How independent content entrepreneurs create value for investors

Edwin Dorsey rose to fame as a 22-year-old wunderkind after exposing a large-scale corporate fraud that mainstream media had missed. His newsletter The Bear Cave, grew to USD 300,000 in annualised revenue within a year of launch, following appearances in The Wall Street Journal and a full-length feature in Institutional Investor.

I first pointed my readers to Edwin's work back in 2021, calling him "someone worth watching".

Since then, he has grown into what I consider the most outstanding talent and innovator of his generation in the investment newsletter sector. He now runs five (!) websites and is building what I believe will become a media enterprise of real significance. It's safe to assume he is now generating high six-digit annual revenue, with EBITDA margins comparable to those of SaaS businesses.

Most notably, Edwin has achieved all of this without the aggressive marketing tactics that have become synonymous with much of the industry.

In a departure from his usual interviews, Edwin agreed to focus this conversation on:

• How he creates (and monetises) value for private investors.
• The new products he has launched and where he plans to take them.
• The lessons he believes anyone with ambitions in this space should internalise.

At a time when legions of fund managers and private investors are launching Substacks and other investment-related channels, there is a great deal that aspiring content entrepreneurs can learn from his approach.

Buckle up for an interview unlike any other Edwin gave before!

Swen Lorenz: Edwin, when you meet someone who doesn't know you, how do you usually explain what you do?

Edwin Dorsey: Swen, thank you for your kind introduction and for having me on! I tell people I write a newsletter focused on exposing corporate misconduct and that I focus on U.S.-listed public companies that are misleading investors, harming customers, or are on the wrong end of disruption.

Over time, I've branched out into many new ventures, too. As you know, I also publish Sunday's Idea Brunch, a newsletter interview series with great off-the-beaten-path investors, and started StockPromotionTracker.com, the most comprehensive database tracking paid stock promotion campaigns.

SL: In 2021, you used your X account to share advice for aspiring bloggers and content creators. That thread is still online. Which of the points you raised do you think have truly stood the test of time, and where would you offer different advice today?

ED: Great question! The advice that's most relevant today:

"Do something UNIQUE. You want to be the only person who does what you do. Build a personal monopoly."

"Fewer emails. I send six emails every month (four free and two paid). Daily emails are not required, especially in professional services. People would much rather read something great once a week, than something mediocre every day."

The advice I would change from 2021 is on distribution. Back then I wrote:

"Use Twitter. Almost all successful newsletter authors use Twitter to promote their newsletter. It is a great way to get momentum and build true fans. Twitter, word of mouth, and earned media are best growth strategies IMO."

Twitter, now X, was a great platform to promote newsletters in 2021. That diminished after Elon Musk bought the platform and heavily demoted any links to Substack. Today, a Twitter presence helps growing a newsletter but is not as important.

SL: I'm a paying subscriber of The Bear Cave myself. How does your flagship publication deliver value to both private and institutional investors, and why do you think this niche wasn't filled before you entered it? Your work now regularly appears in mainstream media, which suggests it resonates with a broader audience. Without singling out specific publications, it raises the question of why outlets like The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberghaven't simply hired a few people to produce similar insights?

ED: The Bear Cave provides an independent source of short-biased idea generation. The articles are not short reports and don't include price targets, but they do let readers hit the ground running in their own research process and give them independent ideas that, in aggregate, have significantly underperformed the market.

Beyond serving as early-stage idea generation, The Bear Cave helps improve your research process. For example, many people can easily find a company's auditor, but did you know you can see the specific audit partner on the PCAOB auditor search database? (This is particularly important for U.S.-listed Chinese companies.) Likewise, do you know how to get consumer complaints through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests or how to best use Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Full-Text Search? Many people don't, subscribers to The Bear Cave do.

Good information has value, and The Bear Cave delivers good information and teaches investors how to get it themselves.

When I started my newsletter in February 2020, there wasn't much precedent for making serious money starting a newsletter from scratch (there were a few exceptions). Moreover, before Substack running a newsletter business was burdensome. The combination of a pandemic giving everyone more time to write and read, Substack making it easy to start newsletter businesses, and more success stories has changed the landscape for independent media.

