The College-Sports-Money Newsletter

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The product didn’t need a reinvention. It needed a different buyer.

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College sports is a giant business, and since 2025 schools can pay athletes directly. Athletic departments, agents and vendors all want to know what other schools pay, sign and spend.

They want the contracts and budgets. They don't want to file public-records requests (legal requests that make a public school hand over its documents) one school at a time.

That's the gap: the documents are public, but nobody has time to go get them.

What's the big idea?

Write a newsletter about the money side of one niche, charge readers a few dollars a month, then sell the institutions that need it a much bigger package. Extra Points charges readers $9 a month and sells its library of college sports documents for $2,999 a year.

It makes money from readers. But it grows from the documents.

►Matt Brown started Extra Points after a 2020 layoff from Vox Media. He sold it in 2021 and bought it back in 2024. By 2025 it had 27,000 subscribers, 2,000 of them paying, and brought in more than $200,000 a year.

Think: school board budgets, county permits, hospital prices, homeowners association law.an point at closed deals.

🥢The winners will be the ones who pick a beat where the buyers have budgets. A fan weighs $9 a month. An athletic department signs off on $3,000 a year without blinking. The real customer is the institution.

🍜 The risk is time. Brown had about 300 paying readers in 2020, writing four days a week, and he now pays a small staff, so $200,000 is revenue, not take-home. It took five years.

Nick Glassett hangs Christmas lights on other people's houses in south Louisiana, and homeowners pay him so they never have to climb a ladder in December.

Day one: $0 invested and no car of his own. He had the smallest ladder Lowe's sells, borrowed his dad's truck, and borrowed a bigger ladder from a friend named John. Before this he drove for Uber and assembled swing sets and basketball hoops for people.

The first customer: his neighbor Lori said, "I bet people would pay you to put up their Christmas lights." He walked inside and posted the idea on Facebook Marketplace. People hired him that first day.

What the first $1,000 took: less than two weeks. He made roughly $2,600 in two weeks, then bought his own ladder and a Jeep Cherokee in the middle of the season.

🍜 The unglamorous part: he was taking jobs he was still learning how to do, on borrowed gear, while store-bought light strands kept failing on him.

It took one comment from a neighbor and one free post. If you can post an offer on Facebook Marketplace tonight, you can test this before Thanksgiving.