Making $1,200 MRR Running A Newsletter While Working Full time

How this retired military veteran makes money off his side hustle while still working a full-time job

Feb 03, 2025

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

I'm Mike Benitez, 44 years old, retired from the US military and now working in the national security tech sector.

I run a military tech newsletter and podcast called The Merge. The podcast is relatively new compared to the newsletter, but its already ranked on the Apple Podcast charts.

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

I've been involved in using military tech my whole career, but in early 2020 did a short assignment in Silicon Valley that got me interested in VC and the business side of the tech sector.

I started looking for a source to keep tabs on the tech trends and happenings in the military sector, but nothing existed. When COVID hit, I decided to learn a bit about how to create a newsletter, and leveraged successful formats from The Morning Brew, The Hustle, and several others.

I chose to send it on Sundays simply because I have a full time day job and it gives me breathing room to finish on Saturdays if I get behind during the week. I expanded it to Tuesdays when I was tired on deleting content that wouldn't fit in the Sunday email. Dear Google, please raise the Gmail clip limit.

How did you get your first initial customers?

The first newsletter I sent went to ~200 people. That core group was built leveraging several private Facebook groups I was in with active duty military members.

I promoted the newsletter for about 6 weeks before I sent the first one, just to be sure I had a decent starting point with a core audience for feedback.

It's grown every week in the 2.5 years I've been running the newsletter, and currently has 16k+ subscribers. More importantly, I've managed to maintain a strong audience (60%+ open rates).

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

There isn't a magic solution, but the most successful ways have been through social media, a referral program, newsletter swaps, and being guests on other YouTube channels and podcasts.

Helping others on their platform as an expert guest is a win-win (and its free). I once gained 2K subscribers from being a guest for 30 minutes on someone's YouTube channel.

How do your business make money?

I use a hybrid Patreon and sponsorship approach.

For Patreon, its a PWYW (Pay-What-You-Want) model since I don't have the time to mess with gated content. Patreon also keeps me less dependent on closing expensive ad deals to keep things running. Currently bringing in at around $800+ via Patroen, starting using ads a few months ago so I was averaging that over the year. I think I made $2000 last month.

The podcast makes nothing, and I don't run ads on purpose. I treat it as a product extension and top-of-funnel expander.

The newsletter goes out on Sundays and Tuesdays, and generates ~$1200 MRR. Expenses are a bit complicated since I've had some 1-time expenses (new computer, podcast equipment, etc.) but normalized it's ~$200/month before ad spend (and not factoring my time).

I'm hoping by the end of 2023 it will have the audience and numbers to be revenue positive with my time factored in.

Take us through a typical day in your life running the business as a solo founder

I'm a 1-man show, and still have a full time day job at a defense tech company. I devote my nights and weekends to run The Merge. Time: maybe 8hrs a week. Lots of data to churn through.

I plan my breaks ahead of time, and have never missed an email.

For the newsletter, I currently use Mailerlite simply because it has an all-in-1 solution to keep things easy for me. The landing page, newsletter ESP, and auto-archive features are key time-savers. I've been through quite a few other ESPs (Mailchimp, etc.). If I ever get bandwidth, I'll explore Beehive more deeply--I hear its getting better and better.

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

Seek out the FB newsletter groups; the search function is your friend.

For audiences, getting solid product-market-fit early is key, so having a way to get feedback is a critical item I don't see with many newsletters. I still have a feedback button in every email I send.