Officially launched my business opportunities newsletter today. Experiences with monetization?

Hi everyone!

Today, after 6 months of creating and experimenting with content, me and my friend have officially launched our business opportunities newsletter CommunityValidated.

Our biggest challenge in the past weeks was to figure out which way to monetize. We decided to keep the newsletter itself free while putting the archive of previous issues behind a paywall.

Clearly, we’re not going to get a lot of money from our existing audience, since they had free access to the archive until now. But we’re hoping that we will be able to make some money as new subscribers come in.

In addition, we have a second price tier that gives users access to a database of fast-growing online communities and also allows them to get individual feedback from us on their projects (regarding research & validation).

Does anybody have experience with monetizing newsletters? Does our model make sense to you or would you recommend a different approach?