This AI newsletter grew to 500,000 subscribers with the help of — ironically — a human touch

For the founders of AI-focused daily newsletter The Neuron, lighthearted playfulness meant serious success.

Noah Edelman and Pete Huang saw ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch as an opportunity to help readers stay on top of the quickly-shifting landscape of artificial intelligence. They chose to do that through a daily newsletter.

They weren’t the only ones to jump on this opportunity — several AI-themed newsletters sprung up in early 2023.

What distinguished The Neuron from its many competitors, ironically, was giving it a more human feel.

Several AI newsletters used robots for branding, so Huang and Edelman opted for quirky cat icons.

“The idea is that if AI takes over the world, at least we still have our pets, right?” Pete Huang said in a Creator Spotlight interview.

Edelman agreed. “We saw a big opportunity to create a very human-like brand,” he shared in a Media Empires podcast. “When people see The Neuron, they’re seeing cats and icons and jokes — and, yeah, sometimes typos in our writing — but people know that there are humans behind this brand.”

While the Neuron does use AI in their research and editing processes, the newsletters are fully written by humans, with an eye toward infusing a lot of personality in the content and continuing to tweak the format rather than settling for an unchanging template.

“I treated our newsletter like a product and tried to make it 1% better every day,” Edelman posted in a thread on X. “This compounded.”

Within its first month, the Neuron gained 10,000 subscribers. It hit 200,000 subscribers within a year and 500,000 by year two.

This compounding success helped The Neuron get acquired by technology media publisher TechnologyAdvice in January 2025, for a combination of cash and an earn-out.

Growing an AI newsletter to 500,000 subscribers

When ChatGPT went live, Huang reached out to Edelman with an idea.

Huang’s LinkedIn posts about AI had gained a following, and he thought together they could create a daily newsletter like Morning Brew — but on AI instead of business.

Huang was an alumni of Northwestern University and knew Edelman from an entrepreneurship group. Edelman was still a sophomore at Northwestern, where he was studying psychology and entrepreneurship.

But he’d also been doing something that could be incredibly useful as a co-founder: writing online, including for a newsletter he created to explain cryptocurrency.

While he wasn’t sure right away that he wanted to jump on board, after he saw Huang’s first few newsletters for The Neuron, he realized it could be a perfect fit for the high-personality writing voice he’d been working on.

“I was trying to develop something that stood out a little bit compared to most writers on the internet,” Edelman told They Got Acquired. “So I took over writing and Huang could focus on growing the brand.”

Through The Neuron, they not only shared AI-related news but also provided context of why new developments mattered and how people could leverage AI in their work and personal lives. They published this all in an easy-to-consume, fun format.

The first 100,000 subscribers came from Huang’s organic social media posts, Edelman said. He had a large following from which to attract subscribers; as of January 2025, Huang had 220,000 followers on LinkedIn.

But they eventually hit a ceiling with organic growth. “You’re not going to get millions of people from TikTok to sign up for your newsletter,” Edelman said on the Media Empires podcast. “There are ways to do organic growth, but it becomes much harder at scale.”

Using their sponsorship earnings, they hired an agency to help with paid growth. They bought targeted ads on Meta’s social media platforms, which yielded a few hundred thousand more subscribers.

They also bought some smaller AI newsletters that had strong open rates and click rates, folding those subscribers into The Neuron.

Edelman and Huang continued to focus on being 10 times better than competitors, and their engaged audience proved a draw for advertisers, even when they raised sponsorship rates.

“We never had trouble selling out inventory,” Edelman posted on X. “A+ content = engaged readers = happy advertisers.”

How newsletter business The Neuron got acquired

By fall 2024, Huang had left The Neuron to cofound Haven Infusion, a Michigan medical clinic serving patients with chronic auto-immune diseases. Edelman had brought a writer on board who was able to maintain the tone and quality of The Neuron.

Edelman was then a senior at Northwestern, and he had struck a good balance between entrepreneurship and student life. “I was always pretty good at time management,” he said. “I had a very good sense for what my priorities were: Building this business and also leaving time to build relationships with my friends and experience some social activities.”

Still, he was curious about the acquisition market for a newsletter like his.

By the end of 2024, about 60 million users had viewed the newsletters and the website over its lifetime, and about 20,000 had participated in their free ChatGPT introduction video course. The Neuron was bringing in low 7 figures of revenue.

“I had an amazing time building this business, but I’m interested in a lot of different industries, like psychology and mental health,” Edelman said of his openness to selling the business. “With my time coming to an end at Northwestern, it was also time to think about potentially exiting the business and thinking about what I wanted to do next.”

He called M&A firm Media Advisory Partners in fall 2024 to ask for help selling the business. (The advisory firm, by the way, is one of They Got Acquired’s partners. Get in touch with us if you’d like a free warm introduction to them and other advisors who could help you sell your business.)

While the advisors said The Neuron was probably too small for them to represent, they put Edelman directly in touch with one of their clients that was looking to acquire media assets in the tech space, TechnologyAdvice.

TechnologyAdvice is a tech publisher that owns more than 20 media brands, including TechRepublic and Datamation. They deliver advice to tech buyers and help companies that sell business tech reach new customers.

The deal closed in January 2025. While the sale price was not disclosed, it included an earn out, Edelman said.

In the end, the founders’ focus on creating a quirky voice and obviously-human style paid off. “It’s one of the things TechnologyAdvice really saw that stood out about us,” he said. “It was a key factor in the end, for making this exit possible.”