I needed to make this newsletter work. There was no backup plan.

Right now, Matt Brown is getting ready for his newsletter’s first football game.

Matt is the founder and publisher of Extra Points, a publication that covers the business behind college sports. And he decided it was high time they sponsor a game themselves.

At 6pm today, Matt will do the coin toss at the Extra Points Bowl wearing his Extra Points custom anchor jacket with several of his newsletter readers joining him in the stands.

It’s a pretty cool moment for the newsletter.

It’s Matt’s version of buying InfoWars, though it comes with a lot less lawsuits.

What’s most impressive to me about Extra Points is not their high profile sponsorship, it’s that the newsletter is a 90% reader-funded venture Matt’s been running full time for four years with a growing team.

If you think your target audience is too small, you’re going to love the Extra Points path to building a paying fan base.

P.S. Did you know this newsletter you’re reading only goes to 800 people? Francis Zierer interviewed me about how I make a living with a small audience for Creator Spotlight.

This was never just a passion project

Matt started Extra Points in 2020 after his tenure at SB Nation ended.

Unlike a lot of writers who toy with their newsletters for years as a side project, Matt knew right away he wanted it to be his full time gig.

Matt stepped into the role of publisher quite naturally. He cut his teeth on the revenue side as a reporter, figuring out how to sell sponsorships or how to get a story to perform well with the audience.

Rather than making a play for viral growth and ad eyeballs, he knew that his best chance of success was to find a small base of paying readers.

That’s a rare model, but it’s one that is becoming more popular with journalists who like to report on stuff that’s not going to appeal to the masses and also journalists who are sick of catering to Google and Facebook’s traffic sending whims.

The stakes were high. Matt wasn’t going to be on the street if his newsletter didn’t work, but he also didn’t love his backup options.

“This was never just a passion project.”

Why Extra Points is 90% reader funded

When launching Extra Points, Matt saw an opportunity to cover a side of college sports often missed by major outlets: the business and operations of the schools.

Matt uncovers stories like the expensive meal contract of UCLA Football, how the team from Hawaii travels to games, and the offshore fundraising adventures of Colorado.

It’s a fascinating world that surrounds college sports and Matt knew there was an audience big enough to care about it.

But the Extra Points reader is deeper into the industry than the average college basketball fan. It’s people like the athletic directors at the schools, vendors who work with colleges, and die hard college sports fans who moonlight as public records nerds.

Matt’s worked to cultivate a more two-sided relationship with his readers at Extra Points than most publishers do. Because of that intel, he’s been able to create more than one type of subscription to cater to different types of readers. And that’s paid off in a resilient income stream for him and his newly expanding team.

What works to turn readers into subscribers

A lot of reporters find the balance of publishing stories and selling the publication to be tricky (and it is). Here’s what Matt says works to persuade readers to chip in:

Higher level strategies to get more paying readers

• Strong audience/offer match: Matt talks to his readers often, invites their input and puts them at the center of his business. He’s able to write what they want to read and knows what kind of stories, documents and products they’d pay for.

• Build a reputation: Matt had a personal brand in the college sports arena while at SB Nation. Having people who already trust you when you launch and encouraging them to follow you over helps seed faster financial support.

• Make fun stuff readers want: Paying readers get access to the Athletic Director Simulation game which trains you to run a D-1 athletic department. Matt wrote the game as a joke, but it was so popular, he enlisted some help to professionalize it and now it’s used as a subscriber perk for readers and classrooms.

• Offer utility journalism: Reporting that people find genuinely useful in their lives or their work is easy to get them to financially support. Matt wrote about this on Reddit emphasizing that you’ve got to be “capable of writing stuff people will pay for.”

What does that look like?

In the case of Extra Points readers, it’s information that:

• Helps somebody do their job better

• Helps them save money at their job

• Helps them with their performance

Best case, it’s also something they can ask their boss to write off as a professional development expense.

Tactical strategies to get more paying readers

• Tease the paywall: Send paywalled issues to free readers with an enticing preview to show them what they’re missing. Extra Points comes out 4x a week with 2 of those issues being only available for paying subscribers.