If anything, I imagine this will cause more of the best talent to leave traditional publications and we will see a disintermediation in media where the best journalists leave to start independently for more freedom and more financial upside.

SL: For someone earlier in their journey as a content entrepreneur in the investment sector, what's the #1 inspiration or learning they should take from your commercial success with The Bear Cave?

ED: Swen, you are too kind.

Three points:

1. Niches have tremendous value.
2. It's much easier to monetise if you directly help people do their job better.
3. Having an extra distribution channel (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) helps when getting started.

SL: Your second product was Sunday's Idea Brunch – which I've been a paying subscriber to for several years. What's it about and how does it create value for investors?

ED: Twice a month, Sunday's Idea Brunch publishes written interviews with great off-the-beaten-path investors. Each guest shares details about their background, investment process, and pitches a few of their favourite ideas.

It's a great way for allocators to find new talent and for investors to get great new ideas. Some of the Idea Brunch guests I've been most impressed by are David Orr of Militia Capital, Brian Bellinger of Monimus Capital, Maj Soueidan of GeoInvesting, and @Mike10947310, a pseudonymous micro-cap investor.

SL: The angle and format of Sunday's Idea Brunch now seem almost painfully obvious. It's proven popular, and I know at least one analyst who built an entire business after being featured in your service. In hindsight, its success may appear inevitable – perhaps on a smaller scale, but with a high-calibre, high-quality audience. Tell us about the difficulties and hurdles you faced in building this product.

ED: I love publishing Sunday's Idea Brunch because I get to help shine a spotlight on talented people who have been ignored by the mainstream media. I'd like to tell you that it was tough and required tremendous hard work, but it was pretty easy.

I announced Sunday's Idea Brunch in The Bear Cave newsletter and on Twitter and then got a friend/mentor, Bill Martin, as the first guest interviewee. His interview was a hit, and within a few weeks I had a few thousand readers. It required a little initiative to get the first guests on, but now it has enough of a following that many mangers want to be featured and will recommend their friends.

It's a lot of fun and doesn't require too much work on my end. The most important part is getting good guests, which I do from reading a lot on Twitter, sending cold emails, and getting referrals from past guests. Now, I also use ChatGPT deep research to help come up with better questions.

Having it be written, rather than audio/video, was the right call as it means the guests can be more deliberate with their thoughts and it makes life easier for me as the question writer!

SL: Clever ideas don't always lead to successful businesses, and some niches may simply be too narrow to be commercially viable. From what you told me the last time we met in New York, your website tracking FOIA requests fits this category – a brilliant idea, but no commercial traction. What's the story behind FOIAsearch.com?

ED: The SEC, like every government agency, receives FOIA requests for documents. However, the SEC is unique in that most requesters don't care about the requested documents but the text of the SEC's denial letters. For example, you can ask the SEC for "documents pertaining to any investigative activity on company XYZ", and the SEC will either deny your request because 1) they don't have any documents or 2) releasing the documents would disrupt an ongoing enforcement matter. The latter reason is also called a B7A exemption and is generally interpreted as a sign of an SEC investigation.

John Gavin at Probes Reporter built a successful business filing tens of thousands of these requests to detect undisclosed SEC investigations. Ironically, the FOIA laws to democratise information were being used to give select investors an informational edge!

To help even the playing field, the SEC began uploading copies of all the FOIA requests and B7A exemptions every month to an infrequently visited government webpage.

The issues: 1) most people didn't know about this government webpage, 2) it was incredibly difficult to search all the files simultaneously, 3) it was difficult to interpret the data.

I made FOIAsearch.com as a free website to solve all three of these problems and make it easy for investors to search all FOIA requests and signs of SEC investigative activity. So far, the free search feature has been used over 47,000 times.

I also launched some paid features for alerts, such as notifications when your portfolio companies appeared in the FOIA logs or when FOIA requests were filed by notable journalists. The paid features got limited traction, and I ultimately decided to focus on other ventures.

Moreover, under the Trump Administration SEC investigative activity has grinded to a halt, so these issues are now largely moot.

SL: A more recent service that was WILDLY successful in its own way was StopNasdaqChinaFraud.com. Your detailed, systematic exposure of Chinese stock scams targeting American investors even earned you another feature in Bloomberg, which noted that one stock you exposed as scam fell 90% in just five minutes – talk about market influence! Notably, you decided *not* to short any of the stocks, instead relying entirely on subscription revenue. Talk us through your decision and – if you're willing – let us in on how it worked financially.

