Codie Sanchez

Codie Sanchez is an American entrepreneur, investor and educator best known as the founder of Contrarian Thinking, a media and education company that teaches people to buy and run small, cash-flowing businesses, and as the author of the New York Times bestseller Main Street Millionaire. Sanchez built the company on a personal newsletter and turned it into courses, paid communities and a deal marketplace.

Sanchez started out as a journalist covering conflict and politics in Latin America, including Venezuela and Argentina. Disillusioned with journalism by about 25, Sanchez moved into finance to understand how wealth is built, working as an analyst at Vanguard and Goldman Sachs and later becoming a managing director at Entourage Effect Capital, a venture firm investing in cannabis startups. Codie's own site describes nearly two decades in private equity and building businesses. An earlier newsletter, The Struggle Isn't Real, reached roughly 10,000 to 12,000 subscribers.

Contrarian Thinking launched in 2020, when pandemic lockdowns halted travel, carrying over about 12,000 readers from that earlier list. It reached about 30,000 sign-ups by July 2020 and more than 100,000 by April 2021, driven by the argument that ordinary people should buy boring businesses such as laundromats, car washes and vending routes rather than chase startups. The newsletter became the funnel for paid products: Contrarian Academy and an acquisition community for business buyers, Growth Boardroom for owners, live events, the BigDeal podcast and YouTube channel, and BizScout, a marketplace for finding small businesses for sale. A holding company owns a portfolio of the kinds of businesses the courses teach about.

In 2024 Sanchez published Main Street Millionaire: How to Make Extraordinary Wealth Buying Ordinary Businesses, which became a New York Times bestseller. Today the X account has more than 700,000 followers, and the stated mission is to create one million financially free people through business ownership.

Sanchez matters to the indie world for popularising acquisition entrepreneurship with a mass audience and building a creator-led education business around it rather than relying on sponsorships alone.