Website Investing: Paid Subscriptions Stalled at 70 — a Free Tier in Front Led to $7,500/Month and a Six-Figure Sale in Seven Months

All amounts are in US dollars. This article adds a rough conversion at ¥150/$1. “Low six figures” is an English-language shorthand for the $100,000–$300,000-plus range — roughly ¥15 million to ¥50 million in yen.

Website Investing Publication was a paid newsletter for “site investors”, people who buy, sell, and operate websites as assets. It was run by Richard Patey. He conceived it in December 2019, launched it properly on Substack in May 2020, and two months later, in July 2020, sold it to Travis Jamison, founder of Smash.vc, for low six figures. Counting from the initial concept, that’s seven months. From the Substack move, just over two months, a striking pace.

From launch to sale

At the time of sale: $7,500/month in revenue (~¥1.12M), 100 paying subscribers, 2,700 free subscribers. The team was Patey plus four contractors, two writers, one editor, and one podcast host/producer.

Breaking down the revenue

The composition of that $7,500 monthly figure is the most important number here. According to the source, roughly $5,000 of it came from advertising and affiliate partnerships, with the remainder from paid subscriptions.

That means about two-thirds of revenue rested not on the 100 paying members but on the readership as a whole, including the 2,700 free subscribers. The paid tier, “Patey Premium,” ran $49/month with a free newsletter placed in front of it. The podcast was structured with the first half free and the second half paid. Patey has said “the free newsletter/podcast was getting at least 1,000 views/listens every time, on Substack.”

That said, the numbers don’t fully reconcile: 100 paying subscribers × $49/month works out to $4,900, and adding that to “about $5,000 from ads/affiliates” would exceed $7,500 total. It’s natural to assume an annual-plan discount, mid-period churn, or a price change is somewhere in the mix, but the source doesn’t explain it. This is a figure worth reading with some slack.

The turning point: moving the paywall from in front of readers to behind them

The point where the trajectory shifted is clear: the Substack move in May 2020.

Before that, Patey had set up $49/month billing on Gumroad and plateaued around 70 paying subscribers. The price and the content were essentially unchanged. What he changed was the structure alone. He put the free newsletter and podcast out front, with a paid tier behind them.

Line up the before and after: from a plateau of roughly 70 paying subscribers, two months after the move he had 100 paying subscribers, 2,700 free subscribers, and $7,500 in monthly revenue. The paid-subscriber increase was only 30 people. What grew was the free side, and the free side is also what became the primary revenue driver.

Patey deliberately chose this design.

“I went all in on it. I’d previously built and sold a six-figure software review site in the funnel space, and I could see how free newsletter content could directly convert free subscribers into paying ones.”

Why it worked

The position of the paywall determined the number of revenue streams. Under the Gumroad structure, revenue had exactly one source: paid subscriptions. Readers faced a binary choice, pay or leave, and non-paying readers weren’t an asset. Putting a free tier in front kept those 2,700 non-paying readers around. That group became the target for advertisers and affiliate partners, generating $5,000/month. Same content, same writer, but revenue streams went from one to three. That’s the substance of the shift.

The buyer was hiding inside the advertisers. When Patey received an acquisition offer with unfavorable terms, he reached out to Travis Jamison for advice. Jamison had already been an advertiser on the publication. That conversation turned into an acquisition offer: Jamison acquired the publication as a building block for a newsletter and investor community called Investing.io. Patey retained a minority stake and provided six months of transition support, then sold that remaining stake back to Jamison in January 2021.

This path wasn’t a coincidence. An advertiser has already spent their own money running ads, watched the reader response, and knows the publication’s value from real data, the one outside party who has effectively already done due diligence, as part of their normal course of business. An offer from someone in that position moves fast. Half of this deal’s seven-month timeline is explained right here.

Built with contractors, handed off with them too. A team of two writers, one editor, and one podcast producer minimized Patey’s own hands-on time. That’s partly for launch speed, but it also pays off at the point of sale, the more of the writing that isn’t tied to the founder personally, the easier it is to explain continuity after the handoff.

A premise not to overlook

This story is eye-catching for its “sold in seven months” speed, but Patey’s career runs back to 2009. He taught himself SEO starting from literally googling “what is a title tag,” and over more than a decade cycled through dropshipping, an SEO agency, a review site, and a podcast plus a 2,000-member Facebook group, buying and selling along the way. He’s reflected, “I realized I was actually building audiences.” Website Investing Publication reaching 2,700 free subscribers in two months was a story of moving an existing audience over, not of building from zero. The source itself attributes this to two things: “leveraging an existing audience” and “getting onto Substack early.”

The exact sale price, the multiple, contractor payouts, and advertiser count/rates were never disclosed. Also noted but with undisclosed terms: Patey later sold another publication, Alts (an alternative-assets newsletter), to Flippa via acqui-hire in early 2022, and currently operates Alts as a contractor while owning Patey Media Services.

What’s reproducible, and what isn’t

What’s reproducible is the design decision of moving the paywall’s position. When paid subscriptions have stalled at a few dozen people, there’s value in checking “does a free tier exist?” before touching price or content. In this case, adding a free tier didn’t just drive paid conversions. It generated an entirely separate revenue stream through advertising and affiliates.

Another reproducible move is treating your advertiser list as a list of prospective buyers. Someone already paying money to be involved with your publication will move faster than an outside buyer.

What isn’t reproducible is the track record of three prior sales over ten years and the audience accumulated along the way. Add to that the timing of being on Substack in May 2020, in its early days, you can’t choose that either. Running the same playbook today offers no guarantee that a free tier reaches 2,700 people in two months. Read the “seven months” in this story less as a build time than as a harvest: something collected in seven months during an eleventh year of work.

Related reading

• ScrapingBee’s sale — how the composition of revenue shapes valuation
• Plausible, the record of reaching $1M ARR — an example of publishing your numbers continuously to build both readers and trust