• Write really good calls to action: Every issue of Extra Points has a call to action. Sometimes Matt goes harder and other days he goes lighter. He also mixes them up, prioritizing different revenue streams and offers.

• Say what the money is for: Matt used to publish a quarterly financial report but now he tends to communicate this story by story. He reminds readers that they can trust his reporting because he wasn’t bankrolled by the school but that travel expenses still cost money. Want the story? Help pay for it.

• Be a “soul opener”: One of Matt’s most successful issues in driving new subscriptions was a piece he wrote about why he’s not Mormon anymore (related to BYU sports). It sold 24 new subscriptions.

The idea of being vulnerable as the person behind the reporting is still pretty fresh for a lot of journalists. Matt acknowledges that but stands by it for those willing to put themselves out there:

“It's generally good practice to share what you are willing to share with your audience that you are a person who has biases and interests independent of this beat.”

I agree and have found similarly that mixing in behind the scenes, behind the writer, behind the business content drives more people to buy what I’m selling too. Honestly, the more vulnerable the better usually but beware the vulnerability hangover.

Extra Points has two other core revenue streams

Reader-support is the anchor revenue stream for Extra Points but it’s not the only one.

The publication also has:

1) Sponsorships, partnerships and ads

2) A digital product called the Extra Points Library which costs a couple grand a year

The Extra Points Library is a brilliant play because Matt is already digging deep in the public records of college athletics (and paying the fees). He tried it first as a Google Drive but that didn’t land so he hired a developer and turned it into this glorious searchable database of over 5k documents from hundreds of schools.

This information is invaluable to the athletic directors and vendors who are already part of Matt’s audience.

Extra Points also sells sponsorships and ads.

They sometimes use beehiiv’s built in ad network though they make more money when they work with partners directly, particularly for bigger ventures like the Extra Points Bowl.

Just this month, they hired a full time sales exec to handle partnerships and the EP Library sales, mainly because they see a lot of revenue potential in developing that side of the business.

Year over year growth is around 18% across all revenue. Matt said the biggest factors there right now are:

• Selling more subscriptions to The Extra Points Library

• Raising reader subscription prices from $8 to $9 a month

• Raising prices on outbound ad sales

• Selling subscriptions to college classrooms (with the Athletic Director Simulator game as an enticing educational perk)

Moving from Substack to Ghost to beehiiv

Matt originally built Extra Points on Substack back in 2020. He even received one of the first fellowships Substack created to attract journalists to the platform.

Why’d he leave?

Because he’s really good at getting readers to become subscribers and he was giving too much of that cash to Substack. They take 10% of your revenue which, for Matt, was hundreds of dollars a month he was giving up.

“I was paying way too much money for what I was getting.”

[Related: Is Substack bad at paid newsletters?]

From Substack, Matt went to Ghost (and Outpost) which he liked a lot but he found it required having a developer on standby to customize the site and set up integrations.

He also saw that Substack and beehiiv were building growth tools into their platforms at the same exact time Twitter was becoming unusable as an audience driver. Features like recommendations, referral programs and fostering a community of writers offered list growth options that can really help out small publishers.

Ghost didn’t offer those, nor did they seem to want to. Extra Points had already been at Substack (before those features existed) so Matt took his publication over to beehiiv.

Matt was one of the first paid publications to move from Ghost to beehiiv.

I asked Matt which one he thought was the best and he noted that no platform is going to solve all your problems.

He did say Substack’s list growth engine works but hosting Extra Points there would increase his costs by 6x and it wasn’t worth paying thousands of dollars a year for that. After all, you can always redirect that growth cash into paid social media ads, as Matt and team have.

If you only heard one thing, hear this.

Don’t focus on selling everyone. Focus on the people most likely to pay.

Subscriptions for the true fans.
Products and services for the industry professionals.
Sponsorships for the brands who want to reach the audience.

In Matt’s words:

“If you can do two of those revenue streams very well, you will never have to check your bank balance when you go buy Chinese food on days you don't want to cook, which to me is the equivalent of making it.”