Learning from a 200K/year sports newsletter

Today’s edition is a newsletter about a newsletter.

I’ve long admired Matt Brown’s work building Extra Points from scratch.

I’ve been reading for a while now.

I’m ashamed it took me until the year 2025 to become a paid subscriber.

Better late than never, right?

If you’re not familiar with Matt and Extra Points, you should be.

“Hey, wait. Is that the dude who writes all the time about the EA Sports College Football game?”

Yeah, that’s him.

But he does so much more than that.

I’ve studied how Matt has grown his audience and I always enjoy reading his takes on business, content production, and marketing.

The newsletter you are reading right now is published through beehiv, the same platform that Extra Points uses.

Their team recently interviewed Matt for a really neat case study - you can check out the full thing here - and I had two key takeaways to share with you.

I’m going to give you what I learned, another example from my ecosystem, and a final point.

Stand out with your content.

Matt’s website does a great job of explaining what he does:

Extra Points covers the business, policy, and off-the-field stories changing college sports.

Sounds like he’s found a niche, right?

What I learned from Matt: “If it’s something that’s not available anywhere else, they will almost definitely pay.”

If you can create content that isn’t widely available, you’re going to stand out and have a chance to own that space.

Matt’s willingness to cover things that others aren’t - and to cover them well - in his content means he can charge an audience for that content.

Another example from my world: For the past 15 years, I’ve been creating online content centered around college football and recruiting.

There are times in which we will publish 50 pieces of content per week.

Heck, I don’t even read all that. I know our subscribers don’t.

That brings to mind another quote from Matt, who initially took the approach of “drowning” his readers in content.

“What I realized is people don’t have time to read everything,” he said. “They’re paying because they like the mission of the publication and see value in what they do read.”

Final point: If you’re selling content or using your content to sell, any of these approaches are valuable:

1. Producing things nobody else is doing.

2. Doing what others are doing, but better.

3. Curating content to make it convenient for your audience.

4. Building an audience so loyal to you that they will support you financially because they see you as valuable to them.

Diversify.

Things move fast nowadays.

That means that your business need the ability to quickly pivot and adapt.

It’s fine to have one main revenue source, but the best sports brands have multiple ways to capitalize.

What I learned from Matt: Yes, his content is great and is the engine.

But Matt added to his ecosystem by not having “just a newsletter.”

In addition to his newsletter subscription, he’s implemented ads, a database of valuable documents from college athletics departments (a separate subscription), and even licensing his newsletter to universities to use in their curriculums (for a fee).

He started with newsletter content and building his audience, then expanded from there.

Another example from my world: I was talking with a young sports founder lately whose company has grown exponentially in the past year.

He jumped into a hypercompetitive space when NIL launched, but many of his competitors have fizzled out.

Why?

They haven’t adapted, and my founder friend has. He still has a core offering in the business that his competitors also have, but he’s moved as the industry has moved and taken advantage of numerous additional revenue opportunities.

Final point: Multiple revenue streams are great. They’re necessary, I think!

Make sure you have a core offering, a flagship product or service, that you establish first.

For Matt, that was a newsletter that had great, niche, content. That allowed him to grow into the other areas.

Want to talk about your sports brand’s content and marketing strategy?

I’ll be glad to help!

Book a meeting with me.