How Amanda Cua Built BackScoop, Southeast Asia’s Go-To Tech Newsletter

There’s a lot to learn from how publishers around the world use newsletters to build audiences and make money. That’s the rationale behind The International Inbox, our series of conversations with newsletter operators based outside the United States. You can read other interviews from the series here.

Amanda Cua was only 19 when she launched her newsletter, BackScoop. Inspired by Morning Brew and Axios, Cua wanted to make a newsletter that covered tech and business in Southeast Asia. The topic area made sense: Cua’s based in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, itself a growing tech hub.

Cua was a first-time founder herself, starting her newsletter the way so many operators do: By reaching out to family and friends to ask them to sign up. But she’s taken BackScoop to impressive places in the two years since launch. BackScoop now has more than 10,000 active subscribers. She’s hired a small team to support the newsletter, and turned BackScoop into her full-time job. She’s made quite a name for herself, too: Esquire Philippines named her to their 2024 Trailblazers List, and more than 30,000 people follow her on LinkedIn.

With BackScoop, twice a week, readers can expect a lighthearted-but-informed look at up-and-coming startups in the region, interviews with VCs, and features diving into the stories and strategies of businesses (both in tech and non-VC backed) that readers can learn from to become better founders and operators. The newsletter’s free to read — it’s funded by advertisements within the newsletter.

The newsletter’s continuing to expand, too. She’s looking to hire for more roles, instituted a referral program where readers can get access to a database of Southeast Asian startup information for suggesting the newsletter to other readers, and hosts One More Scoop, a podcast where she goes deeper in more unscripted conversations with Southeast Asia’s top tech startup founders, executives and VC investors.

We caught up with Amanda to learn about the grassroots way she grew her audience, learning as a young founder, how to know when to hire, and what’s unique about running a newsletter from and about Southeast Asia. 

(This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.)

How did you start to grow the audience for BackScoop?

When I started marketing BackScoop, the first thing I did to get the most subscribers — apart from DMing a couple of family and friends saying, “Hey, I started a thing” — was I actually took the time to message all of my Facebook friends at the time, one by one, to invite them to subscribe. I had about 2,000 Facebook friends. After that, I messaged everybody I was connected to on LinkedIn, literally everyone one by one, until I finished messaging all of my connections. That’s how I got my first few thousand subscribers.

This was useful because, in a sense, even though some of them were not interested in startups, it was that initial seed group that I needed to be able to get. The ones who didn’t like it unsubscribed. But many of the people who unsubscribed knew somebody who would be into it and ended up sharing it with them. It’s like, “Hey, it’s not for me, but maybe it’s for you.”

The people who liked it were sharing it with their teams, their friends, and their families, and that’s how we started growing. I was shy initially because I was 19 years old. I just had a job for one year. I didn’t want to let people know I was the founder of BackScoop because I thought nobody would read it once they found that out. I started in August. In December, I started posting it on my social media and then making consistent posts about it. That’s how we were able to grow from that base — the word-of-mouth plus posting on socials.

Are your readers mainly in the Philippines, or do you see readers in other parts of the world?

Our biggest market is actually Singapore, and then the second market always fluctuates between Indonesia and the Philippines. The reason for this is because of the ecosystems as a whole. Singapore is the most developed. They speak the most English as well. The Philippines is a bit younger than the other markets, but we have such a large English-speaking population. I’m also based in the Philippines, which is why it’s likely to be second or third. Indonesia also has a very big population, and next to Singapore, they would have the most mature side of the [tech] ecosystem.

One of the things that surprised me was that the people who follow us are spread across the board. It’s early-stage founders, but I also saw that we had some subscribers who were late-stage founders. We also had some people who were just starting their start-ups.

I was looking at your LinkedIn page, and I saw that you were proudly highlighting that one of your subscribers had just gotten a new job in this space. Aside from subscriber numbers or the money that you get from advertisers, what are other ways that you’re like, “Backscoop is doing what I wanted it to do”?

I started working in tech at 18 years old. I got into the industry accidentally because I was just looking for an internship to do while I was not in university.

