Axios, the American startup of the day, is a selection of email newsletters on serious topics: politics, business, and such. Its overall audience amounts to 2.4 million subscribers, it mainly monetizes through ads, although it also has paid subscription.
Axios positioning is ‘ we make the smart smarter.’ We protect you from informational noise, we only send the most important. Some say it was them who invented today’s subheader format ‘Why it is important,’ ‘What of it,’ and the like.
The startup’s founders are journalists and not entrepreneurs. Before launching their own startups, they wrote in similar format for some major media. The legend has it that during Axios’ first years. The flagship newsletter was written by one of the co-owners, and the other one took part in topic selection. The drama of the story is enforced by the fact that the letter gets sent to the subscribers in the morning, meaning that it had to be written at 4 AM.
Today, the startup’s revenue is about USD 100M per year, 40 dollars per subscription – incredibly much for a news outlet. To make it perfectly clear, it turns out that Axios earns on every reader as if they had subscribed to a paid newsletter and not a free one.
The company announced that it’s being sold recently. The business got valued at about USD 500M.
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
