Is a B2B newsletter for local business owners worth starting?

A Meta ad aimed at local business owners doing over $1 million a year, replicated in another market by a 21-year-old operator, landed three qualified leads quickly. One was a Shark Tank alum. That's the kind of reader a B2B local newsletter is built to reach.

Think Morning Brew for your area. Morning Brew looked at the Wall Street Journal, saw great information packaged terribly for young people, and made it fun in five minutes. The local business journal is the Wall Street Journal but local: super long articles, a paywall of $100 or $200, links you have to click through. I want to be the modern version of that.

When I say B2B, I really mean white collar. Business owners, white-collar workers, middle managers and above. Anyone in a city who is proactive about making money. I also think of it as the modern chamber of commerce: doing what a chamber says it does, but better and free.

Why go B2B instead of a regular local newsletter?

Each reader is worth more. Regular local newsletters are easy and cheap to grow and highly engaged, but regular people are harder to monetize. National newsletters are the opposite. Combine them, high-value people in one local area, and you can probably monetize it 10x better than a regular local newsletter.

In my general local newsletters, only about 10% of readers are business owners. That audience is about local influence. In the business version, readers are straight-up buyers of what I sell.

Other people are proving it. These are their numbers as they told them to me, not mine:

• A guest on my podcast co-founded a B2B newsletter in Austin. He told me he makes roughly $150,000 to $200,000 a year from the newsletter plus cohorts, and he's not maximizing it.
• An operator who curates and hosts events for startup founders and investors in a big city was making six figures within about a year, with paid sponsors.
• Another B2B newsletter charges about $300 to post a job.
• A one-city newsletter for healthcare people hosts networking events for everyone in that industry, from nurses to healthcare software founders.

How big an area should it cover?

Bigger than a consumer newsletter. Only a slice of residents are your audience, so this only works in a big area. It wouldn't work in my small town. I'm doing mine across all of Williamson County, about 800,000 people.

My advice is to build the biggest umbrella you can on the business side, then add niches inside it. Cover the whole metro and run ads to the whole metro. I made the opposite mistake: I launched suburb-level newsletters for Leander and Round Rock, and now I'm fixing it by creating a top-level brand for the whole county. I told an operator in Southern California the same thing: don't start a business brand for your small town. The business brand covers the whole region, as a sub-publication under the regional umbrella.

Should I add it to my general newsletter or spin it off?

Spin it off. If only about 10% of a general audience cares about business content, mixing it in hurts the whole brand. Start the general newsletter, get it to 10,000 or 20,000 readers, then launch a separate B2B brand and promote it inside the main one: "For those of you who are business owners, I'm starting something new." You'll pull 500 or 1,000 of them over and run it as its own brand.

What goes in it?

Interesting things business owners and six-figure professionals would want to know about their area, written creator-style: first person, casual, curated, five minutes to read. In mine that means:

• Short business news with a quick reason to care, including what commercial property is being redone.
• A jobs section. I found 300-plus jobs paying $250,000 or more in Las Vegas on Indeed. Five a week is plenty.
• A weekly AI brief. That one's killer.
• A spotlight on a business or owner. My welcome email says reply if you want to be featured, and I send a form.
• Curated business and networking events.

It doesn't have to be fancy. One local B2B publisher I know just goes to events, writes about them, and shares who he met and what they went over. The old business journals also skip short-form video and social, which is the open opportunity right now. More in what a business newsletter should include.

How does it make money beyond ads?

Ads are almost secondary. Soon after I launched my county business newsletter, at 99 subscribers, more than half had filled out the signup survey. Nearly half make over $100,000. About half want hands-on AI workshops. 17% are hiring and 39% want a new job, which is an audience recruiters would want. The survey has to show up right after they subscribe. That's where everybody screws up.

From there, the paths stack up:

• Events. Curate other people's events first, then host your own: networking, AI trainings, dinners for founders or any vertical. That's where you become the center of the business community.
• Training. A free AI 101 is lead gen. Then companies ask you to come do it for their team, something like $3,000 for a day.
• Hosted experts. Once you have the audience, an AI trainer would probably pay you to host a session because they know they'll get clients.
• Back-end businesses. An AI agency, a digital marketing agency, a business brokerage, commercial insurance. My big vision is an AI-first digital marketing agency on the back end.

My estimate, not a result: a solid local B2B newsletter should get enough sponsors to make $50,000, and maybe $100,000 a year in advertising after year two. The bigger value is being the go-to person for business in your community. If you're a business broker selling one or two businesses a year, that's worth far more than the ads.

Who sponsors it? The usual buyers:

• Independent insurance agents selling commercial lines. Their whole book runs on business-owner networks, which makes them ideal sponsors or partners.
• High-spend local businesses where $2,000 a month is a rounding error and the real purchase is community influence.
• Nonprofits with more money than clear places to spend it.
• Chambers of commerce, though they're slow: their budgets lock a year in advance.

Can I run it on the side?

Not well. This is the honest part.

"A regular local newsletter, especially at the beginning, you can kind of half-ass for a while. The local B2B, I don't think you can or want to half-ass."

I know because my own half-effort version isn't working that well, while lots of people putting real effort in are crushing it. It's higher value than a consumer local brand, but harder, and in-person events matter much more. For industry B2B, you need to live in that space. I can't do a restaurant one, so my approach there is to partner with an expert who does the content while I handle acquisition and marketing.

What should I test first?

1. Run a Meta ad aimed at local business owners above a revenue line, like the $1M+ ad above.
2. Test a variant that says it's for local business owners only.
3. Put a signup survey right after subscribe to learn income, role and what they want.
4. Line up a back end before you scale, so qualified leads have somewhere to go.

One more personal note: the only brand I want to be the face of is my business-facing one, not the local consumer newsletters.