It was very hard for me to get into the industry. There were a lot of words I didn’t know. Like, What’s series A? What’s series B? What is an IPO? And that’s just the high-level stuff. Then you get to the part of having to talk about other people’s companies, and you don’t know all the jargon in every industry like fintech and biotech. It’s very daunting. For me, the way that I tried to fit into the industry and get my start was reading a lot of news, and that’s how I was able to understand a lot more companies and get to talk to more people.

I feel like I had a community in tech even though I was 18 and nobody else I knew was in tech apart from my bosses. For me, the way that BackScoop started was also about solving my own problem. I was reading the news every day, and it felt so difficult. I thought, “There should be an easier way to do this.” BackScoop is one way I would have wished I was getting my news back then.

With BackScoop, I’m helping, hopefully, other people who are just getting started, or other founders and VCs get the information they need so they can converse better with other people and build deeper relationships, get to know more about a company so they can close that deal, get that job, or know more about a company so they can invest in it.

It’s great to have revenue, and it’s also great to have more subscribers, but it’s more heartwarming to be able to actually make a difference, as cheesy as it sounds, in other people’s lives.

Tell me a little bit about your research process. How do you get all the information you need and quickly turn it around into a newsletter issue?

In the early days, when we had no contacts, no network. I would wake up in the morning and check the news sites I knew would cover Southeast Asia tech at about 9 or 10. Public relations sites, like PR Newswire, I’d check as well. I would look at the stories, and if there were any that were big and interesting enough, I would start writing. If not, I would wait until about 1 or 2 p.m.; that’s my deadline for the first article. By then, I would pick the first article. I would take about 1-1.5 hours to finish that, and then I move on to the second article. If there were no story for the second article, by that time, I would wait again.

My deadline would be about 4 to 5 p.m. That’s when I know that nobody’s going to report [anything new] anymore. It would take another 1.5 hours, and then I’d do the rest of the newsletter. Before I finish writing, and even after I’m done with the whole newsletter, I’m still checking all the new sites throughout the day just to make sure we have all of the biggest stories. There were some times when, just by chance, [something important] was published at 7 or 8 p.m. or even 10 p.m., and then I would rewrite one of the stories that I had just to make sure it was the biggest, most relevant story.

Now because we have a bigger network, about a year and a half into BackScoop, people started sending us their press releases. It would be a PR firm, a venture capital firm, or the company that’s actually raising the funding or announcing the news themselves. It used to be just team members saying, “Hey, we’re going to announce this. I like BackScoop because I read it. and here’s the press release.”

Your style is distinctive with quick headlines and emojis and things like that. I’m curious what it was like to hone that tone. Did you know going in that you wanted to write in that punchy style, or was it something that took shape as you worked on BackScoop?

I started reading Morning Brew in 2018, so by [launch], I was already reading that for about three years. I was also a recent high school graduate. We are more familiar with speaking very casually, trying to make things a bit funnier. If I came from a corporate background, I don’t think I’d be easily able to write like that, but just because I was also young and I was reading a lot of Morning Brew, the voice was something that I could create fairly easily.

I wanted the voice to be a mix of the Morning Brew style of writing and Axios. How do we balance the casual tone, but able to make it blend and mix with more details and more technical words?

How big is your team?

Right now, we have one full-time writer and one intern, so it’s the three of us. We’re looking to hire another writer and a couple interns, so my week is full of interviews with different potential candidates. I hired the first writer in May 2023, but the first time we ever made any hire at all was January 2023.

When did you know it was time to hire someone?

At the beginning, I had a feeling that I didn’t want to hire for a while because the way that you process the information, the way you share it, how it’s read — it’s very controlled by the writer. I felt like, “I’m still establishing the brand, establishing the voice. I don’t want to jeopardize it.”

I would sometimes do a writing test with a couple of potential candidates, and they would get it, but I still held off for a while. There were people who will match the writing style, but when you speak to them, you feel like they’re not a fit for the team or a fit for the brand as a whole. When you have something like BackScoop, where it’s very fun, very casual, you try to be a bit cooler in the way that you present things. We want a person who, in a daily conversation, would also try to give off that feeling or at least be able to be very conversational.

