✖️ No More Headlines?

X CTA Madness

Anyone doing any ads on X has likely seen a big decrease in click through rate and increase in CPA over the last couple of weeks, due to them taking away the headline and link button on ads.

But now there is a solution in the form of showthe.link, created by Paul Hunkin:

The tool automatically creates high-conversion preview images for links posted on X.

You can check it out here.

You Need to Start a Newsletter Today!

The newsletter business model is hot, and justifiably so.

When you master the art of building and nurturing your newsletter audience, you're staring at a potentially lucrative stream of sponsorship revenue.

But you can also monetize in so many other ways:

• Subscription fees

• Paid recommendations

• Affiliate marketing

• Sponsored editions

• Own products

• Consulting services

• Events and webinars

• Donations

• Lead generation

• Job boards

• Marketplaces

• Community access

And newsletter businesses have become sellable assets (see next section), based on a value per subscriber and a multiple of your revenue.

beehiiv is the fastest-growing newsletter platform as it enables you to quickly launch, monetize and scale in ways not possible before. You can track subscriber acquisition with UTM parameters and can monetize with their in-built ad network, as well as paid recommendations engine Boosts.

Letter Operators is currently running an offer to set up a new beehiiv account for just $199. It even includes a copy of The Newsletter Is The Business ($147 value).

Check out The Offer Today

Market Update

Spencer Haws broke down a post from the content site marketplace Motion Invest showing that it’s leading by at least 3:1 the volume of every other marketplace right now:

And the newsletter marketplace Duuce posted that they had two sales in the last week:

Human Probability 101%

Content at Scale recently launched a pro version of their popular AI Detector, which now scans up to 50K characters at a time.

Play the game of generating humanlike, authentic content that truly rivals a good writer, and rewrite all AI detected sentences in one click!

You can check it out here.

To YC Or Not YC?

Daniel Vassallo, founder of smallbets.co, caused a stir on X this week when he urged potential entrepreneurs not to join Y Combinator (YC).

This is a pretty controversial opinion to put it mildly. For the uninitiated YC is the most prestigious ‘accelerator’, providing seed capital, mentoring and connections to start-ups in exchange for equity. Companies such as Reddit, AirBNB, Coinbase, DoorDash and Stripe are all alumni.

It’s a long post (or whatever X calls its new long format) but in essence, his argument is that the chances of success are actually small (50 successful companies out of 4000 past participants).

Those 50 successes are great for YC - they more than pay for all the failures - but not a great bet for entrepreneurs. It’s one big all-in bet (or as Daniel says “YC teaches you to try to be a visionary. When you fail… Oopsie! Tough luck.”)

You’re much better at making small bets on lots of things and then doubling down on the (probably small number) of successes.

Anyway, here’s his post:

For balance here’s a former participant’s, mostly positive, take on the experience…

📰 Classifieds

Online Magazine Blueprint: Discover 300 profitable niches to launch a successful paid magazine, in this free guide by Chris. Get your copy

The Newsletter Is The Business: Learn how to launch a newsletter as a separate media asset, in this product by Richard. Check it out

Newsletter Shoutout of the Week