Almost Bought The Neuron — Lost the Bid
The Story
In early 2025 Nathan tried to acquire The Neuron — the newsletter his agency had spent 17 months growing from 150K to 500K subscribers (Source 2).
He lost the bid to TechnologyAdvice, founded by Rob Bellenfant. Bellenfant’s company was doing “like 40 or $50 million a year, something really big like that, with a bunch of like lead gen and newsletters… they’re kind of like an industry dive or stuff like that” (Source 1).
“I still think they should have sold it to me,” Nathan said. “It would’ve, the deal would’ve closed in January, and so it would’ve dramatically changed how I treated this year” (Source 1).
His acquisition plan would have run “the industry dive playbook” — taking the ad-supported newsletter and layering high-priced webinars, white papers and B2B lead-gen on top. He’d also worked out an affiliate deal with Rowan at competitor newsletter The Rundown to send Neuron subs into Rundown’s paid AI community: “I’m a huge fan of the idea. I think it’s awesome when enemies become friends” (Source 1).
Then the part that turned the loss into compound interest. Nathan wrote up the lost deal as a newsletter issue: “I (almost) acquired The Neuron yesterday” — sharing the behind-the-scenes attempt and his planned monetization playbook publicly (Source 2).
What happened next: “Speaking of partnerships, how about this one: The founder of the company that acquired The Neuron, Rob Bellenfant, just became a reader of Newsletter Growth Memo. And his company, TechnologyAdvice, is now a client of Nathan’s” (Source 2).
Lesson for Creators
Lost deals are content. The instinct after losing a high-stakes bid is to bury it; Nathan published the full plan he’d have run as the buyer — including specific monetization tactics he could have charged for as consulting. Two things happened: he proved his thinking publicly to every other newsletter operator reading, and the winning party became both a subscriber and a paying client. Building in public works for losses, not just wins, because vulnerability is rarer than competence and gets remembered longer. The deal was lost; the asset (his reputation, his pipeline) compounded.
Related
- The Neuron - $1.80 Cheap Subs to Acquisition Target — The 17 months of growth work that earned him the seat at the bidding table
- Free Stuff Better Than Their Paid Stuff — The same “give it all away” instinct applied to lost-deal content
- The Sponsor Deck Tweet That Sold Out Months of Ads — Packy McCormick: making normally-private business artifacts public as a growth lever
- The 13-Minute Documentary That Doxxed Him on His Own Terms — Yossi Levi: controlling a sensitive narrative by publishing it yourself first