list to Substack.

“I’m over Mailchimp, too designed, no paid & most importantly no community.”

Mailchimp gave her no route to charge readers and no community layer, which were the two things she wanted the newsletter to grow into.

“too designed, no paid & most importantly no community”

In a group-wide expense review Codie’s team shut down a batch of underperforming side projects across her businesses, naming a newsletter, a community, a consulting offer and a physical product line.

“We killed dozens of zombie projects across my businesses in this process:”

Recurring costs and half-alive projects had been left to accumulate because nothing forced a periodic review; she says the only thing she would change is making the review a scheduled routine.

“Only thing I would do differently is to schedule this annually & processize.”

Codie hired an executive on $200k salary plus $200k bonus who, inside the first six months, secretly ran two side businesses, tried to move company clients to one of them, and was building a competing product.

“I hired an exec, paid her $200k a year + $200k in bonus.”

She frames it as a screening and trust failure that a business should expect rather than treat as bad luck.

“Protect your house because your biggest costs will always be wrong people trusted.”

Contrarian Thinking’s 2025 annual letter lists the group’s losses for the year: companies shut down for underperforming, one cash-strapped company that needed a hard turnaround, payment providers repeatedly cutting off revenue for a new business, and a bad hire kept on too long.

“Shutdowns of companies that were underperforming. Painful.”

On the hire specifically she names the delay in acting, not the hire itself, as the thing that cost them.

“A bad hire we didn’t cut fast enough, and it cost us.”