🔴 A six-figure newsletter business built over three years

What works in one market is often translatable to another. But not always, and rarely one-to-one.

Fernando Caralt tried to bring the American newsletter playbook laid out by products like The Hustle to Spanish-speaking markets, initially targeting readers across Colombia, Mexico, and Spain. That didn’t quite work — then he narrowed the focus to just Mexico, and, three-and-a-half years later, the business is generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue per year.

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Fernando Caralt started Espresso Matutino, a daily tech and business briefing for Spanish-speaking audiences, in the spring of 2023, with a four-year plan: build a media company, sell it, and become a millionaire.

Before he’d even written the first issue, he’d already raked in a few hundred signups via Meta ads.

He was following a playbook proven in the American market by business newsletters like The Hustle; if Sam Parr was able to build a seven-figure-strong audience from an American population of over 330 million, why wouldn’t he be able to build at least a large audience targeting an even larger Latin American Spanish-speaking population?

Three and a half years in, parts of Fernando’s plan have come to fruition. In its first year, Espresso Matutino brought in around $50k in revenue, then $240k in 2025, and now — with 156,000 subscribers — is on track for roughly $400k in revenue this year.

Before launching Espresso, Fernando was a mechanical engineer in an R&D lab at 3M, the century-old American manufacturer, surrounded by PhDs and colleagues who’d potentially stick with the company for decades. Two years in, he knew that would not be his path.

Fernando’s route from engineering to newslettering was circuitous.

A capitalism.com mastermind introduced him to the idea that an audience could be the asset everything else was built on. He tried e-commerce and didn’t sell much. Then, he spent a year running operations for a self-improvement YouTube creator, where he grew the at-first-solo creator's operation into a team of eight, and learned that creating video is brutally hard. By comparison, building a newsletter looked easy.

At first, his audience focus was too broad — early Espresso was focused on tech and business news in Spain, Colombia, and Mexico, written in a neutral Spanish, with the regional expressions sanded off. But this common-language approach didn’t build a cohesive enough audience, especially in the eyes of advertisers Fernando sought to work with.

Advertisers want a focused audience, and Fernando kept hearing versions of the same objection: "I don't really care if you have 50,000 people from Colombia. I just want the people from Mexico. So why am I paying extra for this?"

So he narrowed Espresso’s focus to Mexico, and began writing in Mexican Spanish. But Fernando, a Spanish national then living in Texas, lacked lifelong idiom. A year and a half into writing the newsletter, he hired Steve Saldaña, previously lead editor at another Mexican tech outlet, Xataka, to take over editorial duties.

Of course, narrowing the focus brought its own set of obstacles. Newsletters were still a more niche product in Mexico than in the States, and many of the readers and advertisers he encountered associated them with promotional or junk mail. The Hustle playbook would not be a one-to-one translation. He also kept hearing that if he really wanted an audience in Mexico, he needed to make video.

So he started expanding into social, then launched a daily video podcast.

Steve, who already had about five years of podcasting experience under his belt, is the face and voice of the Espresso show, which is an audio-video version of the newsletter published about an hour after the email goes out each morning. Fernando has built a set of tools to expedite the process — they use AI to convert the newsletter into a script, Steve records it, and an editing tool built with Claude Code transcribes the episode, detects the sections and adds breaks, then animations, music, and transitions.

Across platforms, Espresso now has an audience of over 700,000 and generates 13 to 15 million impressions a month. Investing in video made it easier to sell partnerships, too; advertisers who had never heard of Espresso even after three years of the newsletter now walk into sales conversations having discovered it on TikTok.

Three and a half years in, Fernando is merely months away from his original milestone goal of a sale after four years, but he’s accepted that Mexico lacks the right acquisition market for a media company like his. So, instead of modeling what Espresso might sell for, he’s started modeling how big it can get on its own.

For all the ways Espresso has expanded, it only has one revenue stream; advertising. The publication has no paid tier, events business, product line, or affiliate revenue. The $50,000 generated in year one, the $240,000 last year, and the roughly $400,000 the business is tracking toward this year all came from direct ad sales.

