🔴 17 months to sell a newsletter

What does it take to sell your newsletter to a tech giant? First, start your newsletter. Then, buy another newsletter.

Our guest this week is Adam Biddlecombe, co-founder of Mindstream, a daily newsletter covering AI and tech. It was acquired by HubSpot just 17 months after launching.

The acquisition was for an undisclosed sum, but Adam was otherwise generous with the details of his story. He founded Mindstream alongside his best friend, Matt Village, a talented copywriter who handled editorial while Adam managed growth and monetization. He has a razor-sharp talent for both; I gleaned many insights from this one, and I think you will too.

In this episode:

• 🎵 Becoming a savvy affiliate marketer as a teen musician

• 💼 How and why Mindstream acquired a newsletter 10x their size

• 📊 Every step that led to Mindstream's acquisition by HubSpot

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

• 00:00 Introducing Adam and Mindstream 

• 01:48 Adam's first business in the music industry

• 06:38 The creator/entrepreneur spectrum

• 10:34 Getting started in the newsletter world

• 15:13 The first 1k subscribers and early investments

• 20:51 The skill of identifying an opportunity

• 27:31 Monetizing strategies following rapid growth 

• 31:57 The value of using LinkedIn as a creator entrepreneur

• 37:56 How to prepare for acquisition

• 49:06 The three types of exits in business

• 52:20 The biggest opportunities in the creator economy right now

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in to your podcasts.

From selling out concerts to building and selling a newsletter

At 10 years old, music was everything to Adam Biddlecombe. At 14 years old, he and his friends had a band and were ready to play gigs. He played the drums and handled booking; when he couldn’t land a gig, he decided to do it himself.

Adam hired a venue, printed tickets, and organized a sold-out show of 100 people that netted him £500. Thus kickstarted his “second most successful business” to date — he spent the next half-decade making his living primarily as a booker and tour manager, organizing shows for his own and his peers’ bands, consistently selling out venues across the U.K.

Once COVID-19 put a stop to live events, the dream was over. At 22, with no university degree or formal job experience, Adam was forced to enter the traditional workforce. His entrepreneurial itch persisted, however, and he quickly realized that the grind of working for someone else — especially after being his own boss for so long — wasn't a lifestyle he was willing to settle for.

In May 2023, he called his best friend, Matt Village; they’d always talked about starting a business together. The two locked themselves in Adam's garden shed and emerged with the concept for Mindstream, a daily newsletter about AI and tech, inspired by the storied success of newsletters like The Hustle and Milk Road.

They launched the newsletter a month later, on June 1, 2023, and grew their subscriber list through aggressive LinkedIn networking. They never sought investment, but within five months, they had it.

Inbound interest brought enough funding for them to quit their jobs and go all in. This enabled them to acquire AutoGPT, another AI-focused newsletter with approximately 170,000 subscribers (they had fewer than 10,000 at the time), in exchange for a 30% stake in the company. This instantly multiplied Mindstream’s audience and revenue, setting the stage for HubSpot's acquisition of the business just 17 months after launch.

This duality — understanding both creative and business elements — has proven crucial to Adam's and Mindstream’s success.

As I listened to this conversation, I found it worthy of noting some key thoughts on Adam’s approach to networking, AI, and creative output:

• While building Mindstream, Adam took the time to network with, learn from, and collaborate with other LinkedIn creators who focused on audience building — understanding that growth is not just about competing but also about mutual support and learning, even from and with competitors. Read more about this down in the Steal this Tactic section.

• AI has transformed Adam’s creative process. He’s trained AI models to replicate his voice and log his ideas, allowing him to generate more content without the mental fatigue that typically accompanies creative work. This thinking aligns with a broader shift in the creator economy: as more creators adopt a business mindset, they’re leveraging AI as a partner in creative work rather than a threat — one that supports efficiency, scales operations, and enables sustainable growth.

Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.

Adam asked us to share Mindstream’s ChatGPT guidebook, filled with “hacks you can use across sales, marketing, management, and customer support.”

You can get the guidebook by subscribing to Mindstream.

This is not a sponsored post; we simply think you’ll find Mindstream’s work useful.

Mindstream’s playbook for LinkedIn growth and monetization

Adam's approach to building Mindstream offers replicable tactics and strategies for building a LinkedIn audience from scratch — and leveraging that audience to build a newsletter subscriber list.

Study creators with similar audience sizes

Adam would take note of what the biggest creators on the platform were doing, including how they structured and formatted their posts. In terms of content, however, he studied creators with 2,000 to 5,000 followers to see what was working at his audience level.

Adam mentions Sahil Bloom — a powerhouse on social media with over 630K LinkedIn followers, known for packaging everyday advice in an appealing way — as an example of a creator in a higher audience bracket than his own. Adam makes an important distinction: Sahil's more generic advice is effective because he has established trust with his audience, and gained authority through his wealth, lifestyle, and public persona.

"As you read his posts, you think, 'Yeah, that makes sense,' but it’s not just the advice — it’s the person delivering it," Adam explains.

Building this trust takes time. If you’re starting with 500 followers, you’ve got to work harder and create content that’s more thoughtful and genuine, especially in the early stages of growing your audience.

Network with creators in your niche

To learn everything possible about how to grow on LinkedIn, Adam networked extensively with other creators, scheduling 5-10 calls weekly with people who were also growing their presence, and joined WhatsApp groups where people would share what worked in their first viral posts. 

The key here is engaging with creators in similar or adjacent niches to learn, in real-time, about what’s working and leverage mutual support and shared insights to accelerate your growth. In the same vein, it’s important to stay aware of the ways in which your work overlaps and the ways you may be in direct competition with each other.

Ultimately, Adam didn’t collaborate too closely with others who were also building AI newsletters, at least not those in the same audience bracket as his own.

Reduce subscriber acquisition costs with immediate monetization

Mindstream developed a formula to optimize its subscriber economics. By offering a digital product on their thank-you page, they generated immediate revenue from new subscribers.

They eventually optimized this to generate about $0.80–$1.00 per new subscriber immediately, while acquisition costs were around $2.00. This kept their “real subscriber acquisition cost” around $1.00.

Their most successful digital product was a 28-day email course on AI content creation, covering topics like writing copy with AI and creating images with Midjourney, priced at $30.

beehiiv launches direct sponsorships

Newsletter creators can now manage their direct advertising partnerships entirely within beehiiv's platform. Read how it’s done.

The new Direct Sponsorships feature eliminates the need for multiple third-party tools, letting you:

• Create a professional website with beehiiv's website builder

• Set up a Shopify-like sponsorship storefront

• Manage payments and inventory in one place

In related news, Creator Spotlight is now accepting sponsors. View our Direct Sponsorships page here.

This is a sponsored partnership.

• Is it possible to be truly authentic online? Does anyone even know what that means? I wrote about it last week (Creator Spotlight)

• He grew his newsletter to 190K subs in one year (Creator Spotlight)

• A fascinating piece on how OpenAI is subsidizing the Gen Z lifestyle (Atlantic)

• A quick overview of Instagram’s new video editing app, Edits (The Verge)