Case Study: Lemon Press/Inside Mongolia by Ankhbayar and Zolbayar

Ankhbayar Tserenvandan is passionate about Mongolia and the many untapped resources that the small country, nestled between giants Russia and China, boasts. He understands you may not know much about it outside of what you learned in high school history class about Ghengis Khan. He’s out to change that with Lemon Press, a financial media company that he co-founded with New York-based Zolbayar Enkhbaatar.

Through Lemon Press’s English-language newsletter, Inside Mongolia, you’ll quickly learn that Mongolia is a very mineral rich country with large deposits of coal, copper, gold, silver, fluorite and not to mention the ample livestock stemming from their historical nomadic culture, including more than 3 million horses, plus sheep, goats, cattle, and camels. With so many riches, Ankhbayar and Zolbayer believe that Mongolia’s underdeveloped economy is ripe for investment and further growth. Lemon Press was launched 18 months ago as a Mongolian language newsletter that covers business, finance, and market news, with the goal of becoming a resource that helps young business professionals make better decisions.

With the recent addition of Inside Mongolia in January 2022, Lemon Press aims to both increase business acumen within Mongolia and to serve as a bridge for foreign investors by covering a range of topics (business, finance, politics, nature, culture, food, business, art, etc) about life and untapped opportunities in Mongolian market.

Lemon Press is a 16-person team that oversees the two newsletters and will be soon expanding into video and other mediums. Ankhbayar and Zolbayar are huge fans of newsletters. When they learned about beehiiv, it was an easy sell to migrate both newsletters over. We chatted with them about their move and their vision for a thriving economy in Mongolia.

The Newsletters 

Inside Mongolia: English language newsletter aimed at anyone who’s interested in Mongolia

Lemon Press: Mongolian language newsletter aimed at modern business professionals

Founders: Ankhbayar Tserenvandan and Zolbayar Enkhbaatar

Top posts to check out

• Inside Mongolia: Crypto | Economy | Olympics of Mongolia, CU | Cars | Foreign Trade of Mongolia

• Lemon Press: Biden + Xi 

2022 Goals

Reaching 40,000 subscribers at Lemon Press and 10,000 subscribers at Inside Mongolia with further plans to expand into other mediums, including partnerships with local TV channels, YouTube channel, etc.

Advice for other writers

Start small and fast.

Favorite beehiiv feature

The fact that I can chat up the highest exec of the team is bliss. I hope as beehiiv scales, the customer service also stays personalized and close.

Advice for anyone considering a switch to beehiiv

Beehiiv gives you the opportunity to think about every other problem without worrying at all about the structure or anything else besides the content.

Tell me about Lemon Press, your media company

We currently put out 2 types of newsletters: Lemon Press- covering the business landscape for modern business professionals in Mongolia, Inside Mongolia- covering business and investment opportunities, market insights, politics, culture, and arts of Mongolia for foreigners who are interested in Mongolia.

Why newsletters?

We’re huge newsletter fans. I’d like to think I use email a bit more than the average young professional and from there, I fell in love with newsletters such as Morning Brew. Newsletters are personal, accessible, and extremely efficient cost-wise. The content we produce reaches thousands of people every day on a regular basis with little to no effort.

Tell me about the switch to beehiiv.

We've used MailChimp since we first started sending out Lemon Press in Sep 2020. There were a few hurdles when it came to using MailChimp: customer support was extremely hard to get for the Standard Tier (which is actually just 1 level lower than the highest tier they offer). Content Builder was laggy and slow. Tiers didn't really make sense. We were sending out 22-25 emails every month to our subscribers and they'd charge us on the email send count when exceeding the tier limit. If we wanted to upgrade the tier, it also didn't make sense since the pricing gap between the tiers was quite large.

I've been following Tyler’s blog for quite some time now. His telling of his experience with Morning Brew products was impressive and in-depth. We were pretty sure what he was working on was better than we were using as a newsletter platform, so after testing out beehiiv briefly for a month, we’ve made the decision to migrate. So far, we’re extremely happy with beehiiv.

Can you sum up Mongolia’s economic situation?

Mongolia is not a poor country by any means. We have a wealth of resources and an extensive mineral deposits: copper, coal, molybdenum, tin, tungsten, and gold account for a large part of industrial production. In terms of population, youth aged 15-34 represent the largest demographic group in the country, constituting 34.9 percent of the population.

By the way, Mongolia is a strong capitalist society compared to our neighboring countries, China and Russia. We also have a solid record of human rights and extremely progressive in terms of gender and racial equality.

And what role does Lemon Press and Inside Mongolia play?

Lemon Press’s vision is to become the go-to-source for Mongolian business professionals when it comes to business, finance, and market news.

Inside Mongolia’s vision is to attract foreign investors and to promote the wealth of opportunities in Mongolia to the world by delivering quality content. We end up covering much broader topic, so anyone interested in investment or business in Mongolia can get a sense of the larger picture.

It’s motivating because we’ve recently found out that one of our Inside Mongolia subscribers was the head of an NYC hedge fund that has actually invested a 20% stake in the largest private conglomerate in Mongolia.

Are you monetizing the newsletters?

With Lemon Press, yes. Our revenue primarily comes from branded contents. We’re not monetizing Inside Mongolia content yet.