There’s money in newsletters. There’s money in communities. Why not invest it?
Our guest this week is Stefan von Imhof, co-founder of Alts, a newsletter-turned-community-turned-investing-group. It’s am ambitious media company — they’ve acquired and sold several niche publications — with a unique business model.
Nearly 1,000 members pay between $500 to $10,000 a year to join a network of people investing in everything from K-pop royalties to farmland deals.
In this episode:
🎯 How to elegantly integrate acquired newsletters into an existing portfolio
📈 Leveraging newsletter acquisition as a primary growth strategy
🏦 The newsletter to community to investing network pipeline
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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Hosted by Francis Zierer
00:00 Introducing Stefan
02:05 An alternative revenue breakdown
06:54 The biggest challenges of community building
15:02 How a side project becomes a business
22:44 Demonstrating the value of your content
27:33 Leveraging audience segmentation
31:21 Decentralized due diligence
33:56 The art of buying and selling newsletters
37:10 A bearish perspective on the newsletter economy
40:54 The power of events as a community business
47:17 The playbook for newsletter acquisition
49:39 Newsletter remix concept
53:16 A love for physical media
56:55 Where is the creator/business owner tipping point
🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, you can find us wherever you tune in to your podcasts.

How a newsletter becomes an investing networking
Alts is a community that invests in niche assets like K-pop music rights, rare tequilas, and farmland. For Stefan von Imhof, it began as pandemic project — a newsletter he started as a way to research alternative investments. Just a few years later, it’s grown into a 130,000-subscriber newsletter group and a nearly 1,000-member investing community deploying capital into the very assets it covers.
When he spun up the first newsletter, Stefan was head of product at Flippa, a marketplace for buying and selling online businesses. Stuck indoors in Melbourne, he started writing about micro private equity and alternative assets. Early issues of the newsletter were sent to around 50 friends.
Around the same time, Wyatt Cavalier, stuck indoors in Spain, was writing about alternative investments from a different angle — collectibles, rare books, and what would become NFTs. Stefan discovered Wyatt's work and made a cold call. "I don't want to compete with you," Stefan remembers telling him. "Let's join forces and build this thing together."
The partnership clicked immediately. Stefan brought an outgoing, deal-making personality suited for podcasts and partnerships; Wyatt brought deep finance expertise and sharp writing. More importantly, they shared a conviction that the newsletter was just the beginning. “I want to start a fund,” Stefan recalls telling Wyatt on their very first call. “I want to do something much bigger than a newsletter.”
Almost immediately, that vision took shape. They raised capital from their growing subscriber base and began experimenting with Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), letting accredited investors back deals alongside them. Their Sunday newsletter still covers everything from farmland to music royalties to crypto — but increasingly, they weren’t just writing about investments, they were structuring them.
Building community was the next logical step. An early attempt at using Discord didn’t fit — “too chaotic, too many impersonators,” Stefan told us. After nine months, they dropped Discord and transitioned to Circle, a platform specifically designed for more formal, personal community-building.
That's when they introduced Altea, their premium community for serious alternative investors. The pricing structure was deliberately exclusive, with three tiers:

$500 a year for Gateway tier, which includes access to deals, the Circle community, and resources
$2,500 for Base tier, which additionally includes lower fees, priority allocations, and full event access
$10,000 for Black tier, which additionally includes with guaranteed allocations, waived SPV fees, reduced carry, exclusive perks, and even free trips
"We're not interested in vanity metrics. We don't want people who are in the club but never invest."
Their revenue model reflects this philosophy. While they do offer newsletter sponsorships, the real money comes from investment management fees and carried interest — typically 20% of profits when they sell assets after holding them for several years.
"We're at an interesting inflection point. Sponsorships are half our business now, but we're switching into something much different, much bigger."
Their most innovative breakthrough involves what Stefan and Wyatt call "decentralized due diligence." Instead of analyzing every deal in isolation, they tap experts inside their Altea community: For a K-pop music rights investment, they leaned on music industry professionals in the community to assess catalog valuations and revenue projections. Those experts got priority allocations in return, resulting in aligned incentives throughout the network and higher-quality analysis than Stefan’s team could generate alone.