ED: With The Bear Cave I only make money from reader subscriptions and don't bet against the companies I write about. I believe this is better from a legal, regulatory, and integrity perspective and just feels right to me. The moment you start taking positions it becomes a really slippery slope, and the laws around publishing and trading are not clearly defined in my view. My model works, and I'm proud it does.

StopNasdaqChinaFraud.com was another project to make it easier to track all the NASDAQ-listed Chinese stock pump-and-dumps. Essentially overseas groups would pump and dump these micro-cap stocks (e.g., NASDAQ:PTHL) using extensive WhatsApp group networks. My website made it easy for any participant/victim to share screenshots of the pump-and-dumps while they were happening, making it easy for me to predict which stocks were nearing collapse.

I also heard that various market gatekeepers were using the website to find misconduct in real-time. The website was, and remains, completely free, and every screenshot is completely searchable and tagged with relevant tickers.

Now that the SEC has cracked down on these overseas pump-and-dumps, tips to StopNasdaqChinaFraud.com have decreased. I'll keep the website running, but it's no longer my main focus.

SL: Continuing our tour de force through your suite of products, you're now also running StockPromotionTracker.com, with subscriptions ranging from USD 1,100-4,400 per year. What does the service offer, and how do you manage its day-to-day operations?

ED: StockPromotionTracker.com is my database tracking all paid stock promotion campaigns. You can see all the stock promotion emails, articles, sponsored YouTube videos, and campaigns as they are published and search any ticker to see their history, if any, in paying for stock promotion.

It's by far the most complex and intensive project and takes tremendous work. I hired an exceptional engineer to help me build out the website. For dozens of promotion firms we have AI agents that monitor their webpages for changes and new clients and then add them to our database. We also have a dedicated email inbox that received stock promotion email blasts. The AI agent reads each email and focuses on disclosure information. If we find that an email blast is being sponsored by a company, we add it to our database. In addition, we are monitoring a few dozen YouTube channels with a history of stock promotion, and for every video uploaded, our AI agents check the video description and every link in this description for any disclosure of paid stock promotion.

We now have 15,000+ datapoints in our database, and it works autonomously.

Every Sunday, I have a roughly two-hour call with my engineer to go over various errors, areas for improvement, or user feature requests. The stock promotion field is constantly evolving and increasingly shifting from email and web articles (which we track) to YouTube (which we track) and Discord, Reddit, and other social media (which we don't track yet).

Ideally, I'd like to build an API to help generate promotion risk scores that can be displayed to retail investors on platforms like Robinhood and Seeking Alpha. If you are a reader interested in an extended free trial, please email me at [email protected].

SL: Has Bloomberg knocked on your door yet to acquire the site?

ED: No. In any fight between David and Goliath, I'm almost always on the side of the underdog. I would love to partner with Robinhood or another change agent, rather than a big incumbent.

SL: Can we just recap briefly – you operate five distinct services and subscription sites for investors, and your operation's headcount is what exactly?

ED: Headcount is 1.5 (me plus my part-time engineer), and I have three main sources of revenue:

The Bear Cave (80,000 free readers, ~1,000 paid)

Sunday's Idea Brunch (12,000 free readers, ~700 paid)

StockPromotionTracker.com (10-100 paid)

I also have FOIAsearch.com, CommentLetterSearch.com, and StopNasdaqChinaFraud.com as free projects.

Overall, everything is profitable and has significant potential for growth if I execute well.

SL: I have a sense of the turnover you generate and the kind of margins you likely earn, which is why I'd describe being a content creator as a viable alternative to being a fund manager. Would you agree with that take?

ED: Yes.

SL: Did you watch the recent interview with Matt Paulson of MarketBeat, where he disclosed his income? With sales around USD 50m, he's netting USD 20m per year – that's the kind of income an NFL player earns. Matt is 40, doesn't work past 5pm, and can probably continue growing revenue by 5-8% and topline by 20-30% annually for years to come. You're too modest to say so, but I think you'll reach a similar level before long. Why do you think there isn't a stampede of content entrepreneurs taking this sector seriously and investing in building scalable businesses?

