How Plan Cash Turned a Newsletter Into a Platform For Financial Literacy

Léa Lejeune is the co-founder of Plan Cash, a French feminist media outlet that helps women invest according to their financial means. Initially started as an informational newsletter in late 2021, Plan Cash has since expanded to include training courses run by Lejeune’s partner, Morgane Dion.

In June, Plan Cash announced that readers would be able to invest in Plan Cash itself, with funds being used to finance a new app to provide financial education and training to their audience. As of this week, 865 readers had pledged to invest more than €263,000 in the business. (This interview took place in February, before the public investment round was announced, and efforts to reach the Plan Cash team about the round were unsuccessful.)

Lejeune spoke with Marine Slavitch, a journalist at French publisher Médianes, and the team at Médianes has graciously allowed us to republish their conversation here. In this interview, Lejeune talks about How Plan Cash started, why they’re investing time into Instagram, and how they’re begun to monetize.

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What was the idea behind Plan Cash?

It all started with a newsletter and an Instagram account. I wanted to create a media outlet to talk to women about money, especially young women and minorities. It is clear that these people are underrepresented in the traditional business press. According to the 2022 Global Media Monitoring Project, they appear in only 26% of business content: they are barely represented in photographs or among the interviewees and experts. 

Additionally, the economic jargon used in business media does not help. The level of accessibility does not really allow the general public to understand how the economy affects their daily lives. For all these reasons, I decided to create a feminist newsletter that would talk about money, investing and environmental issues in a friendly tone. I believe that young people should be able to understand where their money goes and what the relationship is between the economy and overall environmental issues.

Why did you choose to start on your own?

When I first had the idea for this newsletter, I was a journalist for the French weekly business magazine Challenges. Naturally, I met with my employers first and shared my idea. Unfortunately, they were not interested. From that moment on, I decided that I would start everything on my own. I was full of ideas and projects and wanted to develop everything as fast as possible. But first, I had to slow down to see if the idea I had on paper could actually work. Ultimately, I sent out my first newsletter on December 15th, 2021. Two years later, Plan Cash has nearly 15,000 subscribers and is published three times a month.

Did you always intend to make money out of it?

I knew I could reach my goals with 5,000 subscribers and good open rates. I wanted to get to that number early enough to find advertisers. I reached this goal six months after sending my first newsletter. 

It was important for me to be able to show any potential advertiser that there was a need for these topics and my experience. I also wanted to find healthy partnerships that aligned with my feminist and environmental values. For me, feminism means putting more emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility. It means giving women all the tools they need to invest. And I also wanted to find an advertiser that would work with me over a longer period of time. My job is to write, tell stories, to explain. I want to spend my time on something other than looking for my next sponsor. Luckily, it worked out! I signed a partnership with a life insurance company called Nalo. Their team has been working with me for three months.

Why did you create an Instagram account in addition to your newsletter? 

I was afraid that the newsletter alone would not be enough to entice the user to come back frequently and be a part of a community. Since I knew I wouldn’t get any mainstream media coverage in the early days, I had to go to social media. I chose Instagram because it was the best fit for my target audience: women between the ages of 28 and 45 make up the majority of Plan Cash readers. They have had a couple of jobs in their lives. They have a budget to manage. They are either single women, sometimes recently divorced, or women in a couple who want to invest to stop delegating to their spouse. You can easily find almost the same types of profiles on Instagram. Today we have more than 59,000 followers.

Why did you begin offering training courses?

As a journalist, I know that the business press struggles to find a profitable model. People are less and less willing to pay for information, but I think there are more and more willing to pay for training. It was important to me that the people who were less able to afford it financially access the information for free, and only those who could afford to pay should be charged. This is what Chelsea Fagan, Lauren Ver Hage’s popular community The Financial Diet does: offer a mix of web media and training courses.

In February 2022, I met my partner Morgane Dion. She was developing a money and investment training platform, so it made sense for us to work together. We are still looking for the ideal business model. For now, she manages the training part, and I take care of both the media and the content. Our business is balanced. We pay ourselves two modest salaries.

Are you planning to test other monetization sources?

We have created a hotline, a page on our website where our readers can schedule appointments with wealth management advisors sensitive to feminist issues and the distribution of money within couples. We received a small commission on the first appointments.

Why did you choose to use the Substack newsletter platform? What’s next?

Our newsletter is free and financed by advertising as many women are not yet interested enough in money because most financial media do not speak to them. Since this audience is not ready to pay for such information, we excluded many platforms that charge monthly fees from our list of options.

However, we now need a system that helps us differentiate between advertising and editorial content. Substack doesn’t offer the tools we want — like the ability to set up a block of text with specific colors — to clearly label ads. So far, we’ve tried to show it by integrating a large homemade banner, but that’s not ideal.

Currently, we are testing Kessel, a French newsletter platform. Their team is full of journalists, so they put editorial at the center of everything. They were very attentive to the features we needed to make our newsletter more professional. We wanted to set up a system where subscribers who recommended the newsletter could win gifts, goodies, invitations to Plan Cash parties or free training. Kessel could easily implement these features.

How would you assess your first year?

I think we have succeeded in our goal of making Plan Cash as participatory as possible. Our trainers are qualified people: wealth management consultants, real estate agents, and real estate brokers with a small social media community. Sometimes it is as few as 2,000 people; it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we bring in outsiders.

We don’t just show our faces all the time. In the year that we’ve had an Instagram account, we’ve responded to every post and every comment. We try to do live videos regularly. We have a front-page story format called “This is an Investor,” where community members share what they’ve invested in, and where they have made or lost money. Our goal is to show that anyone can do it.

Thank you to Marine Slavitch for both the interview and translation of this story. And thank you to Médianes for first publishing this piece. They’re a France-based consultancy and resource center to help media outlets produce better journalism and monetize it. You can find the original interview in French on the Médianes website.