A primary newsletter placement runs around a $20 CPM; a secondary, about $10. The sweet spot has been B2B software and fintech companies, where an expensive customer makes an expensive lead easier to justify. HubSpot is Fernando’s model advertiser: he tells us that Espresso has become one of the company’s stronger sources of leads in Mexico.

Fernando is now experimenting with WhatsApp, too. An advertiser mentioned they’d been getting a version of the newsletter in a WhatsApp group — one of their friends had been summarizing the daily newsletters. So Fernando developed an official version, which now reaches around 20,000 people, with open rates over 80%. This, too, will be monetized — he’s tossing placements into existing packages for free while he figures out what they’re worth.

For most of his tenure running this newsletter, Fernando has barely paid himself. His fiancée works in tech, and her salary has been enough to support their life. That gave Fernando an unusual amount of room to keep choosing the company: another employee instead of a salary, more growth instead of a salary, more runway instead of a salary.

Besides Fernando and Steve, Espresso has three additional full-time employees: a salesperson, a copywriter and account manager, and a video editor.

Even when Espresso entered its most profitable stretch yet, Fernando kept finding reasons to wait. He let the cash pile up until there was nearly enough in the bank to cover a full year of payroll for his team.

Eventually, the prudence started making less sense. “Am I just hoarding money and not paying myself to be, like, a martyr?”

Last month, he finally paid himself.

“I’ve run out of excuses.”

Subscribe to Espresso Matutino.
Connect with Fernando on LinkedIn, Instagram, or X.

Espresso Matutino, by format, still looks much like the American briefings that inspired it: short, sectioned, free, ad-supported. Fernando kept the format nearly intact and rebuilt everything around it — who the audience was, how sponsors bought, how it sounded, where people found it.

Espresso’s podcast, short-form videos, image posts, charts — everything sources back to the newsletter. Fernando uses lightweight internal tools he built with Claude Code to turn one editorial product into several formats without multiplying work for his five-person team.

But he draws a line around what’s worth building himself. He’ll automate the bespoke work — like turning a newsletter into a podcast script or publishing across social platforms — but won’t rebuild foundational tools like beehiiv or his CRM.

You can build the systems that make your operation unique, and buy the infrastructure that doesn’t.

As Espresso has expanded beyond the inbox, Fernando has built an audience flywheel for ad sales:

Increasingly, advertisers buy across all three. Fernando sees the bundle as a way out of competing with Meta on CPM alone: Espresso is selling repeated access to the same audience at different points in their day.

There are signs that the model works, if unevenly. Espresso sold out its ad inventory from April through June; July went dead. August rebounded to roughly 75% booked, with September around half full at the time we sat down with him in early August.

He’s pushing that logic further by helping advertisers with landing pages and lead magnets — work many of his clients’ two- or three-person marketing teams don’t have the capacity to do themselves.

The Mexican newsletter market Fernando launched into was not as developed as the American newsletter market he was translating from.

But TikTok's advertising reach in Mexico grew 22% between 2024 and 2025, the fastest of any major platform in the country. Fernando followed the audience, expanding Espresso into short-form video even as email remained the core product. Today, some advertisers discover Espresso through TikTok before they ever encounter the newsletter.

WhatsApp offered an even more direct signal. The platform reaches roughly 93% of internet users in Mexico, with about 78% using it to message businesses.

Fernando started Espresso with an American definition of success: build quickly, sell after a handful of years. But without a meaningful acquisition market for media companies like his in Mexico, he’s had to rethink what the business is building toward.

Mexico’s population is roughly 130 million people; only a fraction are valuable to his advertisers, and he expects to capture an even smaller fraction of those. His estimate puts Espresso’s ceiling at 500,000 to one million subscribers, with its current properties capable of generating roughly $3 million to $5 million a year.

He’s changed his original aim from “How big can this get before I sell?” to “How big does this need to get?” If the business can generate millions in annual revenue without an acquisition, Fernando may not need an exit at all.