Grit Capital’s growth moments

Read for insights from Genevieve Roch-Decter, then join us for Wednesday’s Investing Happy Hour to continue the conversation

We invited Genevieve Roch-Decter, who writes a suite of publications on finance, crypto, and investing under the umbrella of Grit, to share meaningful growth moments for her flagship publication, Grit Capital. 

What questions do you have for Genevieve? Leave them in the comments and we’ll ask her live at this week’s Investing Happy Hour on Twitter Spaces. 

Publications at a glance

• About: We make complex financial topics easy and fun to read about!

• Publications:

  • Grit Capital is the flagship publication, where we publish a free daily post and weekly deep dive. There is also one paid stock write-up each week and a paid deep dive each month. Plus, the paid subscribers get access to my portfolio with buy and sell alerts.

  • Grit Crypto covers Bitcoin with one free weekly post and a monthly paid post. 

  • Grit ALTS, use to be Grit Carbon, recently redirected the focus to be about alternative investments like private equity, real estate, Regulation A’s, private credit, and 

• Started first Substack, Grit Capital: November 2020

• Went paid with Grit Capital: May 2021

• Free subscribers: 87,000 across all three Substacks

• Paid subscribers: 877 across all three Substacks 

• Team: For the first six months, it was just me. I was doing everything—writing the Substack and promoting it on all social media channels. Eventually, I raised a round of financing for Grit and was able to hire help. I’ve got an operations team, a sales team, and a content team.

Meaningful growth moments

1. Getting started. I started with a list of about 5,400 subscribers from an investor relations firm I co-founded and ran for four years before Grit became a financial media company. It consisted of hedge fund managers, wealth advisors, accredited investors, and some retail. On Substack, I began from scratch rebuilding a company, and I wanted to do it around financial content. I used to be a money manager, and I thought, Why don’t I write about managing my own portfolio

   Read more: How to move an email list over to Substack

2. Going paid. I decided to go paid because I wanted to let people see how I make decisions about buying and selling stocks. Especially in tough markets like today’s, doing less is more. Being patient and staying the course is so important, and a lot of new investors don’t know that.
   
   In retrospect, I should have started paid subscriptions earlier. It’s a slow build, and there’s no better time than now to start.

   Read more: Guide to going paid

3. Daily posts. We added a daily newsletter to Grit Capital. At first we lost a lot of subscribers, as people didn’t want to receive this style of email every day. But eventually we started to grow again. I was concerned it wasn’t going to work, but I kept looking at the open rates and it was high, so I thought eventually the audience that loves our content will stick around.

4. Introducing new newsletters. In the second half of the 2022 fiscal year, we launched two new newsletters, one in crypto and one in carbon. We wanted to create content specifically for these niches and go deeper, because we believed we could build solid free and paying audiences. That said, it’s been harder and slower to grow.

5. What’s next? We plan to introduce new niche content newsletters: one B2B newsletter (huge market) and another B2C, potentially on alternative investments (RegA deals, private equity, VC, and fractional ownership of collectibles).

What questions do you have for Genevieve? Leave them in the comments and we’ll ask her live at this week’s Investing Happy Hour on Twitter Spaces. 

Join us for Investing Happy Hour with Genevieve on Wednesday at 4 p.m. ET.