From newsletter subscribers to investors
Today, Alts has over 130,000 newsletter subscribers and nearly 1,000 paying community members, but email is increasingly just the entry point.
Alts has bought and sold at least six newsletters, including the Inverse Cramer Newsletter — acquired from the creator of the viral Twitter account. The timing was uncanny — just before Elon Musk began tweeting about Inverse Cramer and the meme caught fire across social media. Subscriber growth surged as they rode the wave, but ultimately they sold the property when it no longer fit their more serious, fund-focused brand. More recently, they sold the previously acquired, 100,000-subscriber newsletter Stocks & Income to focus fully on alternative investing.
Early events like a San Francisco beachside mansion gathering and an Austin airplane hangar party with NFL players and investors were organized directly by Stefan. But as the community has grown, it’s begun to stabilize around a locally networked model. This summer, members in New York, LA, and beyond stepped up as “city captains,” hosting local gatherings that cement Alts as more than an online network.
“We’re turning subscribers into community members, and one is far more valuable than the other.”
This trajectory has always been the vision. Alts didn’t just bolt a media arm onto an investment firm. It inverted the model, using media to build the firm itself. What began as a pandemic newsletter is now an investment platform with its own private equity mechanics — proof that in 2025, a media company can just as easily be a fund.

Nat’s notes ✍️
A couple of things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:
“What’s the equivalent of a retweet or a quote-tweet in newsletters?” Instead of just running guest posts, one of the coolest editorial initiatives Stefan shared was their “newsletter remix.” Every couple of months, they’ll take a piece from another writer they admire and reframe it for the Alts audience — adding their own intro, imagery, and closing analysis to tie it back to their broader investment thesis. The original author receives free distribution and subscribers, while Alts maintains high quality and ensures the piece carries their distinctive voice.
“We owe it to our audience to do a little bit better than just a standard guest post. I think guest posts are okay, but I think if you do them too much, people are like, what am I really signing up for here? They came here for your voice. We basically splice up the piece so it retains its core soul, but we put our own flavor onto it, put our own fingerprints on it.”


The Alts playbook for newsletter acquisition and audience integration
Stefan's approach to buying and selling newsletters is sharp and shaped by experience. We’ve spoken to plenty of folks who have bought or sold newsletters, but nobody who has both bought and sold this many. After six acquisitions, he's developed systems that maximize both integration success and eventual sale value.
Use segmentation to extract maximum value
Rather than treating acquired newsletters as monolithic audiences, Stefan's team immediately begins segmentation based on engagement patterns and content preferences. They track which subscribers click on alternative investment content versus traditional finance stories, building detailed behavioral profiles.
This data enables targeted content distribution that wouldn't work for the broader Alts audience. For example, farmland investment opportunities are sent to subscribers who've shown interest in agricultural content. Regional real estate deals target specific geographic segments.
These targeted sends typically reach 15-30% of the audience rather than the full subscriber base. They also segment geographically — avoiding sending US-specific deals to UK subscribers and vice versa.
Implement the "slow integration" rule
“You’ll get burned if you do anything else.”
Stefan's cardinal rule: newsletter integrations should take months, never weeks. Rushing subscriber migration can destroy trust and trigger mass unsubscribes.
Their integration process follows a strict timeline:
First month: Keep the acquired newsletter's original cadence, subject line style, and content structure exactly as subscribers expect — if it was a weekly roundup of fintech news, for example, keep it a weekly fintech roundup. They document what works well in the acquired newsletter's existing systems: community engagement techniques, timing strategies, and subject line formulations for specific niches.
Second month: Begin introducing alternative investment angles to existing topics. Include occasional invitations to participate in the Alts community discussions.
Third month and beyond: Full editorial integration where the newsletter maintains its original focus area but applies Alts' deep-dive research methodology and connects every story to investable alternative opportunities.

They've codified this approach in their acquisition contracts, requiring their newsletter buyers to follow similar integration practices. This protects both the acquirer's investment and Alts' reputation, should subscribers connect the original newsletter to their brand.
Build acquisition deal flow through community
Many of Stefan's best acquisition opportunities come through Altea community members who know newsletter creators looking to sell. Community members understand Alts' integration capabilities and often make introductions when they encounter struggling newsletter businesses.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle: successful integrations build reputation within creator networks, leading to more acquisition opportunities. Stefan estimates that community-sourced deals have three times higher success rates than cold outreach acquisitions.
Structure deals for strategic flexibility
Stefan's six newsletter acquisitions demonstrate a portfolio approach rather than permanent holdings. When they sold the Stocks and Income newsletter (100,000 subscribers), the decision centered on strategic focus.
"We realized if we're gonna get serious and double down on community and alternative high net worth investing, we need to free up cash to double down on this."
The acquisition game requires significant upfront capital and operational sophistication, but Stefan's track record suggests it can be among the most effective growth strategies — both in audience and direct revenue terms — for media companies with a clear strategic focus and the flexibility to divest when priorities shift.