Crypto Newsletter Milk Road Sold 10 Months After Launch with 250,000 Subscribers: A Textbook Case of Getting Off at the Peak

Start and Finish

Milk Road is a crypto newsletter launched in January 2022 by serial entrepreneurs Shaan Puri and Ben Levy. Delivering “what happened in the crypto market today” in a breezy voice every morning, it reached 250,000 subscribers in just 10 months, and the sale to crypto media company Bitfo closed that December. From launch to exit in under a year, the fastest full run of any case we’ve covered. The sale price was undisclosed, but the consideration included Bitfo equity (confirmed by buyer Kendall Saville in an email to They Got Acquired). Investor Suleman Ali tweeted it was an “eight-figure” outcome ($10M+, over ¥1.5B), but that’s unconfirmed information the principals themselves never verified (¥150/$1).

The two had built businesses in e-commerce and esports and had also lived through the failure of live-streaming service Blab. Looking for their next project in early 2022, they picked crypto, something they were both already interested in, as their subject. Puri laid out the concept on his own podcast right after launch: a newsletter where “a smart friend explains one or two interesting things happening in crypto today, in plain, unpretentious English.” A deliberate counter-move against the stiff, jargon-heavy trade press.

The Growth Curve and Initial Investment

A 45% open rate is well above the reported industry average of 34%. This was a list that got read every morning, not merely a big one. Ad value as a media property is determined by the product of the two. Initial investment, meanwhile, was effectively just the domain purchase and ad spend. Anticipating the exhaustion of writing daily, the two set an explicit limit from the start: “just a one-year experiment.”

Taking Apart the Growth Machine

Reaching 250,000 subscribers in 10 months wasn’t built from zero. Puri, as co-host of the hit podcast My First Million, already had an audience of hundreds of thousands. His partner Sam Parr had sold his business newsletter The Hustle to HubSpot in 2021, and Puri says he applied The Hustle’s growth playbook directly to Milk Road. And they kept the build itself public, on their show and on Twitter. For someone who can announce a new venture on his own show, launch costs are effectively zero. It’s the same “compounding returns of owning an audience” we saw with Marc Lou and Levels.

But the main engine behind the 250,000 wasn’t audience transfer. It was paid ad buying. According to growth marketer Matt McGarry, who supported Milk Road’s growth, the team leaned heavily on Facebook and TikTok ads, with a cost per subscriber of $1.00–$1.30 (roughly ¥150–195). Facebook alone drove over 150,000 subscribers, 60% of the total list, through paid acquisition. Record retail interest in crypto in early 2022 was what made it possible to build a list at that price. The theme’s heat was reader demand and a tailwind in the ad auctions at the same time.

Editorial craft and hooks turned that paid list into a “list that actually gets read.” Their referral program offered a PDF report Levy wrote, “What 12 Crypto Whales are Betting On,” in exchange for one friend referral. Beehiiv co-founder Tyler Denk assessed the design this way: “You could argue the PDF is just going to get forwarded around anyway, but honestly, it’s a lot easier to get one person to sign up with your link than to ask ‘…does anyone have this?’ across 13 different group chats.” Daily reader polls, via Beehiiv’s polling feature, kept measuring reader reaction, and that signal continuously steered content toward what readers cared about. The team grew to include writers, a social media lead, and an ad-sales role, monetizing through in-newsletter ad slots.

The capstone was a spring-2022 stunt. They put $1M into a publicly tracked wallet and let readers watch it get invested in real time. The position eventually dropped 70% as the market fell, and subscribers kept growing anyway. Puri summed it up in a tweet: “Lesson: crazy stunts work. Just wear a helmet for the crash.” It embodied the goal Levy set for the project (“have maximum fun, regardless of what BTC’s price does”) turning a loss into content, with the added fact that the publishers themselves were bearing the same pain as their readers. A 45% open rate is the accumulated result of hooks like this.

