Have you ever wondered what the world’s largest startups were doing, before they were massive?

Think Airbnb and Uber. The biggest players are easily recognizable, now, but they weren’t always.

Introducing Unicorner.

Bring one up-and-coming startup to your inbox every week. It’s growing, and profitable, has increased open rates by 10%, and climbing higher.

But, it’s easy to doubt a newsletter like this. So many newsletters take a journalistic approach, but in a saturated industry like start-ups (and tech in general), it isn’t very comforting.

• Will it take off?

• Is the market too saturated?

• Why would someone read my “little” newsletter when so many big players cover the same?

These questions can stop you from publishing, but they shouldn’t. Unicorner is a prime example of how good quality, consistently, can take off and create opportunities. With a list just under 10,000, open rates over 40%, and a thriving community, this is an example we can all learn from.

Unicorner is run by a team of two: Arek Der-Sarkissian and Ethan Keshishian (more on them below).

Today we’ll cover.

• The Unicorner origin story.

• The content strategy that brings ideas to you.

• How to win with less, but better.

• Running a newsletter like a startup (OKRs, user interviews, and more).

• Building community with in-person events.

And much more. Let’s get into it.

Unicorner:

Unicorner covers an up-and-coming startup every Monday morning.

The team is clear:

“We are on a mission to find the next big unicorns, or companies with a $1 billion+ valuation, and share them with our community before they make it big. We have an audience of nearly 10,000 founders, investors, and tech enthusiasts from around the globe!”

Think Uber and Airbnb before they were Uber and Airbnb.

The company publishes their weekly newsletters, hosts in person events, and keeps a talent pool that clearly fits well with their audience of start-up enthusiasts.

How it started:

There’s always an opportunity.

“We started working on Unicorner in 2020. At the time, we were both first-year computer science students and roommates at UCLA. Both of us had a shared passion for entrepreneurship and wanted to learn more.”

But passion doesn’t always equate to a thriving business. We all have passion, but what did that mean for them, more practically? In the team’s words:

“During the summer of 2020, we made it our goal to read a VC or founder essay every day. By the end of the summer, we had read and taken notes on almost a hundred essays….But we also recognized how difficult it was for people like us to find quality, easily digestible resources online in the startup world. In an ocean of long-form analyses, TechCrunch articles, and investor memos, we (and many others) were craving a two-minute solution. On top of that, we wanted to learn from real-life examples.”

With a clear “need” identified among themselves and others, they had a foundation for content.

Paul Graham, Y Combinator, Marc Andreessen, and more were already publishing some of the most well-known blogs in the space. But therein lies the difference. It wasn’t about the long-form anymore, that was covered.

“We felt like we had learned a lot, but lacked those zero-to-one examples: early-stage startups that were redefining their industries in real-time… We wanted to share concise yet quality resources online with people interested in entrepreneurship. Thus, the mission for Unicorner was born, and we’ve put out an issue every Monday for the past two and a half years.”

Want an example? Here’s ours (it’s great, you should read it):

Content Strategy:

Selecting a topic is often the hard part, but after two and a half years, what’s often harder is continuing to come up with fresh ideas to keep an audience engaged. Unicorner has nailed this.

“We focus on early-stage companies in any industry. This often includes companies that have recently raised a funding round. Our goal is to create a beautiful and predictable newsletter experience for anyone looking to learn about startups. Everyone should be able to get a Unicorner email and know exactly what kind of information they’re getting every week.”

For all our readers looking to start their own newsletter: the content is out there.