The Milk Road

The founder decided to launch The Milk Road by observing what worked with The Hustle, a successful business and tech newsletter. The insight was simple: "I think I know how to do this because I watched Sam do this like from scratch with the hustle. And like, I think if you took the hustle plus crypto, that would work." This wasn't just copying a format—it was recognizing that crypto investors were an underserved, high-value audience segment who were actively deploying significant capital into the space.

The Milk Road differentiated itself through authentic founder involvement. Rather than hiring remote writers or using AI to generate content, the founders committed to curation based on genuine curiosity. As explained: "If those were in the newsletter, cool, that's fine. But the lead story had to be the thing that I thought was most interesting, which was sometimes Twitter drama, which was sometimes a cool product, which was sometimes a price analysis." The founders also demonstrated skin-in-the-game by sharing their personal crypto portfolios with readers, proving they weren't mercenaries but missionaries about the space.

The publication leveraged both organic and paid growth channels. The founder mentioned: "Yeah, paid marketing on a little bit of paid marketing. You know, still I think half is like organic or something like that. So, you know, it's like half organic growth, half paid growth." This balanced approach to growth, combined with the authentic brand voice, helped The Milk Road build a engaged community of crypto-focused readers.

The key to success was audience segmentation and value alignment. The Milk Road succeeded because "people who read about crypto, like what's going on in crypto, were crypto investors. Crypto investors are a very valuable audience segment." This is why sponsorships and advertising could command premium rates—advertisers were reaching decision-makers with real capital to deploy. The founder contrasted this with AI newsletter startups that were chasing a trend: "But they don't see that. They just see the surface level stuff. They're not thinking about it critically enough to realize that they're just writing this like kind of current momentum." The critical difference was that crypto readers represented a durable, valuable demographic, while trend-chasing content attracts fleeting attention.

The Milk Road became a blueprint for how to build sustainable newsletter businesses. The founder's sibling publication, Small Boy (smallboy.co), grew to 100,000 subscribers in about six months, starting from 38,000 existing subscribers from a previous newsletter (Five to Tuesday). The success of both publications demonstrated that authentic, founder-driven content creation—where the creator is genuinely interested in the subject matter—creates more sustainable growth than algorithmically optimized or mercenary content strategies. As Joe Rogan articulated in the conversation, "The only way for this to be interesting was if I'm actually interested in it. You can't fake being interested in it for very long."