I’m reviewing my year and sharing lessons in public.
This week, I will share reviews, reflections, context, and lessons about:
Caffeineletter Reflections
Business lessons 2025
Roach Mafia 5.0 experience
Our regular content about newsletters resumes in the first week of January.
Caffeineletter in 2025
In August 2024, Aravind told me he wants to write about coffee. He has been homebrewing for ~4 years and has many stories to share from his brewing experiments and from exploring cafes while travelling.
He asked me how he could start, and I asked, “Do you want to do it together? I understand newsletters. You understand coffee. We can create something worth reading.”
kinda like this
We have been friends for years and there wasn’t a second thought about building Caffeineletter together.
We booked an Airbnb in Lonavala a month later and discussed what we wanted to solve for our audience. In October 2024, we launched a newsletter for coffee homebrewers in India to discuss coffee science, brewing techniques, and recipes.
For the first three months, we had a test run with 50 readers. This helped us identify what was missing in our content and polish it before it reached more readers.
In the first half of 2025, we tried growing organically. It was slow because both of us had limited social capital among marketers and developers, among whom we were searching for homebrewers.
So we decided to invest in Meta Ads. Neither Aravind nor I had time for short-form content, and we knew the audience hung out on IG, so our best bet was ads.
It’s a whole new skill I had to learn, and it has the highest ROI of any skill I learned in 2025.
We have carefully run ads in multiple batches, learning from data and feedback. This was in Q3 and Q4. We also experimented with Reddit ads, but they didn’t perform at all. On the same ads, Reddit gave us thousands of impressions with no conversions, while Meta gave us engaged readers at $0.20 CPA.
Now we are at 1265 subscribers with a 48% open rate at the time of writing this edition.
We have invested a little over $1000 (domain, Beehiiv, Meta ads, merch) to get here.
What we have got done in 2025 (and notes, strategies, thoughts….)
If you’re building in a micro niche, running ads is a reliable strategy to grow fast and capture a sizeable market.
Reddit ads didn’t work for us, and a couple of my smart friends mentioned the same.
Don’t rely on Meta AI (Advantage+) to run ads. We lost $60 and had to prune 350 emails from the Advantage Network (segment suggested by Meta AI). The open rate was below 6%, compared with our usual 65% in month one.
We captured first-party data with survey forms during onboarding. This helped us understand our readers' coffee habits. Now we create content based on data, not assumptions.
Not all newsletters have similar monetisation models. We thought it’d be easy to sell ads but no. Most of our sponsors are bootstrapped, so we need to create win-win offers to partner with them. Still figuring this out.
We built Baazar, one place to all find speciality coffees across India.
We also built a Grind Size Converter. You can refer to any grinder and find its equivalent on your grinder.
What’s in for 2026?
We will continue to build tools, resources, and more that will help homebrewers with their coffee habits.
We haven’t generated any revenue yet. Our primary focus in Q1 is to partner with roasters, cafes, and equipment makers.
Expand marketing channels. Meta ads have worked for us. Now we expand to X, IG, and Reddit for organic growth. I’m learning SEO; that might come into the picture at some point.
We will explore in-person experiences.
Love,
Vikra.