1440 is worth $100M+ — it never picked a niche

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Hey rebel ideapreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

In the fall of 1918, DeWitt Wallace was lying in an army hospital in France.

He was an American soldier, and an exploding shell had put pieces of metal in his neck and one lung.

He spent weeks in bed with nothing to do but read magazines.

DeWitt had an old habit.
Whenever he read an article, he wrote the few facts worth keeping on a small slip of paper, and threw the rest away.

Lying in that bed, he had an idea.

What if the slips of paper were the magazine?

Take the best articles from all the other magazines.
Cut each one down to the useful part, two pages or less.
Print thirty-one of them a month, one for each day.

It would not be a magazine for doctors, or farmers, or businessmen.
It would be for anybody who wanted to keep up with every subject, science, business, health, politics, without reading a dozen magazines to do it.

After the war, DeWitt sat in the public library in St. Paul, Minnesota, for six months.

He picked thirty-one of the best articles he could find, one for each day of the month.

Then he rewrote each one so it was short enough to read in a few minutes.

He borrowed three hundred dollars from his brother and three hundred from his father, and printed a few hundred copies of a sample issue.

He mailed it to a dozen publishers.

Every one of them said no.

A magazine for everybody sounded like a magazine for nobody.
And it did not even write its own articles.

So DeWitt and his new wife, Lila, published it themselves.

DeWitt found his first readers the slow way.

He typed letters to people he had never met, one letter at a time.

Each letter asked for three dollars, for a year of the magazine.

By the time the first issue was printed, in February 1922, about fifteen hundred people had paid.

Their office was a basement storeroom in New York, under a bar that sold alcohol illegally.
They hired neighbors to help wrap and mail the copies.

The cover said what the magazine was in one line: thirty-one articles each month from leading magazines, in condensed and compact form.

By 1929, more than two hundred thousand people were buying it.
By 1936, it was printing 1.8 million copies a month.

It was called Reader's Digest, and for most of the twentieth century it was the most-read magazine in the world.

DeWitt never picked one subject,
and he never picked one type of reader.

Instead, he made one simple promise to everybody: the best of all the magazines, cut short enough to read in a few minutes a day.

That promise was the whole magazine, and it worked for anyone.

Twelve publishers said a magazine for everybody would sell to nobody.

But DeWitt was not writing for everybody.

He was writing for one kind of person.

The kind who wants to keep up with every subject, but does not have all day to read.

That is not a job or an age like in demographics.
It is a way of thinking.

Marketers call this a psychographic: a group of people who share the same wants and habits, whatever their age or job.

Millions of people think that way.

So there are two ways to pick your readers, and both work.

You can pick a narrow group by job.
Justin Welsh writes for solo business owners, and Dan Koe writes for aspiring creators.

Or you can pick a wide group by mindset.
Sahil Bloom and Ben Meer write for anyone who wants to get better at life and work.

DeWitt picked the second way, and it made him the most-read magazine in the world.

DeWitt picked his readers by what they wanted, and twelve publishers thought he was crazy.

Meanwhile, we start a podcast about building a side business, and everyone tells us to pick a narrow group.

So we decide the show is for software engineers in their thirties, and we say so in the show description.

Then the listener emails start arriving, and many of them are from nurses, teachers, and accountants.

They love the show, but they write to ask, "Is this really for people like me?"

So we lose them one by one, not because the show was wrong for them, but because we told them it was.

Maybe the answer is what DeWitt did: go broad, but for one psychographic, one group of people who all want the same thing.

He sorted his readers not by job but by one question:
do you want to keep up with every subject, but have no time to read it all?

There is a third choice between everybody and a tiny niche, and one email to seventy-eight friends proved it.

That email now goes to four million people every morning, so here is how it started.

Tim Huelskamp spent about ten years in finance, buying companies and fixing them up.

In 2017, the company he worked for was sold, and he lost his job.

But he left with a good chunk of money, the final payment companies give when they let people go.

He decided it was enough to live on for a while,
so he wanted to try starting something of his own.

For years, Tim and a group of friends had been emailing each other back and forth, mostly to argue about college football.

The friends in that email group were a mix of lawyers, professors, and people with government jobs in Washington.

One of them was Drew Steigerwald, a scientist.
Drew's job was to read long, dense science papers and write short, plain summaries for members of Congress.

Tim and Drew had the same complaint about the news.

Every newsletter went deep on one subject.
If you wanted to keep up with business, science, sports, and politics all at once, you had to read ten of them.

And almost everything came wrapped in opinion and outrage.

Tim put it this way: "There was this intellectually curious, busy professional that wants to know a little bit of everything.
It was just too much work."

Too much work, because keeping up meant reading ten newsletters and wading through everyone's opinions.

So Tim and Drew asked each other one question.

What if we made a newsletter that just told people what happened, with no opinions and no outrage?

Just the facts, and let the reader make up their own mind.

They built a short daily email.

It covered the main news from every subject in one short read.

And it never told the reader whether any of it was good or bad.

They named it 1440, because there are 1,440 minutes in a day.

The first issue went out in 2017 to seventy-eight people.

Tim's description of that list: "literally me and Drew's aunts, groomsmen, college roommates."

By the second week it was ninety-one people, with no promotion at all.

They spent that first summer on one question, in Tim's words: "How do we make this product as kickass as possible?"

Get this — 1440 now goes to more than four million people every morning.

It has a staff of twenty-seven and brings in about $27 million a year.
That is a million dollars for every person on the team.

They never took money from investors.

Recently, a bank worked out what 1440 would sell for.
The answer was $101 million.

Tim and Drew never picked their readers by job, or age, or city.

They picked one psychographic: curious, busy people who want to keep up with every subject.

Then they made those people one promise: the news, with none of the opinion.

That group turned out to be four million people.

A hundred years apart, Tim and DeWitt had done the same thing.
They wrote for a huge number of people with the same interest and mindset, but all of those people wanted the same thing.

And both men delivered exactly that, every single day.

➡️ The Broad Bet

DeWitt wrote for anyone who wanted to keep up with every subject in a few minutes, and his magazine became the most-read in the world.

Tim wrote for anyone who wanted the news without the opinions, and four million people now read his email every morning.

This approach is called The Broad Bet.

Do not pick your audience by who they are: their job, their age, their city.

Neither DeWitt nor Tim wrote for a job title or a demographic.
They both wrote for a psychographic, a way of thinking, and made one clear promise to everyone who thinks that way.

So the next time someone tells you to niche down your podcast, do not shrink it to software engineers in their thirties.

Ask a different question instead: what does my ideal listener want?

Maybe it is "I want to start a side business, but I only have one free hour a day."

Write that sentence in the show description, and let the nurses, the teachers, and the engineers all find you.

Do what DeWitt did with his magazine: pick the mindset, not the demographics, and write for everyone who shares it.

That's it, my fellow contrarians!

Yours 'proving to you that most business failures are preventable and success can be engineered' Vijay Peduru 🦸‍♂️

The prompt below works out whether your edge should come from a narrow audience or a narrow promise.