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15,000 subscribers, about $86,000 in five months — because he sells his own course and community rather than renting the list to advertisers
target is 100,000 subscribers · comparison case in the same interview: a local newsletter with 23,000 subscribers still grinding out ad sales
"Selling ads sucks. It just sucks... sell your own stuff even if it's services." Fifteen thousand subscribers and $86K in five months, from a guy who says "nobody really knows who I am. I'm just a guy."
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Tim Stoddard spent about fifteen years building lead-generation directories in behavioural health, then a marketing agency on top of them called Stodzy, which he sold shortly before this interview. What happened next is the part worth reading. "I did spend — I live in a neighborhood in Denver right next to a lake basically and I spent 3 months just walking around the lake really not knowing what to do with myself." He is blunt that the post-exit period was harder than expected: "it was really hard, man. Like, for real, it was very hard." He has a four-year-old son and an almost-three-year-old daughter, and no shortage of money, and still could not work out what to do. The answer he landed on was the thing that started everything. "It all came back to writing." His first business, Sober Nation, began as a Blogspot blog he started four months sober because Seth Godin's advice was to start a blog and he had nothing else to do — "sitting down and writing and just expressing myself into the internet. It saved my life in a lot of ways and it got me a lot of the things that I have." So now he writes a daily newsletter. "I'm really loving waking up in the morning, getting my cup of coffee, and writing my daily newsletter and just seeing where it goes. You know, I don't really have any plans for it. I'm not trying to build a media empire." Asked where people should find him, the whole ask is one line: "Timstoddard.com. I'm trying to get to 100,000 subscribers. That's it. Read my newsletter." And it is already producing more than the directories did per unit of effort: "there's real traction behind my newsletter right now. You know, people like you are reaching out to me again and I'm getting asked to be on podcasts again."
This list did not start from zero, and the honest reading is that it started from fifteen years of surface area in one niche.
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Join the Unicorn Club — $5/moCancel anytime, in one clickEvery claim traces back to a listed source — open any of them and check the number yourself. The exact words are quoted below, with a timestamp that jumps to the second each figure is said.
“My personal newsletter that I send out every morning, timods.com, I sell a personal product from that and I've done I think at this point like 86 grand in the last 5 months and that's with 15,000 subscribers.”
22:38 · hear it in the videoData credibility: Founder-reported inside a long-form interview on Frey Chu's channel, with no dashboard shown for this particular business. The figures are exactly two: "like 86 grand in the last 5 months" and "15,000 subscribers," both stated in one sentence, plus a 100,000-subscriber target. Critically, the $86,000 is not broken down — it could be steady monthly revenue or largely one launch, and the transcript does not say. The product is never named or priced on camera; it is identifiable from the surrounding conversation as a course about building directories plus a membership community. Comparison figures are secondhand: From Boise's roughly 23,000 subscribers on ConvertKit (used as an example of a larger list still selling ads), and Tricycle Day, which he praises but for which no revenue is given. He has an obvious commercial interest in this story: he sells the course, runs the community, and is building an AI directory-builder product with a partner named Chase, all disclosed in the same interview. His own hedge is worth recording verbatim — "nobody really knows who I am. I'm just a guy" — offered specifically to argue the result is a tactic rather than an audience effect, which is a claim the transcript cannot substantiate either way.
The money follows one decision made before the first send: sell his own product, never ads. The product is a course on building directories plus the membership community it lives in, which is the packaged version of the fifteen years he had already spent doing the work.
The turn came from changing the monetisation model, not from growing the list. Fifteen thousand subscribers is small enough that an ad-funded version of this newsletter would still be pitching sponsors every week.
The flat stretch here came after an exit rather than before revenue. Having sold Stodzy, Stoddard spent three months walking around a lake in his Denver neighbourhood with no idea what to do next: "it was really hard, man.
Two things: a daily email, and a product he owns. The email is written every morning, by hand, over coffee. He gives no format details, no template, no segmentation strategy. The whole editorial thesis is that he writes and sends it daily and has for months. The product is what makes the numbers work. He does not name a price or a SKU, but the interview makes clear what it is: a course teaching people how to build directories, plus a membership community around it. It surfaces twice in the conversation — once when he describes writing the course and hitting the lesson on populating listings, and once when he mentions the membership community as the place the course lives. He is also building a piece of software with a partner named Chase — an AI directory builder that spins up a populated directory in about two minutes — which came directly out of writing that course lesson and refusing to teach people to scrape Google and wrangle spreadsheets. So the stack is: free daily email at the top, paid course and community in the middle, and a software product being added underneath. The email is the only distribution; everything monetises off it. Our read: the reason this shape works for him specifically is that the newsletter's subject and the product's subject are the same thing. He is not writing a general business newsletter and bolting an unrelated course onto it. Fifteen years of directory operating experience is the content, and the course is the packaged version of the content. There is no positioning gap for a reader to bridge.
