Is $10,000 in Facebook ads enough to launch a local newsletter?

Ten grand is a really small risk for the right type of business owner. In almost every other business, you'd have to spend ten times that to maybe make the impact this could.

What does $10,000 buy?

The math is simple. If you can get subscribers for 50 cents, $10,000 is about 20,000 subscribers. In most of my mainstream markets, 50 cents is roughly where subscribers sit.

When I helped a realtor friend launch a newsletter in his town and got his ads down to 15 cents, he added five or six thousand subscribers in a month. That's an outlier, but it shows what's possible. When I launched six new local newsletters with a partner, they reached almost 30,000 subscribers in about six weeks.

What should a big-metro launch expect in the first three months?

For a new brand in a big, expensive metro, I told one business owner to put two to three grand a month into ads for at least the first three months. You want to get out of the gate strong and become the local media source as fast as possible. That scares people out of trying to compete with you.

In a pricier market I'd plan for 75 cents to a dollar per subscriber, even though the newsletter average seems to be about 50 cents. Here's the math I gave him:

Cost per subscriber	Spend per month	Subscribers after 3 months
$1.00 (high side)	$2,500	7,500
$0.50	$2,500	15,000

Even the high side is more subscribers than most people have after doing this for months.

How fast should you spend it?

It depends on the stage. For an established newsletter, I wouldn't put more than about $1,000 to $2,000 a month into Meta. Past that your cost per subscriber climbs. I start most markets around $25 to $30 a day.

At launch the logic flips a little. The lowest cost you'll see is usually in the first two months, and costs go up as the list grows. That's the other reason to step on the gas at the beginning.

A friend of mine who just started, a solopreneur, put in $25 a day. It worked so well he raised it to $100, and he's getting subscribers for about 20 cents. Some of my newsletters can barely get under 50 cents. My rule: if you're over $1, try something else.

Stepping on the gas isn't the same as dumping it all in at once. Throwing $5,000 or $10,000 at ads on day one gets you a lot of subscribers, but it tells Meta to show the ad to anybody, and a lot of those people won't be good readers.

For reference, a partner organization's publisher cohort spent about $25 to $35 a day and added roughly 1.5% of their local population in about 10 weeks.

How much money should I expect to lose?

In the short term, don't count on making money. Count on losing money. You might make money quickly, but I wouldn't assume it. Be pleasantly surprised.

I'd budget for a year, though it shouldn't take that long. Spend at least $1,000 a month on Facebook ads, probably more. A friend of mine is spending $3,000 a month now.

The downside is small and you see it fast. If it isn't working on day three, stop. You lost about $150.

"You'll know it's working before then. It's not like, give me $20,000 or $30,000 and let me see if it's going to work. You'll know before you get there. So you can quit it at $5,000 if it didn't work."

How do you test a new niche without wasting money?

Prove it with the cheapest path first. When I look at a new niche, the rule is:

1. Launch one city.
2. Run Meta ads.
3. Monetize with email-only or link-out offers.
4. No sales hire, no custom builds, no lawyer until it proves itself.
5. Only after one city works, replicate it.

Will I make the money back?

I won't promise that. Meta ads are the only way I know to grow fast, and the only reason not to run them is if you're dead broke. But payback is all dependent on you.

I know people making half a million a year in their first year. I know people making $3,000, $10,000 and $20,000 a month. I also know people making very little, and I'm one of them in some markets, because I don't put much effort into selling there. Some of my partners treat it as an experiment: here's $2,000 a month, we'll reevaluate in a year.

Subscribers aren't revenue. Paid subscriptions are very hard to make work, so the money comes from advertisers and from offers on the back end. Know what a subscriber is worth to you before you start. I walk through that in how much you can afford to pay per subscriber.