How Do You Build a Subscription Game?

Codie Sanchez runs the amazing newsletter Contrarian Thinking, whose topics include passive income, generational wealth, contrarian investing, and learning from strivers who think big.

Her motto is “Question everything and stack income streams”, and that’s exactly what we talk about in this episode. Not just “how to build a newsletter”, but one of Nathan’s favorite topics: how to build wealth!

You’ll learn how Codie went from journalist to investor to partner in a fund, and how she runs her 100,000-subscriber newsletter plus other companies besides. Codie talks growing a newsletter from 100 subscribers to 1,000 and beyond, but that’s not all.

Tune in and find out:

• Why Joe Rogan’s deal with Spotify was a huge mistake.
• Getting people to promote you… without sounding thirsty.
• How to build an all-star team for your growing business.
• Whether ads or sponsors are a better way to monetize your newsletter.

It’s a great show!

Links & Resources

• Unconventional Acquisitions
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
• Joe Rogan
• Howard Stern
• Mr. Beast
• Noah Kagan Marketing & Business Blog - OkDork.com
• Sam Parr CEO at The Hustle
• Jonah Goldberg - The Dispatch
• Charles E Gaudet II » Predictable Profits
• Contrarian Cashflow

Codie Sanchez’s Links

• Newsletter: Contrarian Thinking by Codie Sanchez
• Twitter: @Codie_Sanchez
• Instagram: @codiesanchez

Episode Transcript

Codie: [00:00:00]
The funny thing about audience is money doesn’t care if people care about you. So capital as a leverage source, doesn’t care about relevancy, your dollar, as long as it stays in the market. And you keep reinvesting will have compound interest. The thing about audience is, it can be a depreciating asset. If you don’t pay attention to it, if you don’t upkeep it just like you would a house, then your audience is going to think that you’re not relevant.

Nathan: [00:00:32]
Today’s episode is with Codie Sanchez. Now Codie has a fascinating background where she started in journalism and there, she was covering a lot of things in Mexico and on the US-Mexico border. So she has crazy stories from that. And then she goes into investing, right? Like it goes to Goldman Sachs and Vanguard and goes to the whole investing world.

And then now she’s in not just investing, where she’s a partner in a fund, what was the investing in cannabis companies, but she’s also running a newsletter, with over a hundred thousand subscribers, which is pretty crazy. And we get into how to monetize the newsletter, how to grow it, her take on the creator economy, so many other things. So it was a great conversation and let’s dive in.

Codie, thanks for coming on the show.

Codie: [00:01:19]
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Nathan: [00:01:20]
So you and I have we talk newsletters and everything, which we will, but first we have a shared love for the same topic, a topic that some people love to talk about. Like we do, and other people dance around and think is weird and awkward and everything else. And that is building wealth. Like you and I both love this topic.

Why is it something that you, what about so much on all your social channels and your newsletter and everything else?

Codie: [00:01:44]
Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I nerd out about this. It might be just because I’ve been in finance for 72 years, but, more than that, I think if you want to. Control the art, you have to control the resources behind the art. And so I’ve always loved creating, I mean, similar to you in multiple different ways, whether you’re creating a business or a newsletter or whatever the case may be.

I like the act of creating and if you don’t have the financial resources to actually do the creative, and then there are all of these pressures that get put upon you, and I don’t think you get control of the art. And so that would probably be one of my main reasons. And then secondarily, I just think financial freedom without financial freedom, you don’t have any freedoms. And so that’s sort of one of the building blocks, I think, crucial for people to get.

Nathan: [00:02:29]
Yeah, that makes sense. So, one thing that you talk about quite a bit is leverage and finding leverage on, you know, as a tool for building wealth, maybe explain some of your thinking behind that and how you’d like to encourage your readers for your newsletter and, you know, companies you invest in to find leverage.

Codie: [00:02:46]
Yeah, well, we were kind of talking about this before, you know, I thought I was like brilliant and some of these ideas, and then I realized that like the internet also now has caught up and some of this stuff is more normalized, but, You know, when I thought about leverage, I thought about it with four parameters.

And that was first you had labor, then you had capital. Then you had code. Then you had audience. Now Naval Ravikant talks about the first three. he doesn’t mention the fourth and the fourth I think is really, in my opinion will be sort of the next frontier, the creator economy, and leveraging your audience in order to get different revenue streams.

Because audience is really fascinating in that it’s like an annuity, meaning that it can cashflow consistently, but instead of annuity—only having one revenue stream, you know, they pay you out based on the investment that you make—audience can have have a billion revenue streams. And so anyway, when I think about leverage, I don’t think about it as a financial way.

Lots of people think about leverage. Like you loaned me a dollar and I take that dollar and go do something else with it. but the world we live in today that was old school leverage, you know, that was the leverage that created. Basically the biggest Titans of industry in the US: the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds—they were all created right after banking was established.

So the banks came out, capital was created. These guys made a ton of money, and then you had code come out, software, right? Robots in the form of software and the next biggest billionaires were created. That’s the Jobs, that’s the Elon Musk, etc. And now in the next realm, I think those with audience will be the next sort of wave of billionaires that are created.

And they’re all enabled based on code to some degree. but I think that’ll be the next evolution. So if you are able to understand leverage in a modern day format meaning not just human capital, the most inefficient form—labor like you and I working for living and renting out our time—and not just money like me and the fund, having a bunch of other people...