Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy · Andy McCotter-Bicknell

Juan Mendoza: Building A Newsletter-Based Media Company

·44 min·2 clips

Juan says not knowing a topic is an opportunity to learn, not a reason to avoid publishing.

1. Healthy Competition: Product Marketing | Competitive Intelligence | Strategy features Juan Mendoza discussing the launch of MarTech Weekly as a full-time newsletter business. 2. Juan Mendoza is the guest, and he describes leaving The Lumery after roughly three years to work on MarTech Weekly full-time. 3. The episode asks what changes when a newsletter shifts from a side project to a business with 12 months of runway. 4. Juan says the newsletter began as a LinkedIn post, then a newsletter, and later expanded into a three-year writing practice. 5. He says he spent seven or so years in marketing technology, including CRM work, Shopify, Salesforce, conversion optimization, and enterprise consultancy. 6. Juan explains that working with enterprise businesses doing more than $200 million a year exposed him to the pace of change in martech. 7. He says COVID-19 produced a flood of webinars, podcasts, articles, and press releases that made it hard to see what was actually happening in the industry. 8. MarTech Weekly was built to summarize the week's main themes and save marketing technologists time. 9. Juan says the newsletter also aims to give analysis and insight, not just curation. 10. He describes the writing process as exploration, with one weekly topic often expanded through research and opinion. 11. Juan says the newsletter grows from 400 words to 1,000 words to an average of about 3,500 words over time. 12. He says he writes first, then researches, which helps him discover what he does not know before refining the piece. 13. He says a blank page is an opportunity, not something to fear. 14. He says he reads roughly 200 articles a week, plus Twitter threads and other social posts, to find a usable angle. 15. Juan gives contextual advertising as a recent example, tied to third-party cookie deprecation, first-party data, Apple and Amazon ad marketplaces, and new startup funding rounds. 16. He says he tracks open rates around 55 to 60 percent and notices when some readers reopen an email 20 or 50 times. 17. He says a media company executive told him their team spent a whole morning reading one issue called "The Day Customers Stop Sharing Data." 18. Juan says he does not want MarTech Weekly to be "a substack" because brand, user experience, and long-term economics matter. 19. The interview style is conversational and reflective, with extended back-and-forth about writing, metrics, and business strategy. 20. People building newsletters, martech companies, or media brands will get the most value from this episode. 21. People wanting a light overview without business-model details may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded look at the uneasy shift from side project to real business.

This conversation follows a creator who is close to the leap from side project to full-time work, and it keeps its feet on the ground. It spends time on the questions that actually matter at that stage: what to build next, how to think about customers, how to handle service, and…

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Why you'd press play

You want the messy middle of quitting a job to turn a side project into something bigger.

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