His Newsletter Launched a Real Estate Company

Tad Moore is Strategic Advisor at NWA Daily, the newsletter covering Northwest Arkansas. He came in around mid-2022 to help with writing, and ended up in the middle of a company that now has a newsletter, a stake in a real estate brokerage, a newsletter agency and a dine card. In this conversation he explains how each piece grew out of the audience, and what has not worked along the way.

Why Northwest Arkansas works

Tad gives a lot of the credit to the place. The metro is around 600,000 people and, in his words, on track to hit a million by 2050. New residents want to get connected, and a local newsletter is a ready-made way to do that.

Luke and Daniel launched NWA Daily in late 2020. Growth leans organic: Facebook and Instagram posts that repurpose the newsletter, giveaways, and collaborations. They're at 41,500 subscribers today, with a 54% open rate and a click rate close to 7%. Meta ads are running right now too, but he says the mix is weighted toward organic.

They cover the whole region. Sam Hoisington's Bentonville Bulletin covers just one town, Bentonville, home of Walmart headquarters. Tad says the two share ideas and content freely, and that some people assume they compete when they really don't.

A dollar to a nonprofit for every referral

Their referral program was running but not noteworthy, so they changed it. Instead of "five referrals, get a sticker or a discount code," they now donate a dollar to a local nonprofit for every referred reader they can confirm. Each month they feature a different nonprofit, hoping it shares the link with its own network.

Tad says it's more fun to give a dollar to the food bank than to put another dollar in Zuckerberg's pocket. He was honest that it was only month two and there was no real data yet.

Sister newsletters, and why one was sold

When Tad came on, Luke and Daniel had partnered with people in Tulsa, Little Rock and Kansas City, under a banner Tad called Around Town Media. Kansas City's KC Daily is the one he points to as working well. Tulsa Daily has since been sold after it struggled to find momentum.

His read on the difference is the operator. In Kansas City one person both writes and manages the ad partners. Splitting those jobs across people is slower, even on a team of three. Daniel is the numbers person who dials in cost per acquisition on Meta ads, and Luke brings a big network and helps build proposals, but the daily work needs someone who can do content and relationships together.

Place matters too. Tad says Little Rock never took to the medium the way Northwest Arkansas did. He describes it as a place with legacy companies and slower to try new things, while his region is full of young talent and new ideas.

From writer to starting Skipstone Group

As he ran NWA Daily, people kept asking Tad for help: friends with their own newsletters, and even an agency running a newsletter for a nationally known former NFL player. Last summer a few of those opportunities landed at once. Tyler had been hired to backfill him while he took weeks off for a new baby, which made it a good moment to hand over the daily.

The result was Skipstone Group. Some projects are short, like designing a welcome sequence or an educational email course. Others are ongoing, like ghostwriting and running someone's weekly newsletter. Clients include a creative nonprofit that serves artists in the region.

For local clients on beehiiv, NWA Daily's recommendations feature helps. Tad's own local history blog went from around 500 to almost 2,000 subscribers in a year, with zero effort, just from showing up in the recommendations. For a client he might slot them higher for a month or two.

House Hunch, and how a reader game became a brokerage stake

Each week NWA Daily picked a Zillow listing and asked readers to guess the price from one photo, with four options. It quickly became the most clicked item in the newsletter every day. So they went looking for a realtor to sponsor it. After a month or two of prospecting, one signed up and offered to book the rest of the year.

That raised a bigger question. If they could get a cut when a house sold, they would get much more out of it. None of them wanted a license, and they had even written "real estate" on a whiteboard of dumb ideas. Then Patrick, a realtor they knew from running a patio-bar community group called Patio Social, started a brokerage. NWA Daily took equity in it, and Front Porch Real Estate was born. Tad says they are still bringing on agents.

They also grew a real estate newsletter for Front Porch, starting with a first website built on beehiiv. NWA Daily's recommendations have referred 300 subscribers in about four months, and the list is just under 2,000.

A poll helped too. They asked how long people had lived in the area, with an option for "I don't, but I'm thinking about moving in the next six months." Those readers now go into a separate welcome flow that introduces them to local realtor friends.

Tad also pointed to NWA Look, a B2B real estate newsletter in the region, as a model for how to keep the content separate from any one brokerage. They are going for consumers instead.

Events and dinner clubs

Tad says they have barely dipped their toes into events. The first was a pitch contest with Startup Junkie, a nonprofit that supports startups, held in a local theater around its Startup Crawl. Part of the point was scouting businesses that might become bigger advertisers.

They have also run four dinner clubs with the DNNR team, starting in November. Some guests loved it and some didn't. Tad's frustration is control. He can't pick the restaurants, and he can't control who ends up at a table of six. In his words, you only need one person who is uncomfortable to be around to ruin the experience.

Events also show up inside big annual ad packages. One included a networking event at the advertiser's location, with NWA Daily inviting its advertiser network. Tad also sends a monthly newsletter, the NWA Daily Pulse, to anyone who has asked about advertising, with poll results and package offers.

Agencies, a bank exclusive and ticket trades

Agencies have been a big help. One agency in the area handles a large kids museum and the biggest outdoor amphitheater, and not a week goes by without them asking for something. Tad gave them a rate card, and one contact opens doors to many advertisers.

About two years in, four banks were advertising at various times. In a follow-up, one bank partner said, before Tad could pitch it, "I'd love to be the only bank you advertise." That became their first industry exclusive, a package of around $30,000 a year. It included events, and monthly long-form blog posts the bank could cross-post, with NWA Daily driving traffic to them.

Home services have been harder. Tad thinks plumbers and HVAC companies get a better return from Google search ads.

With the Razorbacks and other local teams, they trade for tickets and use them as giveaways. They used to run one huge season pass giveaway, but it stopped working in year three. Now they give away tickets for individual big games, which spreads the giveaways out.

Tad also mentioned a friend building a list intelligence tool. It ran NWA Daily's list against his database and found decision makers and marketers who already subscribe. That makes cold outreach warmer, because they already read the newsletter.

The dine card made several thousand dollars

They borrowed the idea from Michael Kauffman, who ran a similar discount card. Kauffman did 10% off. They started at 20%. They hired an intern from the University of Arkansas to run the whole thing.

The first year, launched in late February 2025, made several thousand dollars. The 2026 card launched on Black Friday, and Tad says the head start was huge. Coffee shops have been a harder sell because of thin margins. Daniel is looking at putting the card in Apple Wallet.

AI, and building your own platform

Tad says the AI conversation has gotten repetitive. Whatever tool you use, he says, "there still has to be a person behind it," and it has to feel human.

A prospective Skipstone client recently asked if he could build his own newsletter platform with AI. Tad hadn't seen that question coming. He prefers beehiiv for automations and control, but he says he needs to learn more about the tech side. TJ added that his own team has spent eight months getting a newsletter builder close to ready, and that getting email delivered reliably is the real hurdle.