A Newsletter About A.I and Tech News Making $1K MRR

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hey there!

My name is Louis, I just turned 24 and I live near Paris. I'm about to graduate from a business school, so except an internship at Station F (a parisian incubator) and at Amazon, I have actually zero professional experience.

Four months ago, I launched Techpresso, a newsletter that summarizes every day the most important AI and tech news, from 50+ media like The Verge or Tech Crunch.

It's not the usual newsletter because 95% of the job is done thanks to machine learning and AI. This allows me to spend more time on distribution and sales.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

Before and while doing working on this project, I was an exchange student at the Technical University of Munich.

I was writing my master thesis on media and technology and wanted later to work at the intersection of these two topics. I was using ChatGPT to help me write it, and at some point I just figured that it would be super interesting to try to work on a side project that would imply AI in the field of media.

I had previously created a blog 100% generated by AI, but I wanted to make something bigger. I always liked reading tech news but was often disappointed that most media didn't cover all the important topics of the day.

So the idea was to create a media that would recap the best tech news of the day. I didn't want to create a blog or a platform, so I chose to start a newsletter.

My main motivation was to create something new, that no one ever built. 100% passion driven. I had already coded in Lisp, JS and TS, so I wasn't a total newbie when I started working on Techpresso (though I had to switch to Python haha).

I created the first version of the product in a few weeks, spending most of my days on it.

How did you get your first initial customers?

I manage a small discord server and my first subs came from there. I also brought some friends, but they were not the most active readers :')

Then I posted an announcement on Indiehackers and Reddit, in small subreddits that wouldn't ban me for promoting my project.

It quickly gained some traction, and I managed to reach 200 subscribers in a few days.

People were mostly attracted by the technical aspect of the project and I don't think I would have been able bring that many subs without this.

To be honest, when you have a good looking landing page and some content to show, it's quite easy to find the first 10-50 readers. The main difficulty is to find a distribution channel that will bring you users on the long term, and not just rely on oneshots like with launch announcements.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

I mainly use Reddit (I post the news from my newsletter in tech related subreddits). It's quite a grind because you really often get banned.

I also build in public on Twitter (I don't have that many followers but still managed to bring a few subs from there!).

I plan to launch on Linkedin this month, because the audience there is just MASSIVE and competition seems way lower than on Twitter. Also their algorithm seems more reliable than Twitter's.

Finally, word of mouth is something I didn't expect would work that well, but for instance a few weeks ago the CEO of a medium-sized tech consultancy brought in 1/3 of his employees, which is super cool!

How does your business make money?

I have three monetization channels right now.

The first one is Sparkloop: when someone subscribes to Techpresso, they are invited to also subscribe to 3 to 4 newsletters, and I get paid if they become active readers of the ones they subscribed to. It makes around $500/month.

The second one is the "Plus" version of Techpresso: it's basically for the readers that want to support me and not see ads in the newsletter. It makes me (for now) around $40/month, which is small but doesn't require from me any additional work.

Finally, there are the sponsors: I basically get paid to promote their product in the newsletter. I started a week ago to run sponsorships so for now I can't give a precise number, but it will be around $500 for September.

I'm also about to sign a long term sponsor for a few thousand dollars, which is also super cool! It will start in October :)

Before you go, what advice would you give to another who wants to start a business like yours?

I would have never spent so many hours on a project I wasn't passionate about.

It's just so much better when you work on something you like, you're proud of.

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

Here are some links you can go to learn more:

Techpresso’s Official Site: https://dupple.com/techpresso

Twitter: https://twitter.com/louiscorneloup