<p><b>Startup description</b></p><p><b></b>Started in 2021 as an outlet to share learnings with the iOS development community, and grew into a project with a loyal fan base and a recognised name.</p><p><b>Key highlights:<b></b></b></p><ul><li>Annual revenue: 4,400 EUR, potential to increase to 8,000-16,000 EUR at the current sponsorship price (switch to weekly, active outreach to potential sponsors)</li><li>Annual profit: 3,600 EUR (fixed yearly cost: 800 EUR for platform and domain)</li><li>Open rate: around 70%</li><li>Click rate: around 10%</li><li>Ad click rate: 2-4%</li><li>Number of issues: 74. In 2024: 13; In 2023: 22; in 2022: 25; in 2021: 13. No issues in 2025.</li><li>Plug-and-play newsletter with a clear playbook</li><li>Recognisable brand name in the iOS community</li><li>High potential to increasing sponsor revenue</li><li>Track record of sponsorships by largest companies known in the mobile industry (Bitrise, RevenueCat, etc)</li></ul><p><b>Team</b></p><p>Me, the creator - an experienced developer. I've hired others to create a few of the issues for the newsletter before, it worked well.</p><p><b>Tech Stack</b></p><p>Ghost.io as a blog and newsletter platform. Raindrop.io for bookmarking and curation.</p><p><b>Marketing and growth</b></p><p>Posting about every issue to LinkedIn, Twitter and Mastodon. Optimising SEO on the website to make sure it shows up on Google. Big potential here to add blog posts to the website to drive traffic.</p><p><b>Revenue and profit</b></p><p>When the newsletter was last active in 2024, I charged 350 EUR per issue, with 2 issues per month. Given that I didn't spend any time looking for sponsors, only 8 out of 13 issues had advertisers, adding up to 2,800 EUR income that year. In 2023, 20 issues were sponsored to a total of 4,388 EUR that year. There is potential to sending the newsletter weekly instead of twice a month. In that case even at avg issue sponsor fee of 250 eur (in case you give a discount or a couple issues don't have a sponsor), yearly income would add up to around 12,000 eur. Current yearly cost of running the newsletter is around 800 eur (domain and ghost.io platform).</p><p><b>Return on investment</b></p><p>If you make sure to have sponsors each issue, the ROI is going to be quite fast.</p><p><b>Startup assets<b></b></b></p><ul><li>Email list with 3.5k subscribers (3.3k opted in)</li><li>Fully working website at ghost.io with all previous posts</li><li>Source code for the theme of the website (on GitHub)</li><li>X/Twitter account with 2,8k followers&nbsp;</li><li>Linkedin page with 3.2k followers&nbsp;</li><li>Merch assets (svg for stickers and t-shirts)</li><li>Checklist for creating an issue end-to-end, from curation sources to posting to socials</li><li>Template for the issue, templates for socials</li><li>Raindrop.io account with hundreds of link bookmarks for future and past issues</li></ul><p><b>Risks</b></p><p>I recommend that you have a developer with sufficient experience as a writer, so the newsletter maintains trustworthiness and high loyalty from readers.</p><p><b>Summary</b></p><p>Plug-and-play newsletter with a clear playbook and a recognisable brand name in the community, built so anyone can author behind the scenes. High potential to increasing sponsor revenue with track record of sponsorships by largest companies known in the mobile industry.</p></br>✅ $3,600 in Annual Revenue✅ 3,300 subscribers✅ Business model: Sponsorship✅ Built with Ghost,&nbsp;Raindrop