How a Spain-Born Founder Built and Runs One of Mexico’s Most Popular Newsletters — From Texas

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Espresso Matutino’s a widely-read daily newsletter about business and tech news in Mexico. But there’s an interesting twist: Its founder isn’t from Mexico and doesn’t live in Mexico.

Fernando Caralt, the Spanish-born founder of Espresso Matutino, actually lives in Austin, Texas. He launched the newsletter (which means “Morning Espresso”) in April 2023. But while writing a newsletter for a Mexican audience has had its challenges, growth hasn’t been one. His newsletter now reaches 140,000 readers every day, who open the newsletter to get updates on topics ranging from AI to the latest stock market news.

Originally from Spain, Fernando studied engineering but discovered a passion for entrepreneurship. He spent time with an accelerator in Austin, where he learned how to find an audience and develop a product for it — rather than starting with a product and then discovering whether there was an audience for it.

After dabbling in video content, Fernando had a realization: There was an opportunity to deliver quick-hit, need-to-know tech and business news, but for a Spanish-speaking audience. “It seemed like an interesting model,” he said. Readers of Morning Brew will easily recognize a few elements in Espresso Matutino — multiple stories, summarized in just a few sentences; a referral program to nudge readers to share the newsletter with friends; and, of course, the nod to coffee in their name. (Fernando’s official title on LinkedIn is Chief Espresso Officer.)

Fernando started by trying to build something to cover multiple countries, including Colombia and Spain, but then narrowed his focus to just Mexico.

As he’s grown the newsletter, he’s added to the team. Steve Saldaña, a tech journalist based in Mexico City, is the editorial director and handles the daily editorial content. Fernando now focuses on ad sales, and he’s seeing success there — recently, he launched a big partnership with HubSpot. He’s projecting that for 2025, the newsletter may hit $200,000 in revenue from ad sales.

I spoke to Fernando back in March. In this edition of the International Inbox — a series where we profile newsletter operators and businesses around the world — you’ll hear from Fernando about:

• Why he pivoted to focus solely on Mexico — even though Mexico doesn’t have a robust newsletter ecosystem like the one in the U.S.
• What it’s like doing business with readers and advertisers in another country.
• How he uses both organic and paid tactics to grow his list.
• How they use in-newsletter polls to make sure readers are enjoying the newsletter.
• Why you need to put your own spin on existing newsletter playbooks.
• Why he’s thinking long-term when it comes to building this business.

(This interview has been edited and condensed.)

What made you decide to focus only on Mexico and not other parts of Latin America?

When I started, I was touching Spain, Mexico, and Colombia. Over time, I realized from conversations with advertisers that profit and loss is usually tied to a single country. It’s much easier to get an advertiser if you’re focused on a single region.

Also, with the news, it’s very difficult to touch on all countries in Latin America. I’m in Texas, so Mexico is the closest one, too. Within Latin America, Mexico is the second-largest economy, after Brazil.

It helps us focus on professionals in Mexico, where we can make news that is a lot more tailored to them. That business news might be a little more niche to someone in a different country in Latin America. The user is going to care — and also on the advertiser side — when I tell them, “Ninety-nine percent of my audience is in Mexico.”

Were you looking to evoke Morning Brew with your newsletter’s name?

I was not super original. I only drink espressos in the morning, which is why it’s espresso, it’s not “Café Matutino,” or some other version of coffee. The logo is a little espresso shot, instead of a coffee mug. When I started, I wanted to get going right away, and that was the first name I could come up with. It’s one of those things where I was like, “I’ll change it later,” but it’s stuck. People tell me, “Oh, I drink it with my coffee.” A lot of people in Mexico don’t even know what Morning Brew is, so there’s no relationship there whatsoever.

Some of our sections are actually way more like The Hustle than they are Morning Brew. A lot of it is looking at the U.S. playbook and seeing what works. But also, that only gets you so far. Eventually, you have to adapt to the local playbook, which is nonexistent. That’s what we’re figuring out at this point.

