50,000 and Counting…

The PE Week Wire is our daily email service, and predates peHUB by quite a few years. Today it hit the 50k subscriber mark, which is a milestone we’re pretty proud of. Usually I use these “another thousand” occasions to hype one of our paid services (like peHUB Premium subscriptions), but today I’m going to do something different: First, tell you the email’s genesis — because so many of you ask when we meet in person — and then make an announcement:

PE Week Wire was originally conceived back in early 2001, but was shelved after a marketing study found that no one would read it. Sixteen months later, I found myself in Boston with relatively little to do. We also had a bit of a budget crunch, which led to my publisher pulling the plug on our Factiva subscription (it’s the Dow Jones version of Lexis-Nexis).

I was fairly upset with the cut, since Factiva was a major source of research for us. Plus, it was the only electronic repository of our own content. My complaints were met with a sarcastic challenge to find $12k to fund a renewal of our subscription (we made millions of dollars in net profit for Daddy Thomson, but apparently $12k was a breaking point). After cashing in some empty soda cans left me about $11,990 short, I decided to launch PE Week Wire. I didn’t tell anyone except for a few sources, and put a small note in a post on the PE Week website.

My goal was to make $12k in ad revenue, drive down to New York and present the check to my publisher. Then I’d kill the publication. By the time we made our first $12k, however, we had more than a thousand readers and I’d taken a liking to the job. Plus, the publisher (who I otherwise liked a lot) had moved over to a new job, and Factiva was restored. Fast forward five and a half years (wow), and here we stand with 50,000 readers and a roster of top-flight advertisers. Plus a dedicated website…

Which leads me to the announcement: Beginning sometime next week, PE Week Wire will be rebranded peHUB Wire. The current name was really a short-sighted marketing ploy, as I hoped to drive PE Week print subs, thus justifying the $12k. It’s also an unwieldy mouthful, and simply bizarre to have the word “Week” in a daily publication. Finally, I consider this email and peHUB to be inseparable at this point, which means they might as well share the same name.

So don’t be surprised when the peHUB Wire begins arriving next week. I guess the next 50,000 readers won’t even know that it was ever called something else…