In 2018, Emanuel Cinca had an idea to start a newsletter.
He’d come up through affiliate marketing, and before that, poker. Both had trained the same instinct: he could see a bet worth making while it was still cheap.
A newsletter for affiliate marketers looked like that kind of bet.
Five years later, it carried a valuation of three million euros.
He was new to publishing, new to media, and running mostly on a hunch that a daily marketing brief could work where nothing like it existed yet.
The hunch paid off. What he built on top of it is the reason a free newsletter sells for millions.
The thing that set him off wasn’t in marketing at all. It was a newsletter about money.
The Finance Newsletter That Started a Marketing Company
The newsletter that captured Emanuel’s attention initially was Morning Brew.
By 2018, Morning Brew was on its way to a million subscribers, turning a daily finance email into a real media business.
Cinca read their results the way an operator studies a competitor, looking past the content to the machine underneath.
He was working in affiliate marketing at the time, deep in it, plugged into the same forums and Slack groups and conferences as everyone else in that corner of the industry.
He noticed the absence. There was a Morning Brew for finance, but there was nothing like it for people in the affiliate space – people like him.
So he tested the idea before he committed to it.
He wrote a first issue, sent it to about ten people he knew in the space, and asked them what they thought.
The feedback was enough to move.
He hit publish, and his network did the rest.
People who already knew him shared it with people who trusted them.
Inside a week, five hundred marketers had subscribed.
By the third month, a sponsor paid to reach them, and the newsletter made its first money.
The name was What The Aff, a daily brief for affiliate marketers.
It grew fast because Cinca was one of them, building the thing he knew his people wanted to read.
That was the whole edge at the start. He knew exactly who he was writing for, because it was what he wanted to read himself.
When a Thousand Readers Is Enough To Get Paid
Most people, handed a working idea and 500 subscribers, would have gone looking for the fastest way to get to 50,000.
Cinca went slower on purpose.
For the first stretch, he grew the list the way he’d launched it: through community outreach.
He ran cross-promotions with other newsletters, swapping mentions so their readers found him and his readers found them.
He set up a referral program, the kind where readers earn something for bringing in other readers.
Between the swaps and the referrals and the word of mouth, the list climbed toward four, then five thousand.
He tried paid ads early, too. Facebook, mostly. They didn’t work well, so he stopped leaning on them and went back to what did.
He sold his first sponsorship at around a thousand opens.
That’s not a thousand subscribers, it’s a thousand people actually opening and reading.
That difference is the whole game. A thousand people opening every day is an audience an advertiser can count on reaching.
Sponsor money funded better content, better content pulled more readers, and more readers raised what the next sponsor would pay.
The business was compounding.
Only then, with a product that clearly held attention and converted advertisers, did he try to bring in readers through paid channels.
By 2024, roughly seventy percent of his new subscribers came from paid channels, Meta ads and newsletter recommendation tools doing the heavy lifting.
He’d earned the first few thousand readers by hand. He bought the rest only once he knew exactly what each one was worth.
Why He Started Deleting Readers
By 2020, Cinca had a business that worked. The instinct that follows a working newsletter is to grow the list as large as possible.
Cinca started shrinking his.
Every so often, subscribers who had stopped opening the emails got cut.
Thousands of them, gone from a list he’d worked to build.
It looks, at first, like setting money on fire. A bigger number is what goes in the advertiser pitch.
Cinca understood the number differently.
A sponsor doesn’t pay for names sitting in a database. A sponsor pays to be seen.
Every dead subscriber drags down the open rate, and the open rate is the thing an advertiser is actually buying.
Cutting the dead weight made the real product sharper, and a sharper product carried a higher price per sponsorship.
Then he did something most operators keep hidden. He published his numbers.
Once a year, Stacked Marketer put out a report laying out revenue, subscriber counts, open rates, the state of the business in plain figures.
Cinca has said the annual report is reliably the most-clicked link they send all year.
Advertisers read it and saw exactly what they were buying.
When he later raised money from investors, they came to the table already knowing how the business performed, because he’d been showing them all along.
The last piece was to stop treating the audience as one block.
He spun up separate newsletters for different slices of it, a psychology-of-marketing angle in one, pure tactics in another.
Each one handed advertisers a cleaner target, and a cleaner target sells for more than a broad one.
Three moves, one logic underneath all of them.
Cinca was building the most legible audience he could, one an advertiser could measure, trust, and reach with confidence.
The Number You Brag About Isn’t Always The One That Pays
There’s a number in your business you quote to other people. Followers, subscribers, downloads, whatever sits at the top of your homepage.
Then there’s the real number. What’s left after you take out everyone who stopped paying attention.
Cinca sold the real one and that’s how he’s managed to build a three-million-euro company.
Sell on a number that’s valuable to the buyer and not an ego metric.
Cinca sold his first sponsorship at a thousand opens.
Opens mean eyeballs – a metric an advertiser could count on reaching.
This week, work out your own version of that number.
Count the people who actually open and read. That’s the size of your business.
Then price something against it. A sponsorship, a spot, an offer.
If you’ve been waiting to cross some subscriber count because it looks bigger on paper, you’ve been guarding the wrong figure.
Find the one number a buyer actually pays for, then protect it.
Cinca cuts dead subscribers because they drag down his open rate, and the open rate is what advertisers pay for.
Most businesses have a number like that, sitting under the one they show off.
A consultant brags about how many clients they have, but the client who matters is the one who sends them three more without being asked.
A course seller brags about total sign-ups, but the student that counts is the one who finishes the course and gets a result worth talking about.
An agency counts the logos on its website, but the client who makes a difference is the one still paying twelve months later.
Figure out your version this week. Then find what’s watering it down.
Cut that thing, or fence it off from the number that counts.
A smaller number you can trust beats a bigger one you have to keep explaining.
Put your audience to work beyond buying from you.
Cinca staffed his company from his own list. His COO came from it, and so did most of his team.
Sponsors were one way to earn from those readers.
Hiring from them was another.
Your audience can also source hires, test an offer before you build it, or give you the case study that closes your next sale.
Pick one of those jobs this week and hand it over. Post the role. Float the idea. Ask for the case study.
Here’s the belief worth examining on your way out.
The deep dive says you think you need more scale and more credentials before the money can come.
Cinca is the case against it.
He priced a small, engaged audience early, published his way into trust, and let the expertise arrive while he ran the thing.
Olly Richards, from an earlier article, spent ten years building expertise, then grew an audience on top of it. Cinca ran it the other way and reached the same place.
The order was never the lesson.
The lesson is that the thing stopping you is probably a belief about what has to come first, and Cinca’s business is proof that you don’t need to be the veteran expert in order to begin.