🔴 Writing every day for one year (to 190k people)

Today's guest is the award-winning financial reporter Phil Rosen, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Opening Bell Daily, a finance newsletter with over 190,000 subscribers. Previously, he ran a daily finance newsletter at Business Insider; he left one year ago to start his own.

In this issue:

• 🗞️ How Phil became a pro journalist and why he went indie

• 💵 Opening Bell Daily's three-part monetization strategy

• 👔 Actionable advice for building an audience on LinkedIn

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Watch my interview with Phil, or listen to it wherever you get podcasts.

Betting a career on independent media

Opening Bell Daily is a newsletter published six days a week to over 190k subscribers. Phil Rosen, co-founder and editor-in-chief, sent out the first issue on April 3, 2024 — I asked him to come on the podcast and reflect in advance of the first anniversary.

Phil represents two themes common to our Spotlight guests. One, he’s part of the growing number of journalists leaving mainstream, traditional publications to start an independent media business covering the same beat in a similar style. Two, he’s a lifelong athlete; I’ve noticed many successful, long-game-playing creators apply an athlete’s discipline to their professional work.

Every day, for nearly a decade, Phil says he’s sat down and journaled some 500 words to start his day. This led to starting a personal blog and, eventually, his first paid writing position at a local English newspaper during a post-college stint in Hong Kong — and it all snowballed into a journalism career.

Phil joined Business Insider in 2021 to work on the company’s nascent markets newsletter, 10 Things Before the Opening Bell. It wasn’t a high-profile project at the time, so he had a great deal of freedom and quickly turned it into a popular, performant product.

In 2023, the company decided to shut the newsletter down; Phil never found out precisely why. At the time, it had a subscriber count in the millions. He was not let go — in fact, he survived two rounds of layoffs in his time there — but he decided it was time to leave. He’d become good at the daily newsletter as a medium, and there was, of course, a newly created gap in the market.

Creating Opening Bell Daily

Shortly after Business Insider retired the newsletter Phil worked on, he met Anthony Pompliano, the entrepreneur, investor, and creator; if you’re interested in finance, you’ve probably come across his work before. Together, they co-founded Opening Bell Daily to fill the gap.

By the end of his time at Business Insider, Phil was in a good place in his career — still in his twenties and a senior reporter covering markets and Wall Street. Opening Bell Daily represents a bet on indie media:

Anthony’s choosing to work with Phil is a mutual bet on independent media. It stands in contrast to Business Insider's giving Phil the keys to their markets newsletter four years ago. That was a large organization giving an underutilized media asset to a budding journalist who took the opportunity to spin gold; this is a proven journalist partnering with another independent media veteran to build a new institution in the creator economy from the ground up.

Journalist-entrepreneur

Phil is no stranger to entrepreneurship, having previously freelanced and published two books written in hours carved out after his day jobs, but Opening Bell Daily represents his first time working to build a full-on media brand beyond his personal. The core product is a daily finance newsletter; this is his bread and butter. Everything outside of that has presented new challenges.

Monetization

The business’ three revenue streams are syndication, advertising, and a new paid membership model, the Best Ideas Club. Launched this February at $299 per year (there's no monthly option), members receive, each Sunday, “a premium report that unpacks one high-conviction trade or investment idea sourced from an interview with one world-class investor.” Otherwise, Opening Bell Daily is entirely paywall-free.

They waited a year to launch the Best Ideas Club instead of starting with it, Phil says, to establish the core product and build audience trust in the project; “if we had launched paid right out the gate, it would have been very difficult because no one had seen the product yet.” He declined to share exact signup numbers, saying they’ve “seen a very strong launch in the first month,” and those subscribers have given enthusiastic feedback on all the stock-pick deep dives so far.

Sponsorships

After years working in an environment that upheld the firewall between journalists and sponsorship interests, Phil says his growth as an entrepreneur has been most focused on learning how to work with sponsors.

It’s a shift in how he thinks about his work that, he says, he finds useful as a journalist; it’s sharpened how he thinks about his audience’s relationship to his work.

