Reflections on Newcomer Four Years In

Newcomer is on track to generate more than $1 million in profit on more than $2 million in revenue this year.

It’s been four years since I quit my job at Bloomberg during the pandemic and started this newsletter.

On our four-year anniversary, I’m going to tell you how we’ve climbed to over $2 million in revenue and give you a sense of the state of our business today, and where we aim to take it next.

If you don’t already, now would be a great time to become a paid subscriber to Newcomer, support what we’re building, and help us hire more talented reporters to deliver high quality coverage of what matters in startups and venture capital. We’re offering 15% off annual subscriptions for the next week.

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Getting Into Journalism

At 35, it’s been a tough time to be in media for as long as I’ve been old enough to work. I set out to climb the old-school reporting ladder and saw the steps below me crumble. That route is now all but closed off as many legacy journalism organizations contract and retreat.

From fourth grade, I’ve been building a career in journalism. I was an anchor on my elementary school newscast. I was the editor-in-chief of my public high school newspaper in Macon, Georgia. I spent two summers interning at the Macon Telegraph, one at the Sun Sentinel, and another at the Tampa Bay Times. Meanwhile, I was one of the most prolific reporters on The Harvard Crimson where I became an associate managing editor. The summer after I graduated college in 2012, I covered local news for the New York Times as a reporting fellow. I somehow managed to parallel park for the first time in Manhattan on my way to a murder scene.

Despite all that, I did not get a full-time job offer from the New York Times. I had a brief existential crisis about my career choice and spent a month hiking the Appalachian Trail, only to realize while trudging through rain that I couldn’t imagine any other life.

I took my first full-time job at the Washington Examiner, covering city hall in Washington, D.C. Then the conservative owners killed the straight-shooting local newspaper I signed up for and converted it to a partisan megaphone. I got laid off.

Then I got lucky.

Jessica Lessin invited me to join her new, as-yet-unnamed technology publication. I had an offer from the struggling Philadelphia Inquirer, but this looked a lot more exciting. I’d get to move to California, cover the tech industry, and join something new rather than something dying. I guiltily told the local newspaper icons that I worshiped that I was instead going to work for a startup in San Francisco, rather than continue to climb the regional newspaper ladder. I was the first employee at what became The Information. Eventually, I jumped ship to Bloomberg, where I really found my footing as a startups and venture capital reporter, and built a following with scoops on the Uber beat, including the video of Travis Kalanick arguing with that driver.

Starting Newcomer

The startup industry has a way of breaking you free of traditional status games. Even though I was a dyed-in-the-wool member of team media, four years ago I had started to absorb some startup world thinking. From the Silicon Valley vantage point, the people doing noble things are those who carve their own destiny. They build something that is self-justifying and they don’t depend on corporate brands to give them legitimacy. I think great reporters have a similar feeling about good stories. The best stories stand on their own two feet, wherever they’re published.

So a few months into the pandemic, I quit my nice job at Bloomberg to start Newcomer. I never really intended to build a “business.” I mostly just wanted to write stories that would interest me and my sources. In those early days, I could tell many of my sources and readers — you all — liked the idea of a reporter who knew what it was like to build a company. I don’t think I really understood why that was so important at the beginning. I was writing stories people liked and everything else seemed to take care of itself.

The first year was pretty easy. I had lots of story ideas and energy. Even though I was making more money, the second year was harder. I’d have to do it all over again, and work to stay fresh without the backlog of story ideas I’d had in my pocket at the beginning.

Growing the Team and Our Ambition

Then, I hired Newcomer’s first employee, Riley Konsella, on the business side with the hope of selling sponsorships, making me more efficient, and growing the newsletter. We did some of that, but really we stumbled backwards into events with the help and support of my friends Max Child and James Wilsterman. Together, we built the Cerebral Valley AI Summit into a biannual event, attracting top startup founders and investors in generative AI.

In 2023, Newcomer generated $712,000 in net income on $1.6 million in revenue.

In January, we hired Madeline Renbarger from Business Insider to join us as the first non-me reporter. I promoted Riley from chief of staff to Newcomer’s business lead. Jonathan Weber, the former editor-in-chief at both the Industry Standard and the SF Standard, is editing for us part-time as he works on a book about San Francisco. Allie Kerr, the former head of community at NFX, is working for us part-time to put together our events. Christopher Gates, who was the founding executive producer of TechCrunch’s Equity Podcast, is helping us to relaunch the Newcomer podcast. My mother has remained Newcomer’s dedicated proofreader since day one. We’ve had the joy of having five paid interns work for Newcomer over the past four years. 

