Is a suburb of a big city a good market for a local newsletter?

I'd rather be in Green Bay for this than Austin. It's big enough that it's real: professional football, real business, real industry. And I'm assuming there's essentially zero competition. What a great place to own the audience.

That doesn't mean suburbs are bad. My whole model started in suburbs. Here's how I rank the options:

1. A standalone city with nothing else around it. Readers have very few options, so they're more excited to sign up and they care more.
2. A big suburb far enough from the city that people don't go there. My own market, about 30 minutes from Austin, fits here.
3. A close-in suburb. It works, but readers get so much big-city news that it's harder to make them care.
4. The big city itself. I won't do it.

Why not just launch in the big city?

Austin, LA, Chicago and New York already have a million media companies, and some have been doing newsletters for years. Going too big gives you too much competition and not enough sense of belonging.

Size works against the reader too. If you live in Chicago and read a Chicago newsletter, half the things in it may be an hour away from you. You don't care. A smaller area lets you be granular, so everything in the issue is something the reader can actually use.

"In the suburban areas, there's none right now. So you're like the source of information for an entire community. It's pretty powerful."

One exception. Mitko, who runs a Cincinnati newsletter, told me on my podcast that he focuses on readers 25 to 40. In a city of over a million, you probably need to niche down like that anyway. In a suburb I wouldn't narrow it that tightly. What's viable depends on where you are.

What makes a suburb work?

Distance from the city, mostly. Where I live, most people don't want to drive to Austin to do things. The traffic's confusing, and they'd rather do things in their own area. Most of the media covers Austin, and that's not relevant to them.

Suburban readers are often annoyed that everything they see is about the big city they only visit on special occasions. The same goes for the Bay Area: nobody ever talks about San Jose or Santa Clara. A newsletter that only covers those places gives readers exactly what they want.

Positioning against the city helps. A partner and I launched in a family suburb next to a famous tourist district, where the local TV and paper cover the tourist strip almost all the time. Families there don't care about that. They want soccer games and the new restaurant near them. So we positioned the newsletter as the anti-strip media, and nobody else was doing that.

Boring suburbs have a hidden advantage too. There's not a lot going on, which means people need a place to find out what is. Normal middle-class family suburbs are also the most replicable model in the country. Advice from someone in a rural area or a wealthy enclave doesn't transfer the same way. I once guessed there are about a thousand of these suburbs around big metros, with very few people doing local newsletters in them.

Why is a close-in suburb harder?

Two reasons. First, identity. I like the city I live in, but I don't feel super connected to the fact that we have the best Costco only four minutes away. That's not the same as living somewhere with a strong sense of place, like a coastal city or a town in the Catskills.

Second, competition. Suburbs of big metros get crowded. Businesses start telling you the other four newsletters came to them recently. Every pitch gets harder when you're the fifth one through the door.

"You're gonna have a lot of competitors, which means businesses are gonna be like, but the other four ones came to me recently."

Can a small, overlooked town be an advantage?

Possibly. I expected a cluster of four small suburbs nobody could name to be harder than a well-known city. Early results made me wonder if it's the opposite. Nobody targets these places, so when someone does, readers feel like it's special and get more excited. One case doesn't prove it, and it'll get harder as the list grows.

For a partner, I picked a 300,000-person city that nobody pays attention to. His newsletter passed 6,500 subscribers in about two months. When someone 30 minutes from a state capital asked me where to start, I told him to start in his own smaller market: zero competition, cheaper subscribers and ads, and a smaller audience that will love him more than a big-city audience loves anybody.

My plan has always been to copy what the big-city morning newsletter companies do, just in places like Omaha or Gilbert, Arizona instead of Phoenix.

Then why am I in a suburb?

Because my county is the exception that helps me. It's the fastest growing county around Austin and will likely be bigger than Austin in 10 to 20 years. I have no chance of becoming the guy in Austin. There's an AI meetup in downtown Austin every day of the week, and I haven't seen one in Williamson County. I can be the guy there, and that's what I want to own.

I also have a real competitor in my area. Texas has one large, established community news company, and operators here deal with it in a way most operators outside Texas don't. My answer to that has been showing up in person. At an all-day chamber of commerce event I made good relationships and had city council members tell me they read my stuff, even though they'd never replied to an email.

What works if you're already in a suburb?

• Cover the region, not one town. I combine Round Rock, Georgetown and Leander. Name the brand after the biggest place and list the neighbors in the subtitle and ads. See one town or a whole county.
• Check who's already there. If nobody covers your suburb, that's gold.
• Avoid tiny, fuzzy areas. My West Austin brand covered a wealthy but small, poorly defined area and stalled around 5,000 subscribers.
• Use connections. A partner with a tie to city council is a huge value add.
• Be the human in the room. Chamber events, business owners, local short-form video. Outlets with salaried writers usually don't do this.

What makes a standalone city attractive?

• Residents identify with the place.
• Real employers and industries that advertise.
• Big enough to fill a newsletter, small enough that you can be the brand.
• Nobody else doing it well yet.

Size still matters. My range is 100,000 to 500,000 people, with 200,000 to 400,000 as prime. More in what population size is best.