Matt Johansen grew his cybersecurity newsletter, VulnerableU, from 12 to nearly 30,000 subscribers in less than 2 years. It pretty quickly turned into a six-figure business, and he decided to leave his job at Bank of America to go full-time on the project. His secret? A platform-by-platform growth strategy that most creators completely overlook. Matt … Read more
Tom Orbach is the marketer behind Marketing Ideas, a weekly newsletter that exploded from zero to 44,000+ readers in less than two years. In mid-2025, Tom successfully launched a paid tier for his newsletter, pulling in over $50,000 in the first 72 hours from 500+ subscribers. And he did it all with a full-time job. … Read more
For the longest time, the newsletter growth playbook has been simple: eliminate all friction. Landing pages with one field.One-click subscribes.Auto-filled lead forms.Referrals and recommendations on autopilot. Lists grew and grew and grew. But all of growth and scale comes with a cost. Because the easier it is to join your list, the easier it is … Read more
Dylan and I recently got back from Craft + Commerce in Boise, and honestly? It was incredible. I flew out early for Jay Clouse’s offline lab event, and we both stayed for the main conference. What started as a trip to learn about growing our newsletter businesses turned into something way more valuable: real connections … Read more
Jesse Anderson went from zero writing ambitions to 70,000 newsletter subscribers and a social media following of hundreds of thousands, all while working full-time in tech and raising three kids. The kicker? He did it completely by accident. I wrote a deep dive on Jesse’s story mid-2023, but there’s a huge change that recently happened … Read more
The honest numbers, unexpected lessons, and whether it’s actually worth the effort 6 months ago, Dylan and I launched the Growth In Reverse podcast. We’ve published 28 full-length episodes, stuck to our weekly schedule, and learned a lot about what it actually takes to run a podcast alongside a newsletter. Now that we’re past our … Read more
It feels like something big is happening in the newsletter world. In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen creators like Justin Welsh, Dan Koe, and Jay Clouse all launch new publications on Subtack. It feels like everyone’s talking about it. At the same time, it feels like every YouTuber I discover has a Substack. … Read more
And 7 other takeaways from an expert digital marketer. Olly Richards’ story reads like a masterclass in strategic positioning and authentic marketing. But it didn’t start out that way. He was anything but an overnight success. Olly was a broke jazz musician until the age of 28, when he decided to pivot from playing music … Read more
This post came from a talk I gave at The Newsletter Marketing Summit this year in Austin, TX. You can watch the full talk here: For the past 2 years, I’ve been studying how top newsletters grow to 50,000+ subscribers. After writing over 250,000 words on newsletter growth (basically three full-length nonfiction books), I’ve discovered … Read more
Lenny Rachitsky recently crossed 1 million subscribers to his Substack newsletter, Lenny’s Newsletter. And one million is not a typo. If you’ve read Growth In Reverse long enough, you’ve probably either heard of Lenny or are subscribed to his newsletter. But how exactly did he go from writing his first post on Medium, thinking no … Read more