How this ADHD newsletter added 1,439 subscribers in the first week
Welcome to Day 5 of the 30 Days of Growth.
This is a pop-up newsletter put together by the team at Growth In Reverse. We’ve pulled 30 creators together to help give one short, actionable way you can either grow or improve your email list.
You can view past issues here.
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Lead magnets are having a resurgence, but not in the traditional way you might be thinking.
Trading a free guide for an email can work, but it’s getting a little overdone, and people are becoming numb to these repeated CTAs.
It feels harder to drive growth with those. So how can you stand out?
Esteban Perez and Ammaar Khan run The ADHD Weasel, a newsletter for late-diagnosed ADHD adults. And they were feeling this, too.
They had a whopping 250k+ Threads followers, and were promoting 4 lead magnets to them. But even with that huge audience, they were only getting ~17 signups a day.
Not bad. But not the growth they were looking for…
Then they heard my talk in Austin this past February where I shared how a few people were seeing great results with a quiz, and they decided to swap out their lead magnets and try that instead.
And it worked. Really, really well.
After launching their quiz, they drove 1,439 new subscribers in a single week. For context, that’s how many they used to get in a quarter.
Since that “peak” week, they’re still bringing in around 875 subscribers per week.
How ADHD Weasel Did It
1. They built a quiz around 6 specific ADHD types. Each “type” describes a different way ADHD shows up in adult life, and readers recognize themselves almost immediately.
2. They gated the results. The quiz only takes a few minutes, but once a reader completes it, they’re prompted with a form to enter their email address to get the results.
3. They push the quiz data directly into Beehiiv. When someone finishes the quiz, their subscriber record gets tagged with their results and quiz answers to help with segmentation.
4. They send most of their social traffic to the quiz. They promote the quiz via Threads where they have over 250k followers. The quiz converts better than any other Threads CTAs they’ve tried. They are also experimenting with Meta ads pointing to the quiz as well.
Why It Works
There are a few reasons this quiz strategy works so well:
It’s not yet overdone. So many creators are giving away freebies in the form of a PDF or checklist, whereas a quiz will stand out because it gives more personalized results.
Readers want their results. They invested time to answer the quiz questions, so they are bought in to see the results at the end and will be more likely to enter their email.
Segmentation lets them personalize future emails. Esteban and Ammaar already know every quiz-taker’s type and their answers, so they know exactly which back issues would land for which reader.
Results
- Daily subscribers went from ~17/day to ~125/day which is ~7x their previous baseline
- 1,439 new subs in one week, which is what they used to get per quarter
- They lowered their CPL with Meta ads to $0.51, compared to a $3-$8 benchmark
- The Weasel Quiz drives ~88% of all new subscribers, replacing their old acquisition strategy entirely
How You Can Implement It
Step 1: Build a short quiz (5-7 questions) that leads subscribers to self-select into one of your audience segments.
Step 2: Gate the results. Make sure the reader has to enter their email address to see the results on the “next page” or in their inbox.
Step 3: Push quiz answers and results into your ESP with the email address so you can tag or segment them later on.
Step 4: Point your main organic channel(s) at the quiz instead of your homepage or newsletter sign-up page.
Step 5: Build a segmented welcome sequence. You now have segments and data helping you craft a more personalized and relevant email sequence. You can take a look at what Katelyn did here.
Tools
- A quiz tool like Interact (Ammaar & Esteban built theirs with Claude Code & Vercel)
- Your ESP to save the data to subscriber records
Quizzes are great for readers and for newsletter creators. For readers, they’re more personalized and give them custom results.
For creators, they drive lots of engagement, are easy to promote, and capture first-party data you can use to improve your readers’ experience with your newsletter – and help you make more money in the long run.
For more examples around great quizzes, check out Milly’s quiz breakdown here.
See you tomorrow,
Chenell
P.S. Follow ADHD Weasel on Threads, and check out how their quiz works here.