My Hyperlocal Newsletter - Spot report

I started the newsletter build on 5 June, and as of today I have 762 sub. I made my first ad revenue - $80 - two days ago.

I think people are hungry for local information hubs that pull 50 facebook groups together without the facebook bs that goes with them, all into one place.

I'll talk more about this build and what I did, but it started with a tweet that I copy and pasted into claude code.

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Can you build this project out in a folder? I'd use substack. Call it the Barrhaven Bugle. Confirm spelling. Task second brain, researching the idea to flesh it out and save findings.

If I had to start one AI side hustle in 2026, this would be it: a local newsletter that pulls in 2k a month and runs entirely by a team of four AI agents. The founder (Lucas Walter) has never written a single edition. This is a copy-pasteable system that could be applied to any city in the world. Here's the agent setup:

A growth engineer agent scrapes every local news site, subReddit, and event calendar at 6:00 a.m. daily.
A content director reads the database and writes the weekly newsletter in his voice every week.
A sales director handles every inbound advertiser email back-and-forth, pitching AI-generated ad creative.
A CEO agent orchestrates all three and reports back to him.

Results from Lucas's newsletter: Spokane Pulse, 7,400 subscribers, 47.5% open rate (industry average 20% to 30%), 11% click-through rate, 2k a month in ad revenue, and growing under 4 hours a week of human in the loop. Now imagine running the same system in your city. I link to the Spokane Pulse in the comments so you can check it out for yourself.

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From that tweet I just started building it out. Now I ultimately ended up with a different system than this. That looks much like a news aggregator. I do have seven Hermes agents doing it. I am pushing out five-question interviews to people by email and building features. I've added a cartoon daily, a crossword, and a swipe deck pulse.

On top of it, I've added a twice a month business newsletter for local businesses - the idea there is the business newsletter will be pay gated and advertising will pay for the paper, which will stay free for the readers.

We've got a city municipal election coming up in October so I've created an election page and an election issue. I got to my current subscription rate mostly through paid Facebook ads between July 2 and today, at $10 a day and 5 day bursts of $20 over a couple of weekends. I've had some really cool organic growth from people.

To give you some magnitude here, there are 110,000 people in my subdivision. We cover two city wards and we're a sleepy bedroom community for Ottawa, which is basically a federal government town. It's the national capital and there are all sorts of government and public service jobs here.

In terms of Barhaven, we don't have anything to call our own. We have shops, downtown businesses, lots of people here, sports, schools, everything, but except an identity. I think this local, hyperlocal newsletter is tapping into that sort of sense of being adrift within a larger organization or a larger city.

The key here is to build something that people want. I can tell you I built lots of stuff people haven't wanted and I've spent lots of money on things people didn't want. This is the first time I've spent money on things that I think people do want.

When I say I've spent money on substacks, I already pay for Claude Code. The Facebook ads have really come back. I get about $0.40 per subscriber. It's cost me $200 to $300 but I'm getting reach. I just put out my sixth newsletter this morning and it went out to those 760 people. I'm already hitting a 54% open rate. This is getting there. My last email got a 72% open rate.

How much time am I investing? Right now I'm probably investing two hours a day into building it out but for the most part the Hermes agents run it and it's beginning to run itself. I'm very much feeling like I'm in the exploratory phase of what I want the newsletter and website to be. This is how it's going. I'll provide a link to the website and you can check it out for yourself - Everything you see there was built by Claude Code.

Interested in doing this yourself? Lemme know - If you're looking for help to set something like this up, comment or DM me.

web - https://barrhavenbugle.ca

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My Hyperlocal Newsletter - Spot report