Growth

That audience now includes over 190k subscribers, initially from his and Anthony’s already sizable social media followings. Both of their social presences have continued to drive new subscriptions (more on that down in today’s "Steal This Tactic”). The rest of the growth has come mainly from media partners — other newsletters and organizations they’ve worked with, including their two syndication partners; every morning, the newsletter is published concurrently on Inc. Magazine and Bloomberg Terminals.

A “selfish ambition”

At the core of this work is a love for the practice, and Phil’s career as a journalist easily traces back to his commitment to writing daily while in college. For now, it’s just him and Anthony working on the project.

Connect with Phil on X or LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Opening Bell Daily.

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touch on in the podcast:

• 00:00 Introducing Phil Rosen and Opening Bell Daily

• 02:00 Building the foundation of a successful writer

• 05:27 Independent journalism's rise over established media

• 13:49 Navigating the business side of journalism

• 18:22 The freedom of building a new business model

• 21:40 Phil's ambitions to NOT scale the business

• 24:32 The death of objectivity in journalism

• 30:48 The untapped market for valuable growth

• 33:40 Overcoming the fear of posting video

• 39:30 Paywalls: The necessary evils of the media business

• 44:36 Advice for aspiring writers and creators

If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on all of them.

If you’re not on LinkedIn, you’re leaving audience on the table

Phil says his LinkedIn account — and his video posts specifically — is “one of the most powerful levers” in Opening Bell Daily's continued growth. So, I took a look to see what’s been working. He posted 12 times in one week, from March 13 to March 19, 2025.

These 12 posts can be split into three types:

• Reposts of the LinkedIn version of Phil’s newsletter. Six of these. He syndicates the newsletter to LinkedIn, where it has 7k+ subscribers.

• Longer text-based post with one attached image. Two of these. One is a reflection on a talk he gave to a friend’s journalism class.

• Short-form video. Four of these. 30-50-second vertical videos wherein Phil discusses one of the topics from that day’s newsletter.

It’s not a coincidence that the best engagement came from Phil’s video posts. Our small sample's peak comments (21) and likes (92) came from a then-one-day-old video about Google acquiring Wiz. It’s timely and gives viewers the need-to-know on this $32 billion deal.

Notes on how to LinkedIn

Phil has over 30,000 followers on LinkedIn, a milestone he reached in early March, right as he passed 10,000 followers on X. You probably don’t have 30,000 LinkedIn followers, but you could if you took a few notes from how Phil does LinkedIn.

• Subject matter is one reason; finance and business topics are obviously a great fit for a LinkedIn audience. But so are creator interviews like I post there. So is video game criticism. So is Gen Z trend reporting.

  • Rule of thumb: if your content can, in any way, help someone do their job better, it’s a good fit for LinkedIn. 

• Presentation: This is not complicated. Provided you have something to talk about, just … turn on your camera and talk about it. Here are some rules:

  • Vertical is the way. Assume people are scrolling LinkedIn on their phones; even if they’re on their computer, vertical looks better on desktop than horizontal does on a vertically-oriented phone screen.

  • Don’t overthink it. Phil writes a first line and a last line, then improvises the entire middle.

  • Add captions. Any video editing app worth anything can do auto-captions these days. Use them. But proofread them first; if it’s an under-one-minute video, you have no excuse not to.

  • Add additional visuals. Again, don’t overthink this. Phil’s videos tend to have a couple screenshots, headlines, or logos embedded at the top of the frame. They’ll change a couple times throughout the video as relevant to what he’s saying. You can also do a green-screen-style video (video editing apps make removing your background and overlaying yourself onto an image easy) but that’s up to you.

• Frequency is the most important factor: Phil’s newsletter publishes six times a week, but he posted to LinkedIn twice as many times in this one-week sample. His skill as a poster compounds alongside the size of his audience. Every one of these three layers is essential. This one, depending on your disposition, is either the easiest or hardest. This is the fuel that powers the machine.

Frequency amplifies presentation amplifies subject matter. The fundamentals have to be there for the amplification to work best. I asked Phil why he thinks this tactic is working:

MrBeast once said, essentially, the way to succeed on YouTube is to start by making 100 videos, trying to make each one a little better than the last, and otherwise not judging your performance too harshly until you’ve shipped 100 videos. Phil agrees: