Jamie Northrup Takes Minimalist Hustler from Low-Content Products to Robust Newsletter
Entrepreneur: Jamie Northrup
Biz: Minimalist Hustler
Tilt: Minimalist methods to create a successful business
Primary Channel: Newsletter (7.6K)
Other Channels: Substack (11K), Medium (8.3K), LinkedIn (1K), X (7.4K), website, Gumroad
Time to First Dollar: 3 months
Rev Streams: Digital products, merch, low-content products, membership/community, book
Our Favorite Actionable Advice
- Find a niche that combines passion and profit: Jamie’s early ventures, such as selling hockey cards and managing websites, highlight the importance of aligning personal interests with revenue-generating opportunities.
- Start small and know your goals: Jamie’s ultimate goal was to leave his 9-to-5 job, but he later added a goal – a business without customers to manage. Experiment with ideas to identify what resonates with your audience and your own goals. Iterate based on feedback and sales.
- Build a central product: The Minimalist Hustler daily newsletter is the cornerstone of Jamie’s business. Having a central place where you funnel your content creates an anchor for your business and a cohesive experience for your audience.
- Pick the best platforms for your needs: As the newsletter grew, Jamie moved it to Substack because it offered more necessary features than Gumroad. With his paid community, he selected Skool because it worked best for the community and his goals.
Jamie Northrup distinctly remembers his first taste of earning money – when he modeled sports clothing in fifth grade. It sparked a love of creative side hustles that led him to sell homemade scratch-off lottery tickets to his classmates.
In the mid-1990s, the side hustles took Jamie, still a student, into the world of online marketing and the web. He bought and sold hockey cards, building customer relationships in groups hosted on consumer dial-up internet providers AOL and Compuserve.
“[It’s] not much different then than it is now, except for payment and shipping. You had to hide money in a card or some other piece of mail and pray that the payment made it to the seller,” he explains.
By 1997, Jamie transitioned his selling side hustle to eBay. He took card consignments from older collectors who were less tech-savvy and offered them for sale in the online world.
In 2003, at age 21, Jamie did the “normal” thing and got himself a 9-to-5 job with a transport company where he spent almost 20 years. However, he always had a side hustle.
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More web opportunities for side hustleJamie parlayed his experience with AOL and eBay to create a web consulting agency, building sites with Geocities. Launched in 2006, Jaime managed over 40 WordPress sites for clients. He also created niche blogs and monetized them with Google AdSense. He provided social media and email marketing and managed companies’ email systems.
Until his son was born in 2012, Jamie also published his own websites to generate revenue with AdSense postings. “The problem with these websites is that if you don’t consistently put time and effort into it, you still get paid, but it gets smaller and smaller until it is almost non-existent,” he explains.
The turning point for Jaimie’s side hustle business came in 2019. After several challenging client interactions, he reassessed his goals. His overarching goal was always to leave his 9-to-5 job and work for himself. He also realized the need to make money doing what he enjoyed but without customers.
The birth of Minimalist HustlerMinimalist Hustler took shape in early 2020.
“I wanted to earn income in a way that gave me freedom – freedom from endless emails, client class and stress. I registered the name Minimalist Hustler and was off,” Jamie explains.
Initially, Minimalist Hustler was to be a print-on-demand business.
Jamie uploaded product designs to platforms like Redbubble and Amazon Merch on Demand, where he could sell products without maintaining inventory or handling logistics.
Jamie loved the simplicity and soon was addicted to this model. Though he made less profit than if he used Printful, Printify, or built his own store, he had fewer headaches.
Minimalist Hustler expanded into other low-maintenance revenue streams, especially after Jamie discovered Amazon KDP and the world of low-content books. “I could create a journal, upload it, and start earning passive income almost immediately,” he says.
An easily scalable model, Jamie created multiple versions of each product. If he found a design that worked, he would produce 50 versions tailored to different niches.
The royalty revenue didn’t justify his time at first. Each sale brought only 75 cents to a few dollars. However, Jamie knew this business model would snowball, making the sheer number of listings lead to a steady income stream. By mid-2021, Jamie had over 300 low-content books listed on Amazon.
Scaling through content marketingIn 2021, Jamie began educating others on the hustle business model. He self-published his first book, Passion to Passive Profits, before selling it through Gumroad, where he received most of his sales.
Before publishing his book, Jamie attracted an audience on X through content about how to build a minimalist side hustle based on his experiences. With this new target audience, he shared news of the book’s release and directed followers to Gumroad to purchase it.
Jamie also used Gumroad’s affiliate marketing feature to expand his reach. Anyone who bought his book could sign up to get an affiliate link and receive 50% of the revenue from any sale made using that link.
During this time, Jamie realized he needed to start taking his audience more seriously. He had created seven quick-start guides but wasn’t doing anything with them. Jamie credits Josh Spector with inspiring him to start his newsletter to build an audience and share his books and low-content products.
In March 2022, Jamie launched the Minimalist Hustler daily newsletter. He shares three tips each morning – one from him, one from someone else, and one sponsor recommendation. The sponsors are often affiliate links, so Jamie earns revenue if his newsletter subscribers use that recommendation.
He acquired his first 400 subscribers through content lead magnets (people who provide their email addresses in exchange for a content product such as a guide or ebook) related to his digital products. The newsletter quickly gained traction and has become the cornerstone of Jaime’s business.
“It organizes my entire online presence. Everything I publish eventually funnels through the newsletter,” he says.
Moving to SubstackHowever, as the subscriber base grew, Jamie realized Gumroad’s capabilities didn’t align with his goals for scaling the newsletter.
In 2023, Jamie transitioned to Substack, a platform designed for newsletters. It contained everything he needed, including easy-to-use writing tools to subscriber management and organic discovery,.
Jamie also likes Substack’s Notes feature, a social tool for interacting with subscribers. He says it’s been a game changer for audience engagement.
By the end of 2024, Minimalist Hustler had grown to over 7.6K subscribers.
In 2024, Jamie expanded his newsletter offerings with a weekly Substack newsletter. At first, he just republished his daily newsletter in a summary newsletter. However, audience feedback led him to publish long-form content to provide more value. He still includes all the links from the week but adds his thoughts, reasons why he included something, and data.
Recently, Jamie began experimenting with specialized newsletters, focusing on niches like low-content book publishing and digital product strategies to target segments of his broader audience with more specific advice and tools.
“These additional newsletters allow me to serve different audience needs while still staying true to my minimalist ethos,” Jamie says.
Adding paid subscriptions and online communityIn December 2023, Jamie added a new revenue stream: Minimalist Hustler Headquarters. Subscription-based community members receive a deeper level of support, practical resources, exclusive content, and Jamie’s books and can participate in a collaborative environment to grow their businesses.
The Minimalist Hustler Headquarters community uses Skool as its platform. Jamie chose Skool because it offers a unique combination of community interaction, course hosting, and gamified engagement tools.
“I wanted a platform that felt like a dedicated space for serious creators. Somewhere they could come to grow, not just scroll, and Skool offers a clutter-free space where members can focus on learning and networking,” he says.
Skool has a leaderboard feature that rewards members for participation so they can get Minimalist Hustler merch. Jamie also regularly runs “challenges” in the community, encouraging participants in activities, such as engaging on the Bluesky social platform or launching low-content books.
Jamie charges $8 a month or $80 per year for membership. Eight is a number he likes, not a scientific choice, he says, and he’s consistent about using it in all his offering prices.
Jamie’s goal is to continue growing the community and his newsletter subscriber base while staying true to his minimalist hustler guiding principles. He wants to keep making content and products he is passionate about and helping people become minimalist hustlers.
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