notessamuele onelia

From BCG and Mobile Apps to Newsletters via Two Singaporeans

The Story

Nathan’s path to newsletters ran through three previous chapters (Source 1).

At “14 or 15” he built a company called Block by Block making custom Minecraft maps for famous YouTubers (Source 1).

After college he went to BCG consulting, doing M&A and diligence work for private equity, including a 5-year strategy project for media company Meredith and work with Roger Lynch who runs Condé Nast (Source 1).

Then he helped build “this company called Apex that was acquiring mobile apps” from indie entrepreneurs — bootstrapped operators “doing one to ten million dollars a year, all to them super super cool 40, 50, 60 percent… margin businesses” (Source 1). The portfolio reached $15-20M (Source 2).

The newsletter discovery happened through Apex. “Two of those guys we bought a big $12 million a year portfolio from they had a newsletter that was doing million dollars a year, they had a Supplement brand doing million dollars a year. They’re just great marketers” (Source 1).

The two were Dave and Joel, Singaporean indie founders. Their mobile-app portfolio ran “$12 million a year with like 50% EBITDA margins… random little iOS apps… logo makers or like screen recorders.” Their entire Indian dev team cost ~$400K on $12M in revenue, “like 3% revenue” (Source 2).

“I thought like, oh, to have a big company, you gotta go to a 16Z, you gotta go to Sequoia… that’s what it means to have a company. And then these guys were just getting after it. And in the same way that mobile apps were badass businesses, I thought they had that newsletter. I was like, oh, I bet newsletters could be that too. They knew about Sean Puri and the Milk Road and Beehiiv. And that’s how I went down the newsletter rabbit hole” (Source 2).

Nathan started two small newsletters — a crypto one called Nifty Nest (sold to The Milk Road for an “okay amount of money”) and one for creators. “I really loved writing newsletters. I loved growing them. I hated selling sponsorships. So what I’m just kind of doing was like, oh, well, why don’t I just do the part I like, the growth part, for other newsletters? And that’s sort of how the feed got started in, let’s call it February of 2024” (Source 1).

Lesson for Creators

Two beats compress most career pivots: an exposure that flips your assumptions, and a part of the work you’d happily do for free even when the rest is misery. Nathan got the exposure from Dave and Joel (proof that small bootstrapped operators can run businesses bigger than VC-funded ones), and he got the asymmetry from running his own newsletters (loved the growth, hated the sales). The Feed Media exists because he removed the part he hated and sold the part he loved as a service. If you’re stuck choosing between two adjacent niches, the question isn’t which is bigger — it’s which slice of the work you’d do without being paid.

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