One number, and he volunteers it in the middle of an argument against advertising: "My personal newsletter that I send out every morning, timstoddard.com, I sell a personal product from that and I've done I think at this point like 86 grand in the last 5 months and that's with 15,000 subscribers." That is roughly $17,000 a month from a list most media businesses would consider too small to monetise, and it works out to something on the order of $5.70 per subscriber over five months. He immediately pre-empts the obvious objection: "So, I have a little bit of an advantage just because I'm sort of well established, but I don't know, not really. Like, nobody really knows who I am. I'm just a guy, you know, like I don't have a giant podcast or nothing like that. So I think that what I'm doing is not like an anomaly at all. It's just a tactic." The argument he is actually making is about the alternative. Asked whether monetising a newsletter means cold-outreaching advertisers with a subscriber count, he rejects the entire model: "Yeah, selling ads sucks. It just sucks... It's a more direct path to monetization as opposed to trying to sling ads every day. It's exhausting and it sucks and it's never going to be good enough. And so, sell your own stuff even if it's services." He illustrates the failure mode with a real example. From Boise is a local newsletter run through ConvertKit with about 23,000 subscribers — more subscribers than he has — and it is "spending so much time and energy selling these ads." His standing advice to its operator is to attach a directory to it, because then the newsletter has a product baked in and the ad-sales treadmill stops being the whole business. Our read: the honest comparison is not $86K versus zero, it is $86K versus what 15,000 subscribers would earn at newsletter ad rates — realistically a few thousand dollars a month at best, for far more work. That is the size of the arbitrage, and it is the entire lesson.
The transcript is genuinely thin here and it would be inventing things to fill it in. What it does establish: Writing daily is the only activity he describes. No paid acquisition, no lead magnet, no referral program, no cross-promotion swaps are mentioned anywhere. He has fifteen years of surface area in the niche, which is the part that is not replicable in a week. Sober Nation has roughly a million Facebook followers. He has a YouTube channel where he publishes directory teardowns — the interviewer had watched his breakdown of Retreat Guru's business model and unknowingly repeated it back to him. He is being invited onto podcasts again, and explicitly names that as the traction signal: "people like you are reaching out to me again and I'm getting asked to be on podcasts again. So, we'll see where it goes." He treats the subscriber goal as the only metric: 100,000, up from 15,000. The surrounding conversation contains the acquisition mechanic he recommends but does not run himself — the newsletter and directory pairing, where the directory feeds the list and the list feeds the directory. His favourite live example is Tricycle Day, a psychedelics-industry newsletter run by a founder he calls Henry. Henry takes newsletter sponsorships, but the part Tim rates is the "find a professional" directory attached to it: "He's filling up this directory all through his newsletter and I think it's so cool." Notably, Henry's directory is not even SEO-optimised — listings open as a JavaScript popup with no indexable URL — and Tim's assessment is that it does not matter, because the newsletter is the distribution. No revenue figure is given for Tricycle Day. Our read: the replicable part of Tim's distribution is "write every day about the thing you have actually done for fifteen years." The non-replicable part is the fifteen years. Anyone copying this should assume the list-building is the slow half and plan for the newsletter-plus-directory flywheel rather than expecting an audience to appear.
Copy the monetisation order: build the product first, then the list, and never plan on ads. His framing is that ad sales is a treadmill you never get off — "it's never going to be good enough" — while an owned product converts a small list at a rate that makes 15,000 subscribers a real business. The rule generalises: if you would not be willing to sell your own thing to this audience, do not start the newsletter. Copy the subject-matching discipline. Newsletter topic and product topic are identical. Fifteen years of building directories, a daily newsletter about building things online, a course about building directories, and now software that builds directories. Nothing in the funnel requires a reader to make a leap. Copy the pairing he recommends: a newsletter plus a directory, in either order. His reasoning is that a directory is uniquely self-marketing — "when the directory gets big, other people want to join it. So it's sort of like a self-marketing mechanism, but the marketing sells the product which is the directory in the first place. So it's not like other products where you have to create content to sell the product. Like the directory itself is the content which sells the directory itself." And it de-risks both halves: you are not dependent on local search traffic for revenue, and not dependent on ad sales for the newsletter. His stated ceiling for the combination is "a one-person army making 200 grand a year after taxes and profit. I mean, probably more really." Copy the Tricycle Day lesson too: if a newsletter is your distribution, the directory attached to it does not need to rank. Henry's listings are not even indexable and the thing works. What to change: do not assume the conversion rate transfers. $86K from 15,000 subscribers in five months rests on fifteen years of operating credibility in a niche, a million-follower Facebook page, a YouTube channel with genuine teardowns on it, and podcast invitations he did not have to ask for. Someone starting cold should model a fraction of that and expect to spend the first year building the list, most likely by producing the same kind of specific, verifiable teardown content he does — because that is the actual asset, not the daily cadence. And notice what he is not doing: he is not selling a course about newsletters. He sells a course about the business he actually ran.
It is a personal brand with no separation between the operator and the asset. He writes it every morning himself. Stop writing and the business stops, and he has already had one three-month period where he could not decide what to do with himself after an exit. The product is a course and community about a business he has partly stopped running at full intensity, in a category he says out loud is being commoditised. He is shipping the AI directory builder specifically because building directories is becoming trivial — "the act of building directories isn't going to have as much value as it used to because this is so easily replicated." A course about a skill that is being automated has a shelf life, which is presumably why the software is being added. Reflexivity is a real credibility issue for a reader. The person telling you directories are a great business sells a course on building directories, runs a membership community about it, and is launching a tool for it. That does not make the $86K wrong, but it does mean the enthusiasm has a commercial motive, and the honest way to read the number is as evidence for the newsletter-plus-own-product model rather than as evidence for the directory market. Concentration on one channel. Email is the entire distribution. A deliverability problem, a domain reputation issue, or a platform policy change is the whole business, and no second channel is described anywhere in the interview. The number is unverified and unusual in shape. $86,000 over five months could be a smooth $17K a month or it could be one launch that did most of it — a launch to an engaged 15,000-person list would comfortably explain the whole figure. The transcript does not distinguish, and that difference matters enormously to anyone modelling this. Ceiling. He is targeting 100,000 subscribers with no stated plan for how, and the growth engine described amounts to writing daily. If the list plateaus at 15,000, so does the revenue.
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