It was a great pleasure to talk to Michael Kauffman from Catskill Crew last week. He started a local newsletter for the Catskills region of New York in 2023. It's now making six figures and has evolved into a local media brand, with products and merchandise being sold as well as newsletter ads.
Unfortunately, we had technical issues with the video interview so here's a lightly edited transcript of our interview:
Do you want to give a brief intro about Catskill Crew?
I'm a dude that lives in the middle of the Catskill Forest who had an existential crisis, and after 15 years of running startups I wanted to build something that lit me up. And I started Catskill Crew, a local newsletter. Well, it's like a little bit of a hybrid. It's a local media company, a local products company, a local events company, and it's a platform for a local holding company. And so really a subscriber-first media company that brings the subscribers and really lets them take the wheel.
It has 42,000 subscribers and I send it once a week. I try to send something super high value, something interesting, something different, something that sticks out in a sea of noise. You know, your inbox is filled with mostly garbage.
How have you grown it so fast?
Growth is easy in local media. I'd never started a local newsletter before. I've been building all different types of startups for 15 years but I wasn't a writer.
I had never been in the Meta dashboard before and so I was really intimidated on growth. I boosted a couple things on Instagram but I don't like social media, so it'd be like a picture of a river or me catching a fish and I was like, I'll boost that. That's cool. That's a nice looking trout. Everyone's gonna love it and so it grew organically to about 4,500 subscribers.
I also started throwing events, making Canva templates and highlighting different events that were happening - tagging the businesses, saying, "if you want to know what else is going on in the Catskills and beyond, subscribe to Catskill Crew."
So it was really around riding the coattails of established businesses and making them look good. If you don't make them look good, why are they gonna reshare it? I may have mentioned that throwing events is always good. When you're driving traffic to those venues, they are gonna take photos of your events, they're gonna tag you etc.
Finally in August, 2024 I let my buddy Philip, who runs the Orlando Signal, convince me to run Meta ads. And it was just rocket fuel. I mean, the number just went straight up into the right. I was spending $35 a day and I finished 2024 with like 11,ooo or 12,000 subscribers.
I've actually turned ads off since November but you should be starting out with a customer acquisition cost from 8-20 cents. You know, even at 42,000 subscribers, I was sitting around 25-40 cents on average, and I wouldn't even look at Meta ads for weeks. It's very simple to grow these lists, but that doesn't mean people are gonna stick around. So that's where you need good content.
