In the middle of 2020, a private equity vice president managing $3.5 billion in assets started posting Twitter threads about finance.
He had 500 followers. He had no plan to build a business around it. He just thought the financial chatter flooding Twitter during COVID was too complicated for most people to follow, and figured he’d try translating it.
Three years later, Sahil Bloom had 800,000 newsletter subscribers, a portfolio of companies operating behind his content, and a business that generated $10 million in a single year.
Not a single product was ever promoted to those subscribers.
One of those companies filled a 500-person waitlist from a single tweet. Another was generating eight figures within six months of launching.
The whole operation traces back to a pattern Bloom spotted while spending money as a creator, one that his private equity brain wouldn’t let him ignore.
From Fastballs to Fund Management
Bloom’s first career ended with an injury.
He’d come to Stanford on a baseball scholarship, expecting to pitch professionally. When that path collapsed, he finished a bachelor’s in economics and a master’s in public policy, with Condoleezza Rice as his academic advisor.
Despite the accolade of working with Rice, he later described the period simply. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life.”
Private equity answered the question for seven years.
He joined Altamont Capital Partners and climbed to vice president. He was good at it.
The analytical rigor, the pattern recognition, the ability to evaluate businesses quickly, all of it came naturally from someone who’d spent years competing at an elite level.
But the hours were relentless, and the further he went, the clearer it became that financial success on its own wasn’t enough.
He started talking about wanting to become a “time billionaire”, someone who optimizes for years of freedom rather than dollars in the bank.
The pandemic gave him an opening.
Twitter was flooded with financial analysis during COVID, most of it written for people who already understood finance.
Bloom started writing threads that translated the complexity into something accessible.
He called the approach being the “Toyota Camry of financial insights.”
He was still collecting a salary at Altamont. There was no audience strategy. There was no monetization plan.
He just kept writing.
90,000 Words and a Monthly Email to Friends
Those first threads followed a formula. Take a complicated financial concept, strip out the jargon, and explain it the way you’d explain it to a smart friend over coffee.
He wrote 115 threads in that first stretch. Over 90,000 words.
He would repost his threads as comments underneath accounts with large followings, sometimes up to fifty times per thread, picking up retweets and impressions one at a time.
Mark Cuban shared one. That helped.
By May 2021, twelve months after his first post, he had 187,000 followers.
By May 2022, that number had tripled to 580,000.
A newsletter had been running quietly alongside the Twitter growth.
It started as a monthly email to friends and family summarizing the books he was reading, four to five a month. He called it the Curiosity Chronicle.
As the Twitter audience grew, the newsletter became weekly, then twice weekly.
Subscribers climbed to 400,000 within three years of launching.
Then LinkedIn changed the equation.
Bloom had resisted posting there until a peer told him to try going daily. He did, and discovered that LinkedIn drove more newsletter signups than any other platform.
By late 2022, newsletter sponsors were paying $3,500 to $6,000 per email. At two sends a week, that translated to somewhere between $28,000 and $48,000 a month.
Bloom was still at Altamont when the first sponsorship checks landed.
He did something unusual with that money though.
Instead of pocketing it, he reinvested every dollar back into newsletter growth, paying $1.50 per subscriber through SparkLoop’s referral network and running paid Facebook ads to drive signups.
The newsletter was funding its own expansion.
Sponsor revenue covered acquisition costs, new subscribers pushed sponsorship rates higher, and the cycle repeated.
By 2023, newsletter revenue alone had climbed past $70,000 a month. The audience had crossed 800,000 subscribers.
Bloom had essentially built a television network.
The audience never paid for the content. Advertisers paid for access to the audience. And the advertising revenue funded the growth that made the audience more valuable to the next round of advertisers.
The Expense Report That Became a Business Model
By this point, Bloom was spending money every month on the same things every creator spends money on. Video editing. Design. Newsletter operations.
He’d later describe what he saw in a single sentence: “Turn a cost center into a profit center.”
He looked at his audience, hundreds of thousands of creators and ambitious operators, and realized they were already paying other people to solve these exact problems.
The demand existed. The services existed. What was missing was a way to connect the two at scale.
So instead of building products himself, he partnered with someone who could execute.
Hunter Hammonds had spent fifteen years building and selling agencies. Two successful exits. Deep operational expertise in productized services. He’d never worked with a creator before.
Together they co-founded Assembly, a venture studio designed to build service agencies behind established creators.
The concept: pair a creator who has an audience with a done-for-you service that matches what their audience needs. The creator provides distribution. The operator handles fulfillment.
They launched their first agencies under the Assembly umbrella.
ViralCuts offered short-form video editing at roughly $2,000 a month per client. Editors based in the Philippines cost $1,500 to $2,000 monthly and could handle three clients each.
