An exclusive community and data backed acquisition system to buy your first or your next business and build a lasting legacy.
You're not stuck, you're just alone at the top. Most entrepreneurs hit a ceiling, not because the opportunity isn't there, but because you're solving $10M problems with $1M strategies.
Unsure where to start?
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Here's what we've built at Contrarian Thinking:
An advisory business with ~3000 members. A venture capital firm. A New York Times bestselling book. A top-10 business podcast. A 1,000-person annual conference. A software platform for buying and selling businesses. Ownership stakes in a portfolio of Main Street companies. A media operation reaching 12 million people. A team that outgrew two offices in 12 months.
People often ask how we built all of this.
They're usually expecting some sophisticated answer about capital allocation or brand strategy or a lucky break. The real answer is comical in its simplicity:
We sent some emails.
Yup, one of the most important business moves we ever made cost nothing and took 20 minutes to get off the ground. No investors. No permission. Just a decision to start a newsletter and actually send it to people.
Here's how it happened and how you can steal the model.
5 years ago, we grabbed every contact we could. And we wrote them a newsletter out of nowhere.
Just an honest, unpolished note about our goal, plus some thoughts on money and business ownership. The stuff we heard people in finance talk about behind closed doors but never really say publicly.
We almost didn't send it. Spent a solid chunk of time convincing ourselves it was a terrible idea. Then we got the hell over cringe mountain and hit send.
Even Harley Finkelstein, President of the $200B company Shopify, agrees. “Cool waits for results; cringe creates them.” Hey, it worked for us. 102 people opted in. That was our launch list.
What followed was 4 genuinely chaotic weeks focused on growth. LinkedIn posts, Facebook groups, podcast appearances, lead magnets, tagging bigger accounts, begging friends to forward it. Plenty of things that flatlined completely. A few that worked better than expected. A lot of figuring it out in real time with no real playbook.
Today, everyone wants distribution. But few actually want to build it. They want the shortcut. But the reality is rarely neat and tidy.
We posted the full day-by-day breakdown on Reddit 5 years ago if you want the details. It's dated, but the bones still hold. It tells you exactly how we got to 10k subscribers in 30 days.
To be honest, in hindsight, timing helped. In 2020, people were sitting at home actively looking for content like this. Demand exceeded supply in a way that doesn't come around often.
Today, though, all of this is just as possible. The space is more crowded, and you need proper infrastructure to do this well. But there are better tools.
Big brands use beehiiv. But so can anyone. And that's the whole point. We used beehiiv to send you the email you're reading right now.
Using it feels like having an automation whisperer / analytics nerd / website sorcerer / growth goblin on hand 24/7, but without the payroll.
That's why we love it, and why we invested in the company.
(Also, the team wanted to help you out: use the code CODIE30 for 30% off for 3 months.)
Here's what 95% of people on Earth have never thought about when it comes to email:
A newsletter isn't just how you reach people. It's how people tell you what to sell them so you can… make money.
Most businesses spend fortunes trying to understand their customers. A newsletter inverts that entirely. Every send is a data point. What gets replied to. What gets clicked. What question shows up over and over, worded differently each time, but asking the same thing underneath.
After enough time, you stop guessing what your audience needs. They've told you. Clearly.
Most people hear "distribution" and think: views, content, followers. Post more. Go viral. The end. That's thinking too small.
We treat distribution as the central hub of every business we run. Everything else is a spoke. It fuels how we find customers, source deals, test products, and hire people. It tells us what to build before we build it. It gives our portfolio companies an unfair advantage the day we get involved.
Reid Hoffman said it plainly: “A good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution.”
Here's exactly how that played out for us.
The cool thing is, we still believe email will be a wildly powerful channel in 2026 and beyond. More crowded, but more capable, too.
Email is intimate. Direct. Personal. It’s 1-to-many but also 1-to-1. There’s no “views” counter at the bottom. Just a chance to talk straight to another human being. That’s why it’s a great on-ramp into an ecosystem.
Every time we send something out, we get replies from real humans. It’s awesome! Sometimes you’re annoyed at us. Most times, we get to hear about your wins, challenges, and ideas. All of it is priceless.
It really doesn’t matter if you’re emailing 100,000 people or 10 people. WHO those people are is what matters. We don’t take it lightly that you choose to open these emails, learn something, and be part of this journey with us.
Thank you for being here.
-Team Contrarian
The information contained here is educational, may not be typical, and does not guarantee returns. Background, education, effort, and application will affect your experience and the profitability of any business. Individual results may vary.
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