🚪How Jonas built and sold a newsletter marketplace
The No-Code Exit story of Jonas and Duuce
Hi, Katt here.
Welcome to the 67 new subscribers this week. 👯♀️
For this week’s No-Code Exit story I talked with No-Code Founder Jonas who built and sold a marketplace for buying & selling newsletter.
Learn how he:
⭐️ Niched down to stand out
👀 Validated the idea in 1 day
🔥 Used side project marketing to build brand awareness
🚪 Sold his marktplace to a French market leader
Happy building!
PS: did you miss last week’s interview? Ben breaks down how he built a prototype with No-Code and raised capital. Read it here
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Growth in Reverse is a newsletter packed with insights on how creators grew their newsletter to 50K+ subscribers.
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Actionable and snackable playbook on how to build a niche job board without code and grow it to a profitable side-project.
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🔥 Acquisition Inspiration
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🔥 No-Code Maker Interview
Hello, what is your background?
My name is Jonas, the founder of Duuce.com, a marketplace for buying and selling newsletters. Duuce launched in September 2020 and sold 18 months later. It was a side project next to my job at Meta. My previous projects had mainly been content related, Duuce was the first marketplace I built using No-Code.
Tell us about your product that you made?
My best ideas are often connections of non-related things I’m fascinated about. In the case of Duuce it was my fascination for newsletters, building a business and marketplaces. When the connection happened, it made sense right away. I wished there was a product like it. There wasn't, so I decided to build it.
The idea came to me after another idea failed. I wanted to build a marketplace for buying and selling websites for the Dutch market. I quickly found that getting early traction is very difficult in a country that doesn't have a startup media culture. You basically only have major media outlets which could help with early traction. Startup Twitter is not really a thing, a local version of Product Hunt or Indie Hackers is not existing either. And as it was a side project, I needed to get early traction for this to make sense. So I decided to pivot and go for the international/US market. I knew that with a general acquisition marketplace I wouldn’t make a chance against the bigger players. So I had to niche down in order to conquer a tiny piece of the market. I decided on the newsletter vertical because that is what I knew and seen growth.
What went into building the initial version?
I designed a simple landing page in Carrd on Friday and submitted this to Product Hunt the same day.
The first message I got on my submission was from Ryan Hoover himself.
The next day, Duuce went live on Product Hunt. It was just a landing page. Still, it did really well. This gave me the confidence to build this thing.
I started looking for tools to do this. I decided on Bubble. I bought a template and started customizing it. At the same time I got a few leads from my launch and had the first listings for my marketplace. The first newsletter was sold quickly and this gave me more confidence to keep on building.
What were some other No-Code tools you used?
Postmark for transactional email
Stripe for payment
Email octopus for the newssletter
Can you share how you got your first users?
Getting a marketplace of the ground is hard work. Duuce has been a good example of starting with things that don’t scale to find scale. You can’t order a flywheel or liquidity from the shelf. You must build it from scratch. With Duuce, I connected with every single person I knew running a newsletter.
What I quickly found out when putting yourself out there is that your network will increase. It's the ultimate tool to meet interesting people. It gave me access to tons of interesting people who wanted to learn what went on in the newsletter space, Ryan Hoover (founder Product Hunt). Codie Sanchez (Contrarian Thinking), Andrew Gadzdecki (founder Acquire) and tons of other creators and VC’s.
How did you grow your user base?
I tried many things to attract buyers and sellers.
Building authority on Twitter: I created connections with a lot of people. I made sure I was on top of all conversations regarding buying/selling newsletters, Duuce and newsletter business in general.
Building in public with the Duuce newsletter: I wrote a monthly newsletter with my experience and developments with the platform to Duuce subscribers. I wanted Duuce to be a community effort and share everything which went on behind the scenes.
I built a ton of features that helped newsletter owners (and buyers) to increase brand awareness:
Newsletter valuation tool based on the acquisition data I got access to.
Newsletter directory multi-lister to submit your newsletter to newsletter multiple directories.
Paid newsletter directory: I reached out to paid newsletter writers and asked them if they wanted to promote their newsletter for free in exchange for a discount.
Blog where I interviewed sellers (after a successful acquisition), newsletter writers and industry experts.
What was your business model?
I experimented with a bunch of business models. My number one focus has always been creating liquidity. Getting a marketplace of the ground is hard enough. A business model can stand in the way of it’s progress.
I first tried a listing fee of $5. It was basically a way for me to validate that people wanted to use the marketplace. But this also created a barrier for people to try. I found out that a listing fee is interesting when you have a lot of listings so I quickly killed that one.
The other business model I implemented was a subscription. Just like Acquire does. For $99 customers had first access to new newsletters for sale and where notified by email. This worked OK. But again liquidity was low so the value for customers was not big either.
So I finally settled on a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ for all newsletters that were submitted. Basically agreeing, if your newsletter is sold on Duuce, a 5% fee on the selling price is paid to Duuce. This worked for a few newsletters and resulted in the highest revenue.
Tell us about the acquisition?
Duuce came to a point where, if I wanted to make it a real business I had to build a more serious product. Because of the low liquidity the business model had to be around the buying/selling process. This meant I needed to get serious on payment, legal, security etc. I didn’t see myself doing this as a side project. So I decided to sell it.
I ended up selling it for 5-figures to the owner of the French market leader in buying and selling websites. He has been a great support from the beginning and it was great handing over Duuce to him and his team.
They wanted to buy the marketplace as a way to enter the US market. After selling I got a message from both the founder of Acquire and Flippa saying they were bummed they didn't get a chance to buy it. It was pretty cool that the industry leaders wanted to acquire my little side project.
What's your advice for makers who are just starting out?
Engagement is your friend. Try a lot of things and see what sticks. The engagement and traction will fuel your energy to continue building it.
And for selling. You can only sell once. It’s not only about getting paid but also what it will do for you after the sale. Selling to a well known brand/person in the industry can help you with further network and opportunities.
Also, try to make revenue. It will help you leverage your assets and sell the story of future trajectory.
Thank you for sharing your great story Jonas. Don’t forget to check out his newsletter.
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Great interview Katt.
Excellent interview with Jonas. Got some valuable insights.
Thanks Katt.
I appreciate your work.