Crossing $25k MRR on a newsletter that he launched 72 hours after getting laid off

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In April 2020, Vox Media laid off Matt Brown along with most of its other sports reporters. Because of the pandemic, the usual next step, a job at somewhere like the Chicago Sun Times or ESPN, simply was not available. Nobody was hiring.

Going into business for himself was a Hail Mary option, mostly because he did not want to work at the grocery store. He launched Extra Points, a newsletter covering business, policy, and off the field stories in the college athletics industry, less than 72 hours after his layoff was finalized.

He figured he would run it for six months, maybe a year, and then land a job at somewhere like The Athletic. Instead it grew quickly enough that he realized he had a new job entirely. Extra Points now clears more than $25k in monthly recurring revenue across four distinct revenue lines, and Matt considers revenue the only metric that actually matters. If people are willing to hand over their money and not just their attention, something is working.

Here is how a desperate 72 hour launch became a durable, diversified media business.

Matt's media experience had already taught him he did not want to write anything online for free and hope programmatic ads would eventually pay his bills. That game, in his words, died in 2018. So from the very start, Extra Points combined what he had learned as a reporter with his genuine interest in education policy, aimed at a smaller but deeper audience rather than one chasing clicks.

Niching down let him combine his passions, expertise, and voice into a beat nobody else could cover the way he does. Whether the right readership turns out to be 20,000 people or 200,000 does not particularly concern him, as long as they are the right people.

The company has evolved considerably since 2020. Extra Points is no longer just a newsletter providing original reporting and analysis in an underserved industry. It now includes a data product for academics, reporters, and industry professionals, and a college classroom curriculum supplement that combines the reporting with an original computer game, Athletic Director Simulator 4000. The mission across all of it stayed consistent: inform, educate, and entertain both casual fans and industry professionals about the actual nuts and bolts of how the college sports industry works.

Matt had been saving money for over a year before the layoff, because he had anticipated it was coming, and he received a severance package on top of that. His wife also worked, and her employment covered his insurance, which together gave him some financial runway to figure out whether Extra Points would stay a side project or become his new full time job.

He threw himself into writing and running the newsletter almost immediately, spending more than 40 hours a week on it from the very start. When it is just you, you are not only doing the research, reporting, and writing. You are also writing the sales decks, testing software vendors, and finding an accountant, among everything else a business needs.

He is candid that he lacked the time to properly validate and test the idea before jumping in. It was COVID. He had to burn the boats and figure out how to make it work as he went. It worked, but he is direct that if he started another business, he would not do it the same way again.

After a year, he had both the money and the proof to hire people and make the operation more of a team effort, even if only on a contractor basis. The stack behind it:

The core business remains newsletter subscriptions. The team publishes four Extra Points newsletters a week: two are free and supported by ads, and two sit behind a subscription paywall. Full access to all newsletter content costs $9 a month or $84 a year. More than 2,100 paid subscribers now support the newsletter, and it remains the largest single revenue source, though the business has diversified meaningfully over time. The subscription media space faces genuine industry headwinds, but Matt has no plans to abandon it.

The newsletter is also monetized through advertising. Ad network placements from platforms like Beehiiv or Wellput run occasionally when inventory allows, but they typically perform poorly given the lack of massive scale. Direct ad sales and sponsored posts for brands seeking a college sports industry audience perform far better, commanding a much higher CPM. This is projected to be the company's best year for ad sales yet.

A third line sells college classroom curriculum supplements. Schools teaching college sports management, law, or media receive significant discounts on newsletter subscriptions when purchased as a single unit, along with access to the computer game, popular among college professors, plus white papers and other supplemental tools. The whole package costs considerably less than a textbook, while staying more current and more accessible.

The fourth line, Extra Points Library, is a data product built for industry professionals. The database includes roughly 15,000 PDFs covering college sports budgets, coach contracts, major vendor agreements, game contracts, league bylaws, and more. Matt uses the tool to strengthen his own reporting and to provide staffing and budget assistance for schools. It runs $300 a month or $3,000 a year, and it is currently the company's fastest growing revenue stream, the one he is most optimistic about in the near term.

For growth, the team uses paid media through social and occasional placements in other newsletters. But the most successful tactics have consistently centered around earned media generated by original reporting, strong social platforms, regular TV and radio appearances, and plain old fashioned word of mouth.

Extra Points does not just aggregate or comment on the news. It breaks it. When the team owns a story or creates content nobody else on the internet can produce, the ability to drive earned media grows dramatically. The best way to stand out is to genuinely be unique, and college sports is not a large enough industry for good work to go unnoticed. Word gets around when you do it well.

The more conventional newsletter growth playbook, centered on Facebook ads and ad arbitrage, has not found much traction here, mostly because of how narrow the niche genuinely is.

If Matt had to start over, he would write less and charge more. Running a media business with a small or nonexistent staff is a great deal of work, and burnout is real. Spending less time on content volume would have freed up more time for product development, sales, and technology.

In this business, people pay because they care about and are invested in the person behind it. You cannot pour from a cup that is empty, and he is honest that this has been a genuine struggle over the last five or six years.

The change of ownership at Twitter also hurt the business directly. The team now spends more time and money on audience growth because organic reach on the platform is no longer realistically possible, without even getting into the brand risk of being associated with it these days.

Matt reads a great deal: fiction, reporting well outside his own industry, and a steady diet of college sports and higher education coverage. He has never regretted talking or posting less in exchange for reading more. He maintains his distinct voice and perspective not only by being deeply knowledgeable about his exact beat, but by staying well rounded enough to draw connections outside of college sports entirely.

His view on AI tools is direct: ChatGPT cannot think for you, and in a landscape where much of the competition is visibly outsourcing higher order thinking to language models, simply being a genuinely thoughtful human makes you stand out even more.

He also credits a great and supportive family. Starting a business entirely alone would have been too daunting for him. His wife and children share in the success of Extra Points because they helped build it too.

Matt's advice is to solve a problem inside a world you are deeply passionate about and will not get bored of. Subject matter expertise, and the relationships that come with it, carry you a very long way.

The world does not need another newsletter covering the same six AI tips everyone else is hyping on LinkedIn. Solve a problem in your own world, and that requires actually living inside it long enough to understand what that world is going to become.

From here, Matt would love to build Extra Points enough to reduce his own writing load, freeing up time for projects like additional game development, writing other books, and teaching. Making Athletic Director Simulator 4000 genuinely lit something up for him, and he wants to keep that momentum going. The constraint is time, which his current writing and reporting schedule makes difficult to find.

You can find Extra Points at extrapointsmb.com, or find Matt directly as Matt.Brown on Bluesky and MattBrownEP on Twitter.