I realized that when I was first hiring writers, and this is not any offense to any other writers, some of them were not very conversational, and that’s also why I held back because the initial candidates I found were not people who could interview people very well, couldn’t converse with people very well, or make them feel relaxed and opened up. I’m looking for someone who can do that.

How long do you work on an issue before you send it out?
When I was writing BackScoop, it would take about four to six hours to start writing, finish writing, and transfer everything to the newsletter and then publish everything on the website as well. I started with once a week; then I slowly ramped up to four times a week. [Editor’s note: They moved to Beehiiv to streamline the website part of the publishing process, and since we spoke in January, BackScoop has pared back to three sends a week.] 

What are your responsibilities now that you have a staff to work on the writing?

Now, I get to focus on the rest of the business. Last year, the biggest focus was trying to figure out how we could monetize the newsletter. We were already monetizing it in small ways, but the goal for last year was [having] a solid business model, a solid way to pitch and price all of the ads that we were doing because we are monetizing through ads. The next question is: How can we get a solid base of clients?

In terms of the writing side, I still handle a lot of the direction. Whenever we pick stories, I’ll review them. Once all of these stories are written, I also review them and revise them. Revisions can be anything from tone, word, choice length, or just catching a few typos here and there. We’re trying to transition and figure out my role into more of an editor while the writers do the writing.

Is your community able to be in touch with each other? Do you have comment sections or online platforms for them to communicate with each other?

Right now, no, we don’t do that, but sometimes we host a couple of events. We had about two in Singapore last year, and then sometimes I try to connect a few here and there when I can. 

I saw how much people wanted to connect in person, and to be able to facilitate a more casual setting for that was important because, for some of these readers, they only meet in a business setting — over email or a business deal or something like that. When you’re a startup founder, it’s so lonely. It’s nice to facilitate new kinds of interactions.

You have these cute surveys at the bottom of your issue. How often do you review that information? What do you do with it?

We do it to engage the readers so they can also find out more about each other. It’s a fun way to close the newsletter. We ran a survey today, we put the results the next day, and we have a lot of different questions. One of our most popular surveys was asking people whether they wanted to be an angel investor, and a lot of them are actually already angel investors or considering it. Another recent one we did was asking people whether they were parents. We have a lot of parents in our readership.

What, if anything, is something that you wish you’d known sooner when you were getting going with BackScoop?

I gave myself a hard time a lot of the time. I was beating myself up a lot. I want to remind myself that it’s a slower process than you think. I remember when we started monetizing, a bunch of people commented that it usually takes two to three years to properly start monetizing. and we were just about to hit the two-year mark. Pressuring myself might have been one of the ways that helped us get here, but I also want to just cut myself a little bit of slack.

One other thing I wish I told myself is to be more confident. I always looked down on myself when I was interviewing people or meeting people because I always remembered my roots. I didn’t go to college. It still gets to me now when I go to a social event, and I already assume I always know less than these people. I might not have anything to offer because my only experience is running this newsletter. Then people tell me, “You always forget that your newsletter or you are the reason that these people even want to meet you. You’ve met so many other kinds of people that most people haven’t even met.” 

If I met someone who was just starting out, I would tell them not to look down on themselves and to consciously try to build better connections and confidence so that they don’t feel like they’re less than anybody else. Definitely don’t have an inflated ego, but don’t look down on yourself.

Is there anything about the newsletter scene in the Philippines or in Southeast Asia that’s different than in other parts of the world?

Covering our region is very different from just covering one market. For newsletters that mostly cover the U.S., it’s much easier to spread through the U.S., and it’s a much larger country. You can use pretty much a similar strategy to acquire readers. Versus me, if I only focused on the Philippines, it’s very, very hard to hit that amount of people.

Even though we have a hundred plus million in the country, it’s still very different demographic behavior among people who would read a newsletter. I need to grow across Southeast Asia to hit the same metrics like an American newsletter would have.

