Hey - welcome to the first issue of Come Up Weekly.

I'm Landon. I'm young, I play sports, and I'm building online income streams while still in school. Every week I break down exactly what I'm learning, testing, and building - no hype, just what's actually real.

Let's get into it.

Most people think you need a huge audience to make money online. You don't. What you actually need is a small, specific audience that a specific type of advertiser desperately wants to reach.

That's the niche newsletter model. You pick a tight topic - say, independent pharmacy owners, or commercial cleaning companies, or young people building income online. You send a weekly email covering that topic. Once you have 1,000–3,000 engaged subscribers, businesses that sell to that audience will pay you $300–$800 per issue to put their message in front of those readers.

The math works because specificity commands a premium. A supplement brand would rather reach 2,000 serious athletes than 50,000 random people.

AI makes this viable even if you're busy - you prompt it to draft the issue, spend 20–30 minutes editing, and hit send. Total weekly time: under an hour.

Takeaway: You don't need to go viral. You need to go specific.

If you're building a newsletter, Beehiiv is the move. Free up to 2,500 subscribers, built-in monetization tools, a clean editor, and an ad network that automatically places paid sponsors in your issues once you have an audience.

It takes about an hour to set up from scratch. No coding, no website needed.

Takeaway: Start free, upgrade only when you're making money.

Before anything else, you need a niche. The criteria are simple: is there a passionate audience, do they have money, and are there businesses that want to reach them?

Spend 20 minutes this week writing down 3 niche ideas. For each one, ask - who would sponsor this? If you can name 5 businesses that would pay to reach that audience, you've got a viable niche.

Takeaway: The niche is 80% of the outcome. Get this right before building anything.

The newsletter space is growing fast, and most of that money is flowing to small, targeted publications - not giant media companies. Individual creators are capturing sponsorship budgets that used to go exclusively to magazines and blogs.

Takeaway: The window to build in this space is open right now. It won't stay this uncrowded forever.

This is literally issue number one. I set up Come Up Weekly today - picked the name, built the Beehiiv page, designed the logo, and wrote this first issue all in one sitting.

I have zero subscribers right now. I don't know exactly how this plays out, but I'm documenting the whole journey here every week - the wins, the slow weeks, the numbers, all of it.

If you're reading this, you're early. Thanks for being here.

— Landon