The content is spot on, and it’s different from what Morning Brew is doing — we’re focusing on what our audience wants. We’re trying to move towards shorter content than we’ve seen in other newsletters. We’ve started with what worked in the U.S., and then slowly made it our own.

Tell me a little bit about what’s good and bad about being ahead of the trend when it comes to newsletters in Mexico.

It’s good because you’re first to market. As long as the content is good, you can start growing.

It’s bad from the adoption side. Email is not as popular as it is in the U.S. The engagement varies, too. On the advertising side, a lot of companies are not familiar with newsletters as a product itself. Sure, they use email for marketing and whatnot, but not a full newsletter product, where you can get good engagement and promotions. The trust that you’ve gained with the audience, through unbiased reporting of the news, you can transfer to those companies, and we get high click-through rates on the advertisements.

But most of them have never spent money on newsletters — it’s not part of their budget allocation. Convincing them to spend with us is sometimes a little hard.

Tell me a little bit more about the Mexican newsletter market.

We’re still trying to figure it out.

Right now, when I talk to a lot of people, in traditional media, they’re “Oh, people are into video. Nobody reads.” I don’t think that’s true, to some extent, because people are reading the newsletter, so it’s a different profile that’s reading the newsletter. I’m still trying to figure out how far it can grow.

Also, I’m interested in the B2B side as well, versus going full consumer. Looking at, let’s say, what an Industry Dive has done, it’s trying to figure out: Where is there audience interest, and where is there sponsor interest? It takes super long to hit [that sweet spot between] content and audience size.

I’m two years in. I mostly had a lot of savings for this. The newsletter is profitable in itself, but not enough to pay me. This is a long-term game. If I do this for five years, we’ll hit scale. You can’t do it as a side project. Content has to be good at the end of the day. Without that, people are not going to read it. We get tons of messages daily. Our in-newsletter polls say readers absolutely love it.

But there are two or three newsletters I know of in Mexico, and they’re each doing their own thing. I saw what worked in the U.S., because I was a consumer. I wanted to see if it would work somewhere else. That’s the playbook we’ve run. With tools like Beehiv, it is much easier to start newsletters. Whenever people ask me to give them advice, I say, “It takes time. Make sure you give it enough time to grow.”

What’s challenging about doing that from Austin compared to if you were in Mexico?

Mexico is very relationship-based. A lot of deals might happen over dinner — they don’t happen over Zoom. That’s one of the things I need to lean on more: Coming there more often to start meeting more people. I’m looking to work with people locally so they can be part of the company, and we can have that local presence as well. People are very used to Zoom since COVID, but that personal aspect is important there.

I also don’t have that cultural side to it, because I haven’t lived in Mexico.

As someone raised in Spain and the United States, was there any issue language-wise with speaking to a Mexican audience?

I was writing it as super-neutral Spanish. I’ve been living in the U.S. for a while. When I moved from Spain, I lived in Miami, and then in college, most of my friends were Latin American. My Spanish, if you go to Spain, it doesn’t sound like theirs. I also couldn’t make use of Mexican expressions and the words they might use. It wasn’t weird, but it gives it a little more flavor if it’s in the actual data, like expressions, and people use it that way. Steve does a much better job at that.

How does it work between you and Steve Saldaña? How did you find him, and what is his role?

Steve is our director of content, essentially all content goes through him. We started working together last fall. I was writing the news for the first year and a half, every single day. When he started working with me, he started doing the curation of the news as a contractor.

He actually happened to be a reader. He was a lead editor at a tech blog in Mexico called Xataka. He was writing there, managing people. I got lucky — Steve is extremely good at what he does. Now he’s the one who curates the news and also writes it with our fun tone.

He was also doing Instagram videos in his time at Xataka, and now he’s done a few here with us. We haven’t gone all in on Instagram yet because the newsletter is what’s making money. While we can have a good social media presence, you have to choose your battles.

