👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight cool sh*t I’m seeing in newsletters that you can borrow for your newsletter.

This week, I’m showing how Petition turned bankruptcy filings into a multimillion-dollar business. Reading time: 3 minutes.

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🧨 Write about busts, not booms

If the stock market is your only source of business news, you might be surprised to learn how many companies are failing.

Despite 20%+ annual gains in the S&P 500 the past two years, business bankruptcy filings surged 33% for the year ending September 30, 2024, with more than 20,000 companies circling the drain.

Petition, which provides analysis, commentary, and curated links about bankruptcies and restructuring, has made a multimillion-dollar business out of going out of business.

Thousands of investors, lawyers, and investment bankers pay $899/year for Petition’s twice-a-week newsletter.

If you have to read bankruptcy filings for a living, God help you. But the good news is that someone figured out how to make them entertaining.

Read the first three paragraphs of this December email, and see if it doesn’t give you a little workday buzz:

💁 Uncover characters (and gold nuggets)

A newsletter that writes about bankruptcies sounds boring as sh*t. But not when you mine bankruptcy filings the way Petition does.

Petition finds tales of billionaire investors and supermodels:

And they tie stories of bankruptcies and distressed debt to broader economic and geopolitical issues (trust me, this passage is anything but boring):

🤣 Lean into memes (even when stories aren’t funny)

There’s nothing funny about Vladimir Putin or the war he’s waging on Ukraine. And I doubt the Stoli Group LLC is laughing about tactics Putin has used to drive them to the brink.

Petition treads carefully on these serious topics, but still uses its meme-making magic to make the story even more memorable:

Hope you enjoyed this week’s examples. I’ll be back next week with more!

☮️ -Brad

P.S. What’s your New Year’s resolution for your newsletter? Mine is to spend less time writing it haha (today’s issue took me 1 hour, 18 minutes…my goal is to get it under 1 hour!).

P.P.S. If you’re looking for a strategy partner, I’ve just opened up a few 1:1 mentoring slots. Hit me up if you’re interested—they’re less expensive than you might think!

ICYMI: Links to recent issues

📧 What I learned taking Sam Parr’s email copywriting course
📨 The 5 coolest things I saw in newsletters in 2024
🤖 Want to write killer subject lines? Borrow this prompt
📈 The secret to Semafor’s growth
🧠 Why 700k people love Contrarian Thinking