Blockbasis.com

Blockbasis.com is a crypto newsletter and SaaS tool that helps people avoid getting scammed, rugged or lose their money in their crypto wallet. Blockbasis writes newsletters about recent exploits in the crypto industry sent out to 20k+ subscribers, where paid subscribers receive access to our custom scan tool, where users can scan their own wallet or smart contracts to proof-check for exploits or any other risks of losing money. See video and screenshots for more descriptions.

We’ve converted 70+ of our subscribers into paid subscribers, and another 100 are on a free trial, making up current annual revenue of $60.000, out of which $40.000 is recurring revenue from paid subscribers! Finally, the domain blockbasis.com is estimated to be worth almost $10k according to Dynadot appraisals, see attached screenshot.

Revenue

As a combined newsletter and SaaS tool, we have worked on the following revenue streams:

1. Paid subscribers: This is the main revenue source where paid subscribers get access to our premium Saas scanning tool to safeguard their assets in their wallets. 

2. Sponsorships/ads: We make a nice chunk of our revenue from sponsorships, where sponsors get featured in our newsletters and/or we write a dedicated article on them and send out to subscribers.

Besides sponsorships and paid subs, there are other revenue streams possible with Blockbasis that can be activated by a new owner with more time and resources:

1. Affiliate: We have not activated affiliate partnerships as a revenue source, yet it is a great opportunity for a new owner to start creating affiliate sales from both new and existing content

2. Custom audits/reviews: On the SaaS tool we list all the smart contracts and dapps that have been hacked that subscribers should be wary of before connecting their wallet. This opens up the opportunity for an owner with the technical skills to generate highly profitable audits on smart contracts and dapps for anyone looking to get a custom audit done. Typically, a smart contract audit costs $10,000 and upwards to be done, hence the revenue potential is large. We've done this in the past about a year ago, which is why you see this choppy revenue about a year ago

The potential for a new owner is clear:

• Convert more subscribers into paid subscribers: With 20k+ subscribers in our email list, there is a massive potential for converting more of those into paid subscribers

• More sponsorships: As Blockbasis continues to grow there will be more opportunity for more sponsorship ads, and also to charge more for the ads included in the newsletter

• New revenue streams such as Affiliate sales and custom audits/reviews

Cost:

• Beehiv: We use Beehiiv as the platform for the newsletter, which costs $99/month

• X Ads: We’ve started using X for promoting Blockbasis and getting more subscribers from June onwards 

Technology/Platform

Blockbasis.com is hosted and powered by Beehiiv, making it plug-and-play to take over and run for a new owner. Beehiiv is extremely easy to use for managing content, analyse revenue and manage payments coming in.

We've attached some screenshots from Beehiiv, where we have a few notes we want to highlight that we have discovered along the way:

• Open rates not tracking properly: Right now we have open rates of around 20% according to Beehiiv, but we've noticed that many "privacy-focused email clients" such as Proton Mail, Silomails, Aleeas, 8Shield and more don't track when people open our newsletter. Our audience is crypto and blockchain users, which often have a keen interest on privacy and hence use many of these email clients. Our estimate is that the real open rate therefore is at least 50% higher of what Beehiiv reports, which would be around 30% as of writing this

• Analytics not tracking properly: We noticed that Google Analytics wasn’t tracking properly, so we created a new tracking id, hence why there is not much history and perhaps traffic. That said, the most important thing for a newsletter like Blockbasis is to have many (paid) subscribers and high open rates. Web traffic is nice, but not what builds the business. 

• Paid subscribers lag due to free trials: We offer a free trial for subscribers to turn from free to paid subscribers. Given the strong growth we are seeing, there are quite a few free subscribers about to convert to paid, but it does make the calculation of how many paid subscribers there currently are a bit murky. Bottom line is that for every week the number of paid subscribers go up.