We very recently stopped running our remote business over WhatsApp and moved to Slack.

Finally, four years in, I have to admit this is a real business.

With our flagship conference less than a month away, we already have committed contracts that will put us over $1 million in profit and $2 million in revenue this year.

Newcomer has been entirely funded via its own cash flows. I have never raised outside funding and have no plans to. 

On the one hand, those numbers feel so small compared to the ones I usually report in this newsletter. On the other hand, I’m generating more profits than many unicorn startups ever will. And of course, in the world of media where making any money is so difficult, I’m proud of what we’re building.

Not everything has been rosy. While free subscriptions have been growing steadily and recently crossed 100,000, our paid subscriber count has remained relatively flat for the past two years. Still, our paid subscribers are a pillar of the business that gives us a recurring revenue safety net to operate with. We’d like more of them.

Why are things working for us?

I feel incredibly fortunate to cover Silicon Valley, an industry that even in a downturn has a lot of money to spend for high quality information and events. Our business has been predicated on helping Silicon Valley stay in touch with itself. In the pandemic, that meant building a newsletter in the era of lockdowns and Clubhouse discussions. After the pandemic, that meant leaning into real world events. Everything has been oriented around my sources (our customers) and figuring what they want to read about, listen to, and do — mixed-in with a healthy dose of following our passions and doing what we want.

My aspiration is to grow our revenue to $4 million next year. Don’t hold me to that. I don’t know if we can. I’ve just started to admit that this is a business. But to do that, we need to hire more people. We’re looking for a talented senior reporter who can host a new core startup event for us next year. And we’re looking to hire a stellar account executive who can work with our sponsors like HP, Oracle, and Samsung Next and find us some great new ones.

Ultimately, I know that this newsletter is the heart of what we do. It’s helped me build a strong footprint in Silicon Valley (as I type this from my apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn). Right now, events are working for us. But we also want to keep growing sponsorships and paid subscriptions. We definitely know there’s a lot of email forwarding going on and would like to make corporate subscriptions easier. (Reach out if you’d like one.) We couldn’t do this without all of you.

My dream for Newcomer is to have a kind of swat team of exceptional reporters covering startups and venture capital. We build great events for the different verticals that venture capitalists cover, changing and adapting quickly with the whims of the venture capital industry. I want to remain laser focused on startups and venture capital. I really believe in the tech industry and am so happy that by some good fortune I ended up covering Silicon Valley, having never set out to do so.

Even as we grow, I want to maintain the approach and outlook that I’ve brought to the newsletter. Newcomer is expressly pro-capitalism, pro-tech, and focused on business — of and for Silicon Valley. We care what our sources care about. We’re happy to point out corporate stumbles and scrutinize how companies are doing. We won’t pull punches when they’re merited. We aspire to give the type of feedback only a friend can give — sometimes harsh but only because we know what wonderful things they’re capable of.

In the first decade of my career, I learned a lot about the world and met a lot of people reporting on Silicon Valley. That’s still my passion. I’m rarely giddier than when I’ve published a story that I’m proud of. But I’m also discovering that there are other ways of learning about the world. And building a business does give you a real sense of how the world works, how powerful profits are, how to think about risk, how to work with people, what it takes to get things done, and the importance of partnerships and trust.

I’m excited as ever to keep writing (and now building) for you. Thanks for being part of our journey.

How can you help support Newcomer?

1. Become a paid subscriber. If you’re interested in a corporate subscription email newcomer@newcomer.co. Encourage your friends and colleagues to subscribe. We’re offering 15% off annual subscriptions for the next week.

2. Attend our events. We’re still accepting applications to the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on November 20 in SF. Apply here.

3. Reach out to us about becoming a sponsor, organizing a dinner with us, or working with us to create a new startups and venture capital-focused event.

4. Send us scoops and tips. You can DM me on Twitter, email me, or reply to this newsletter. I’m happy to give you my phone number to message on Signal. I love to get email responses to the newsletter generally and always welcome your unsolicited opinions. If you reply to the emails they go directly to me (Eric Newcomer).

5. Tell your friends about our open senior reporter and founding account executive positions.

Here’s our podcast where I talk more about how we got to where we are today