What is your current workflow?

We meet twice a week, and we’re on Slack all day, essentially. Steve is way more focused on content, and I’m focused on sales. He has pretty much full say on what goes in the content these days. We do talk: “Should this be here? Should this be here? How do we cover this?” But in terms of him being in Mexico City, living and breathing what’s happening there, he has a much better perspective on what people might be interested in than I did when I was writing the newsletter.

Right now, editorially, it’s fully him. For the first few months, I was double-checking everything. We track absolutely everything. Every week, we check the numbers for the previous week. What were the open rates? Were the subject lines alright? The poll at the end of each newsletter asks, “How do you like the newsletter?” on a scale of one to five coffees. We ask each other, “What was the caffeine level this week?” Our average is 87% — that’s five coffees. The scores have improved when he started writing because it feels more natural.

A few times, especially at the end of the quarter or end of the year, I book out a bunch of meetings and talk directly with readers. It’s always interesting to talk for 15 minutes and ask them a few questions: “What do you like? What do you not like? Why do you read it?” A lot of times, they’re interested in newsletters, so they hop on to see who’s behind this and talk. We collect a lot of feedback. Steve and I talk about how we add that feedback into the newsletter.

There was this post by The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey about the idea of “media hustlers.” It’s the term he used to describe people who approach media from the business side versus the content. It wasn’t like “I am a journalist — I need to write.” It was more, “This is an interesting business to build.” The content has to be good, of course, for a newsletter to work. The content is the product, so you have to have a good eye for that. That’s why I’m not the one writing it right now. I love the building aspect of it.

When do you poll your readers, and what do they tell you?

Sometimes we’ll introduce new features or new sections, and then we’ll ask, “What do you guys think of this?” We get anywhere from 200 to 500 replies on those. Most of the time, unless you see a trend on the negative end, we usually don’t take action. A lot of times, they’ll say things like, “Oh, you should start talking about sports.” I’m not going to do that. You always have to take the feedback with a grain of salt. What’s the message behind the message there? It’s always a good vibe check to see where things are.

Originally, we started on the more tech side, and we’ve added more business, because people are saying, “Give me business. Give me finance.” These topics are something we’ve shifted towards over time. At the top of the newsletter, we added the stock market numbers for the week — what’s the NASDAQ at, what’s the Dow at, things like that. We had it for a week, then asked about it in the poll, and then there was a majority of readers saying, “Yes, keep it.” We kept it.

What does your media kit look like?

Right now, we have two sponsorship slots, the primary and secondary. Primary goes after the main story, which also includes a button. It’s 120 or 125 words of copy that we write. We see that that performs way better. The images, sometimes, we make ourselves with AI these days; it’s easy to make eye-catching images that don’t look like an ad.

The secondary ad goes further down in the second half of the email. It’s a little shorter, without a button. The media kit has more information about the audience and size, open rates, past sponsors, and where readers are from — the companies they work at.

What was your growth strategy to get to 100,000 readers?

So, I happened to work for Matt McGarry in the GrowLetter agency as a marketing manager. I learned a ton of what he was doing with paid ads at The Hustle, and I was doing that for some of his clients. Relying on this, I know the U.S. playbook to growth and content, so I’m doing the same thing here, where we’re getting a lot of organic referrals and trying to give enough rewards to get readers to share the newsletter, but also doing paid advertising in Meta, and using some of the best practices there for the ads we run.

What rewards do you offer for readers who share the newsletter?

Right now, it’s a ChatGPT guide because we started with tech. Now we’re evaluating more options — all digital, because that physical thing adds too much complexity at this stage. [Editor’s note: Brands like Morning Brew used to send branded merch, like coffee mugs, to readers who shared the newsletter, but those sorts of gifts can be expensive to create and ship.] But one of the main growth strategies has been paid advertising.