Margins cleared 70 percent.
HeyFriends launched as a YouTube channel management service with Ali Abdaal as the creator partner. Codie Sanchez and Sam Parr joined as creator partners for other agencies in the portfolio.
A single tweet from Abdaal put 500 creators on the waitlist within five days, representing $2.5 million in potential revenue.
Paperboy, another Assembly agency, handled newsletter growth. Bitesized handled design.
Each one served a problem Bloom had personally paid to solve.
Assembly was profitable from day one. Zero dollars invested. Zero dollars raised.
Within five months it hit mid-seven-figure annual recurring revenue. One agency inside the portfolio reached a $10 million run rate within six months at 40 to 50 percent net margins.
Alongside Assembly, Bloom built SRB Holdings, a personal holding company with ten cash-flowing businesses, and launched SRB Ventures, a $10 million venture fund writing $100,000 to $250,000 checks into startups.
His audience distribution gave the fund a deal flow advantage most managers at his check size would never see.
Founders wanted Bloom on their cap table because his audience was exactly the demographic that buys software and backs startups.
By the end of 2023, the combined ecosystem had generated $10 million.
Four Emails a Week and a Portfolio of Ten
The reason Bloom’s model scales the way it does comes down to one structural decision he made early on.
He removed himself from every revenue line that would require his daily involvement.
Assembly runs on operators. Hammonds handles operational leadership.
Editors, designers, and service teams deliver the work. Creator partners like Abdaal, Sanchez, and Parr provide distribution for their respective agencies.
Bloom’s role across the portfolio is strategic oversight and audience. That’s it.
The newsletter is the only line in the entire business that requires his time on a recurring basis.
And even there, the sponsorship sales are handled entirely by ConvertKit’s Sponsor Network, which matches advertisers with newsletters automatically.
He writes. The system does everything else.
This is what allows Assembly to launch new agencies at speed.
When a creator partner announces a new service to their audience, the demand arrives in a single concentrated wave.
Hammonds calls this the “thunderclap” model. One tweet, one email, one post.
The surge fills a waitlist, which creates social proof, which generates organic interest beyond the initial burst.
That launch model only works because the fulfillment infrastructure already exists behind the scenes.
Hammonds and his team can onboard clients the same week the announcement goes live.
The cash flow mechanics reinforce the whole thing.
Assembly’s agencies bill clients upfront and pay staff over the course of the month.
That timing gap creates a pool of free cash that Bloom and Hammonds can redeploy into higher-value investments, whether that’s launching a new agency, funding product development, or backing a startup through SRB Ventures.
Cross-sell happens naturally across the portfolio.
A client paying ViralCuts for video editing also needs design work. A creator using HeyFriends for YouTube management also needs short-form clips.
Each agency feeds demand to the others without any additional acquisition cost.
The result is a business where the audience grows the newsletter, the newsletter funds its own growth, the agencies generate high-margin recurring revenue, and the fund compounds long-term wealth.
Bloom sits at the centre of it, writing four emails a week.
What You Can Build From the Same Logic
You probably don’t have 800,000 newsletter subscribers. You almost certainly don’t have a private equity background or a co-founder with two agency exits.
That’s fine. The $10 million number is Bloom’s, but the logic underneath it works at any scale.
Start with what you’re already spending money on.
If you’re a creator, you’re paying for something.
Design, editing, copywriting, email tools, automation setup. Every one of those expenses is a service that other creators in your audience are also paying for.
That’s a potential business and one you already understand as a customer.
You don’t need to build or deliver it yourself. Bloom didn’t. He found an operator who could, and used his audience to fill the pipeline.
The operator matters more than the idea. Bloom has been clear about this. Distribution without delivery capability creates a short spike followed by a reputation collapse.
If you’re going to build a service, find someone who already knows how to run one.
The newsletter model carries a lesson too.
Bloom reinvested every dollar of sponsor revenue back into audience growth. He treated the newsletter as a compounding asset, not an income stream.
Most creators do the opposite. Sponsor money hits the account and it becomes rent, groceries, breathing room.
That’s understandable. But it means the newsletter stays the same size next month.
Even reinvesting a portion of sponsor revenue into paid acquisition changes the trajectory. The flywheel is the same at $1,000 a month in sponsorships as it is at $70,000.
The deeper lesson here is about where the value of an audience actually lives.
Bloom proved that 800,000 subscribers are worth $10 million a year when the architecture behind them is designed to capture that value.
The size of your audience matters less than what sits behind it.
If your content gets engagement but your revenue doesn’t reflect it, the problem probably isn’t reach. It’s what happens after someone pays attention.
Bloom’s system is complex. The principle is simple.
Figure out what your audience already spends money on. Find someone who can deliver it. Use your content to connect the two.
That’s the back end most creators never build.