Covering Southeast Asia is also a very different relationship with advertisers. In the U.S., people are more familiar with working with newsletters, working with podcasts, working with creators. Here, it’s still something very early, especially for newsletters.

If you’re working in a region or a country where newsletters are still very new, expect that you’ll have to pitch to clients differently because they still have to understand why this is different from advertising other places when they look at the numbers. Why do you use these metrics? It’s a lot more explaining and convincing them about the platform alone before you can even talk about the metrics that you have.

What are your goals for the next couple of years?

For the past few years, we’ve had one singular goal every year. The first year, it was growing the audience and building the brand. Last year, it was about monetization. This year, because we have a good base of people and we have a good amount of revenue coming in every month, it’s now the time we can actually start focusing on more things.

What I’m excited about for this year and the next few years is focusing on growing our audience on every platform: Our newsletter, podcast, and also our social media platforms. I’m excited about being able to not just grow the revenue but find more revenue streams as well. Advertising is great to start with, but it’s important to have other diverse revenue streams that are mixed in paid subscriptions, a mix of maybe different publications, or even a new product. That’s something I’ll be exploring over the next few years. What is the next revenue stream? Is it paid content? Is it a paid product? Is it something else?

Lastly, it’s about engaging the community. It also sounds cheesy again, but my newsletter is growing in an ecosystem that’s still pretty early. The ecosystems for Singapore and Indonesia are much bigger and more established, but the rest of Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystems are growing. I want to be able to keep engaging and bridging the community in these early days. It’s impactful to help people find the hire that they want to help grow their company or do other things. It’s something that I try to do on the side, help people with intros and all those things. I want to be able to do that more in the future, whether that’s through community events or through other things that are built to help people.

Is there anything you think other newsletter operators should know when they’re just starting out?

Nowadays, lots of people try to grow their newsletters aggressively. If you’re coming into the industry while just looking at all these other stories, you’re constantly pressuring yourself like, “Oh, I haven’t hit 20,000 subscribers yet. I haven’t hit 30,000. I haven’t done paid advertising to get more subscribers.”

One of the things I would remind people who are starting out is that it’s not always about how many newsletter subscribers you have. It depends on the kind of newsletter that you run. If you’re writing for a niche or for a very hard-to-reach audience, you can definitely have a small audience, and it’s okay.

I also would remind people that you don’t know what context these other operators are coming from. Some people could easily turn on paid advertising to grow because they have a lot of financial backing, like from investors or because the newsletter is a side gig and they have another source of income. Everybody’s journey is different.

Four things other newsletters can learn from BackScoop

Amanda Cua’s journey to building BackScoop is impressive — going from 0 to 10,000 readers in just two years is quite an accomplishment. From our conversation, there are a few things other newsletters could learn from her story:

1.) Focus on your active audience — Some newsletters emphasize their total list size, but that might include readers who don’t regularly open newsletters. At BackScoop, Amanda promotes her active audience — readers who’ve opened or engaged with a newsletter in the past few weeks. Advertisers care most about how many people are actually seeing the newsletter, so Amanda’s focused on a metric that connects back to her business model.

2.) Meet your audience IRL — Amanda’s held a few events where readers can gather and meet one another. Those in-person events continue to cement BackScoop’s place at the center of the tech ecosystem in Southeast Asia, and may open up new revenue streams — like events promoted by sponsors — in the long run.

3.) Lean into an algorithmic channel to grow your reach — Relying too heavily on any one social channel can be risky. But in this case, Amanda’s built a smart strategy on LinkedIn, where her personal posts and cheery tone have been a winning combination. Success on LinkedIn helps her reach a wider audience, and she then uses those posts to drive traffic back to her newsletter. 

4.) Give yourself time to grow — As Amanda told me, it often takes years to build and monetize a newsletter, especially in a country where newsletters aren’t as common. Give yourself the space to build that audience and grow new revenue streams, even if it takes two or more years.

Correction: BackScoop now publishes three newsletters per week, not two. It was updated on 4/10/24 at 12:57 p.m.