Tell me how your partnership with HubSpot came to pass.

Even though the name is closer to Morning Brew, The Hustle was the original inspiration behind how the newsletter started. Since HubSpot bought it, I’ve been trying to get HubSpot as a sponsor in the newsletter.

Once we hit a certain level of growth late last year, they decided, internally, that they were starting to focus on Mexico, and things aligned where we were a big enough size that it was interesting to them. We started with newsletter sponsorships, directly. But then they wanted to do these co-marketing campaigns around AI and content.

Espresso is a fairly small operation, so we use AI in some places to make the content creation easier. We decided to do this email course. It’s a four-day email course, where they’re using us as the example of some of the things that you can do with AI. It was fairly organic in terms of, “We’re already doing sponsorship in the newsletter. Let’s move into this different type of campaign.” We actually include that email course in our welcome email for people to sign up.

What are your other revenue sources?

Right now, it’s purely advertising. We’re seeing good results on the ad side. It’s been a process finding out which companies perform well in our ads versus which ones don’t. The ones that do perform, we’ll do three or four tests, and then some of them buy more: “I want 20 emails for the rest of the year, or two emails a month.” Our first year, in pure advertising, was about $50,000 in revenue; this year, we might hit closer to $200,000 U.S.

Some of the partnerships we are looking at are multiple quarters, and at this rate, we’re bringing in $15,000-$20,000 a month if we fill out every month. Then, as we grow, prices increase too, and that’s when I’m talking to bigger agencies, bigger clients that spend more. It started with startups that are interested in Espresso, and now we’re growing into the bigger advertisers in the country. Then from there, I want to start expanding into more content areas. Is it branded content? Is it more Instagram videos, which is what I’ve seen a lot of brands tend to gravitate to, versus newsletters? Is it a podcast? At the end of the day, the goal is to monetize everywhere, but you’ve got to start one step at a time, because if you broaden immediately, it’s very distracting. 

Maybe we will do subscriptions, eventually.

What are your next big goals?

We hit 100,000 [in March], and I’ve had that in my vision board for over a year. It was a nice moment to hit that. Now I’m focusing on operations, internally, and revenue, where we’ve hit enough scale that revenue becomes a lot more interesting. I want to hire enough people so that it’s not me Steve and me doing absolutely everything. Growing the team and monetizing this a little better is next. How do we improve on what we have, and always keep good content at the center of it?

Five things newsletters can learn from Espresso Matutino

1.) You don’t need to reinvent the wheel — If you see another newsletter having success, you can use it as a starting point for your newsletter. (This is the third newsletter we’ve profiled — The News in Brazil, and Backscoop in the Philippines — that cited Morning Brew or The Hustle as inspirations.) Espresso, smartly, has even borrowed from those newsletters when it comes to growth. Looking through their Meta ads, they’re mimicking the style and copy that’s worked for similar brands in the U.S.

2.) Pivot to serve your specific community — Those newsletter templates are great, but you do need to figure out how to tailor your newsletter to your audience. Making sure your newsletter is written in a local voice and finding ways to partner with local or regional brands make the newsletter feel like more than just a carbon copy.

3.) Don’t be afraid to swing big — In the U.S., a brand like HubSpot might consider a newsletter with 100,000 readers to be too small. But in an emerging newsletter market like Mexico, that’s a big audience to tap into. Success with large brands like that might prove to brands in Latin America that advertising in newsletters is a more powerful tool than they might otherwise realize.

4.) Audience feedback should be at the heart of your strategy — Don’t build the product and hope you find the audience. Start by continually asking your audience for feedback, and then try to shape the content and revenue strategy around what they tell you.

5.) Think long-term — Newsletters tend to reward teams that think about their strategy in years, not weeks and months. Keep your focus on the big picture. The newsletters that create great products over a period of years are the ones that build loyal audiences — and end up creating something that drives real engagement and revenue.

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