A Sale That Started Rolling From One Line in Slack

The exit’s origin story is almost accidental. One day, Puri asked Levy over Slack: “If we sold this right now, what would we sell it for?” “I don’t know. Do you want to sell?” “I’m not saying that”, and yet the number each of them had in mind matched, so they decided to test whether it would actually sell. By coincidence, that same day, Levy had already started a conversation with Bitfo co-founders Kendall Saville and Mike Wittmeyer, not about a sale either, but about a partnership to grow Milk Road’s subscriber base. That conversation turned directly into acquisition talks.

Puri describes his own motive for selling this way: “I’m good at finding ‘something’ out of nothing. But polishing and improving that ‘something’ day after day, which is where most of a business’s value actually gets created, doesn’t excite me.” He acknowledges it could have kept growing for years, but chooses to step off before the operating phase begins. An exit built on self-knowledge.

The buyer, Bitfo, is a crypto media company that runs EthereumPrice.org, BitcoinPrice.com, and PlaytoEarn.online, among others. The two had been considering building a “crypto version of NerdWallet” (the US financial-comparison media brand) from scratch, until Saville realized what they were looking for was already showing up in their own inbox every morning. Wittmeyer’s explanation sounds like an SEO operator’s: “Google has moved heavily toward rewarding brands users are actually searching for. Milk Road gets searched hundreds of times a day. That’s proof people care about this brand.” It’s a calculation of grafting “a list that arrives every morning” and “a brand people search for by name” onto a group of price-info sites built on search traffic.

The negotiation was a “rollercoaster,” in Saville’s words. A sharp crypto-market downturn shook the price assumptions during the process, and the deal came close to collapsing twice. During due diligence, it also came to light that Wittmeyer’s non-compete clause from a past venture, covering gambling-related content, conflicted with the fact that Milk Road had at one point carried gambling-related sponsors, requiring additional adjustment after the deal was agreed in principle. The deal closed in December 2022. Afterward, Puri joined Bitfo’s board, and Levy continued writing the newsletter. The site was relaunched to add reference guides alongside daily news, and a podcast expansion was planned. For the record, Puri declined to be interviewed by They Got Acquired, and Levy didn’t respond.

The Difficulty of Actually Executing “Get Off at the Peak”

The value of a theme-driven media property decays in sync with the theme’s heat. When crypto winter arrives, open rates and ad rates fall and the sale value drops to a fraction, the founders understood this precisely and cashed out while the heat lasted. It was an even faster call than The Neuron (AI newsletter, sold in 2 years).

Easy to say, but selling a growing business is psychologically the hardest thing to do. The feeling of “but it’s still growing” is exactly what makes people miss the window. Milk Road’s lesson is crisp: the time to sell a theme-driven business is the moment growth is still strong but you’ve lost confidence in the theme’s durability. If you wait to confirm the slowdown, buyers are looking at the same data you are. In fact, the negotiation itself was a race against the falling market, a few months later, the same list likely wouldn’t have commanded the same price.

What to Discount

Before reading this as a reproducible playbook, three things need discounting. Sixty percent of subscribers were bought through ads, not proof of organic support. The roughly $1 acquisition cost was a product of crypto-boom-specific supply and demand; ordinary newsletter acquisition ads don’t pencil out at that rate in normal times. And because part of the consideration was Bitfo equity, the founders continued to carry crypto-market risk in equity form even after the sale. This wasn’t “cashing out fully at the peak.” The eight-figure number, too, has no backing beyond a third party’s tweet.

For Japanese readers, three of these gears turn the same way at home: someone who already owns an audience has a structurally lower cost of launching a business. A theme-driven media property is only sellable while its heat lasts. And if you buy a list with ads, you need to simultaneously build “proof of quality”, an open rate, alongside it. Two things don’t cross over: the scale of the boom that made that acquisition cost viable, and the existence of a buyer pool able to value a list alone at eight figures.

Related Reading

• The Neuron — an AI newsletter’s 2-year exit
• Marc Lou — the mass-production strategy of an audience owner