I gave a talk last month in Austin at the New Media Summit all about giving yourself the best chance for success as a creator and what’s working now. The one thing I got the most feedback on was something that I almost didn’t include. It was probably the last slide I added to the … Read more
There’s a faster path to newsletter growth than building your audience from zero. Find someone who already has the audience you want, and figure out how to be useful to them and their audience. That’s the simple version of the strategy. Here are 4 creators who used that in completely different ways. 1. 700 subscribers … Read more
Matt Paulson started making money online in middle school with a GeoCities website that earned him $25-50 a month. Almost two decades later, MarketBeat brings in mid-8 figures annually with 20 employees and 17 million email addresses in their database. The wildest part? A third of their revenue comes from SMS. Not email, not their … Read more
Thomas Shields launched The Dink, a pickleball newsletter, in late 2020. By April 2021, he’d grown it to 9,800 subscribers in just six months—no small feat. Then he launched a referral program that I cannot stop thinking about. On launch day alone, referrals drove 94.8% of new subscribers. They effectively doubled their daily sign-up rate … Read more
Sean Griffey and his 2 co-founders, Eli and Ryan, built Industry Dive in 2012. It started as 3 guys in an abandoned convenience store, using leftover IKEA desks. After 8 years, they built the business up to a $100M+ exit with 500 employees across the globe. Sean recently joined us on the Growth in Reverse … Read more
“What would your day look like if you did less?” That’s the question a friend asked Joe Casabona back in 2018. And while that person meant “You should say no to more things,” Joe heard something entirely different: “How can I keep doing the same stuff, but make robots do some of it for me?” … Read more
You want to launch a newsletter. Awesome! But be careful. Because the excitement around starting a newsletter can quickly turn into a to-do list with 150 tasks on it. You can quickly fall down a rabbit hole of “best practices” that leaves you overwhelmed and paralyzed about your next step. Should you use Beehiiv or … Read more
It keeps happening. Every time Dylan and I ask people, “What’s your most important newsletter metric?” They always say the same thing. It’s not opens. Or clicks. Not even subscriber count or your unsubscribe rate. Those matter, but not as much as this one metric. It’s replies. Yep, I’m talking about the number of replies … Read more
It’s easy to get focused on reaching a specific subscriber count, focusing on hitting 1k, 10k, 50K, or 100K subscribers. But Nathan May from The Feed Media takes a different approach and built a 7-figure newsletter business with around 1,000 people on his list. “Did you say you’re running 1 million ARR with a thousand-person … Read more
CJ Gustafson started writing a newsletter because, as a newer CFO, he was “terrified of not remembering the playbook” he was learning at startups. “You’re getting exposed to these secrets of running a company and making it work.” And he did not want to let those secrets go in one ear and out the other. … Read more