ED: Shhhh, don't give your talented readership too many ideas!

I joke that finance is an excellent field for entrepreneurship because the customers have deep pockets, but all the potential entrepreneurial talent is locked in golden handcuffs at big firms. Basically, if you can build a successful financial information company, you are probably already earning high six figures or seven figures at a major fund, and leaving those lucrative jobs is tough.

SL: Who in the media industry do you follow to draw inspiration for your own business?

ED: Another great question! I really like Doomberg, and they have served as a big inspiration and mentor for me. I also greatly admire MrBeast and more recently was impressed by what Nick Shirley accomplished with his YouTube video. Watching his investigation of the Minnesota daycare fraud scandal makes me want to get into producing YouTube videos. The bankruptcy newsletter Petition also provided a lot of helpful advice in the early days.

SL: Many people assume that all the interesting niches have already been taken and that building an audience in today's crowded market is simply too late. You're proving the naysayers wrong through your continued creation of new products. Without asking you to give away specific ideas, are there particular areas of the financial markets where you still see potential for someone starting out as a content entrepreneur today?

ED: Let me share some specific ideas on my to-do list. Of course, your readership is free to pursue them too!

1. An AI-powered alternative to Value Line

(Note from SL: Undervalued-Shares.com had also, entirely coincidentally, recently published an article on Value Line and predicted that AI would begin to erode its existing publishing business.)

2. AI-powered detection for oddly-timed option grants or executive compensation changes
3. FOIA filing service, file FOIA requests on behalf of startups or funds that don't want to interact with regulators directly
4. Cool Finance Products newsletter, a free newsletter highlighting cool finance tools
5. Europe short disclosure tracker
6. Job board for finance internships (charge firms to promote the opportunities)
7. Newsletter on SEC comment letters
8. Good actor/bad actor tracking
9. Email alerts for high-risk Glassdoor reviews for portfolio companies
10. Non-expert network, make it easy to get consumer opinions from non-experts like college students or suburban moms

And as you alluded to, I'm spending a lot of time on prediction markets. There's a lot of opportunities to build good products for prediction markets, but I think the best course of action is to use them internally to trade rather than to sell them to others.

SL: Trigger warning – we've reached the obligatory AI question! Having recently immersed myself in discussions about the future of newsletters and content entrepreneurship, there's a lot of talk about AI cannibalising the industry. What's your take on how AI is going to shape the space?

ED: I see AI as a huge growth opportunity. For example, I use AI for idea generation in The Bear Cave, regularly asking AI to give me lists of recently listed companies with high levels of consumer complaints. I think AI will make the best content even better and make mediocre content even less valuable.

At the end of the day people trust other humans and want to be able to hold a human accountable if something goes wrong. I'm that human.

SL: Other hot topics for anyone looking to grow a content-based business include cohort-based courses, community building, and events. Do these buzzwords spark any thoughts for you when it comes to building a business?

ED: In my view, the world doesn't need more online courses. Events can be valuable, but they take a tremendous amount of work and are mostly outside of my skillset.

SL: At the risk of asking a very broad question, where do you see this industry in five or ten years? And what are you most passionate about when it comes to future-proofing and growing your content enterprise?

ED: I have mixed feelings about the financial and financial research industry in general. Seeking out information and learning about the world is wonderful. Helping build businesses is wonderful. Charging significant fees to gather assets and deliver mediocre returns is not wonderful.

I hope there is a big push among endowments, pension funds, and other funds belonging to the public to index more and actively manage less, even if that lowers the entire budget for financial research products. I could see that happen in the next ten years.

My success is in my hands and determined by my ability to execute. I focus more on what can I do in the next week to improve my businesses, rather than take sweeping long-term views. If I stay hungry and act like every customer and every hour matters, then I will become big.

SL: Edwin, is there anything I should have asked you about that I didn't?

ED: You asked really creative questions and this was great. One thing I'd like to add is that I'm incredibly bullish on prediction markets. I believe prediction markets will be a big source of media and financial products in the future. It's all very new, and that's one area I'm following closely for the future.

SL: Many thanks for generously sharing your truly unique insights and experiences!

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