Homepros: 2025 Editor’s Letter

I’ve said this before, but I love giving you (our really good-looking readers) a real-time view into what’s happening in Homepros-land, and I plan to do it annually for as long as the company exists. 

Here’s what happened this year — and what’s happening next:

2025

We typed our little fingers off. This year, we published 318 stories totaling roughly 80,000 words. 

Our email audience continued to grow. We’ll end this year with around 15,000 unique newsletter subscribers nationwide, with our HVAC list currently growing around 10 percent month-over-month. Having an increasingly large email base is cool, but since we’re a ‘B2B’ publication, quality is more important than quantity. We’re not in the mass-scale business. For us, having 1,000 CEOs is 10x more valuable than an audience of 1 million randos. 

And engagement has held steady. Our email open rate sits at 52 percent, while our click-through rate remains at a little over 2x the industry average. We’ll be ‘cleaning’ our list to remove some inactive subscribers before the new year, which will improve these figures, because engagement is just as important — arguably more — than our total number of subscribers. 

Our ‘internet audience’ also grew. I like to call these ‘bullshit metrics,’ because they have zero impact on revenue as of today, but our stories nabbed about 880,000 total views across both our website and LinkedIn this year, a 2.5x year-over-year gain. Again, no business impact, but this does suggest our stories are being increasingly shared and picked up by Google, which is important.

We expanded our partner base. We worked with roughly two dozen advertising partners this year, spanning software and financing providers to parts suppliers and best practice groups. 2025 was our first full year of monetization, so we don’t have a full-year revenue comparison to 2024, but we made a couple dollars this year, profitably, and the company is cash flow positive. 

A few more things. We broke some news; I hired Deirdra Funcheon, formerly at Axios, as our first full-time reporter; we hosted a happy hour; and we launched a second publication to cover the plumbing industry once a week. (If you haven’t received any plumbing newsletters yet, they’re likely in your spam — new sender domains take time to warm up to inboxes — so go check.)

A few pics from happy hour:

📸 Full gallery

2026

We’re expanding into more industries. Our long-term goal is to build a multi-platform news-media company covering all of the home service industries. To start, we’ll be launching a Roofing publication as soon as possible, followed by Electrical, and possibly a third, depending on how things go. 

We’ll host a summit-style event. The HVAC and Plumbing industries don’t need another 500-vendor trade show with breakouts in awfully carpeted hotel ballrooms, but we do believe there’s an opportunity for intimate, executive-focused summits built solely around content — conversations on the industry’s biggest themes, including technology, private equity, regulation, and the economy.

And launch new ad products. While the obvious way for us to grow revenue is by launching additional industry publications, another important part is expanding the amount of inventory we can sell within our existing publications. (It’s about going wide and deep — without overdoing it, of course.) We’ll be starting with ‘dedicated emails’ in the new year. These will be short emails — one a month — that contain tailored content by individual partners.

We’re gonna invest more in social. The reality today is that not everyone prefers to consume content via newsletters (or written word), so for us to succeed in the long run, we need to meet people where they are. This means distributing our content in different formats, including visuals and short-form video clips of interviews we do, for instance, across social media platforms. While newsletter subscribers are the North Star, we also want the contractor who prefers to consume news simply via Instagram.

We’ll lean into original reporting. Press releases are important to cover, but they’re essentially a commodity — everyone writes about them — so the publications that produce content that can’t be found elsewhere will be better positioned going forward. Our value proposition has largely been brevity, speed, and contextualizing stories, but we need to layer on original stuff — interviews, scoops, analysis. It’s hard to do, but we’re gonna go for it.

And block and tackle. Our business isn’t rocket science. To do well, we need to listen to readers, cover what’s happening and put it out there, and serve advertisers. I subscribe to the Buffet-like philosophy of keeping things dumb simple and getting comfortable with doing the same thing day-after-day for a long period of time, so that’s what we’re gonna do. And we’re human, so we’ll f*ck up and get some things wrong, but we’ll learn from it and move on. 

If 2026 goes reasonably well, we’ll end the year with around 40,000 unique subscribers across all of our publications, including the new ones, assuming modest early growth, and be set up to launch several more — including events — in 2027. 

I hope this helps give you an idea of how we’re thinking about things. If you have any questions or comments, are interested in partnering/advertising, or just wanna chat, shoot me an email. 

Either way, thanks for all the support. It means a lot. Have a great holiday and a Happy New Year!

— Alec S