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 something that might surprise you: many people are focused on the wrong thing.
See, when people find out what I do, they usually ask: “How do I get more subscribers?” or “My newsletter isn’t growing fast enough, what’s the secret?”
And I’d argue that these are actually the wrong questions.
Let me explain.
It’s Never Been Easier to Reach 50,000 Subscribers
I analyzed the growth trajectories of all the creators I’ve studied to find out how long it took them to reach 50,000 subscribers. The overall average was 31 months.
But here’s the interesting part: when I looked at the data by the year these creators got started, I found that newsletters that launched in recent years grew much faster than those from 5+ years ago.
In fact, the average time to reach 50,000 subscribers for newsletters started over the last three years was just 24 months.
That’s insane! You can build a business with that kind of audience in just two years.
It’s also easier than ever to start a newsletter. Platforms like Substack, Beehiiv, and
But here’s the challenge: approximately 4,300,000 emails are sent every second. That means during the time you spend reading this post, billions of emails will have been sent.
It’s easier (and cheaper) than ever to start a newsletter. It’s easier to hit 50k subscribers. The barrier to entry is laughably low.
So, how do you stand out?
IV Content: The Ultimate Growth Multiplier
Think about your favorite newsletter, YouTube channel, or podcast. What makes you eagerly await each new edition?
Whether it’s Morning Brew delivering the day’s news with personality, 1440 giving you just the straight facts, or Sam Parr and Shaan Puri on My First Million sharing fascinating business ideas – what keeps you coming back is Insanely Valuable Content.
I call it “IV content” – the kind that gets readers sending you emails saying:
- “I can’t believe this is free.”
- “How do you only have [small number] followers? I feel like I’m stealing.”
- “How do you put out content like this every week? Are you actually a magician?”
And if you’re not getting replies like that – I hate to tell you, but you don’t have a growth problem.
You have a content problem.
The 5 Buckets of Great Content
Through my research, I’ve found that great content typically falls into one of five buckets:
- Helps someone make money
- Helps someone save money
- Helps someone save time
- Makes someone laugh
- Teaches someone something/makes them feel smart
The magic happens when you combine two or more of these buckets. Let me share some examples.
Mario Gabriele’s S-1 Club
Mario Gabriele of The Generalist created the S-1 Club, where he and friends would analyze S-1 filings (the documents companies submit before going public).
A typical S-1 filing runs about 317 pages of dense financial information. Mario’s team would distill this down and included market size analysis, revenue breakdowns, COVID impacts, and investment recommendations.
The final piece often ended up being around 10% of the original S-1 – and included a ton of extra research and information.
Can you imagine someone coming to you and saying:
“Hey you know that 300 page document you have to read to decide to invest in a company? We did it for you – and we included a bunch of additional market analyses and things to look out for. Do you want it for free?”
Sign. Me. Up.
So going back to those 5 buckets of content I mentioned before, let’s see which ones he hits on:
- His content helped readers make money
- Or even potentially save money (through avoiding a bad investment)
- He definitely helped them save time.
That’s three buckets in one piece of content! See how this becomes magical when you add more than one?
Yossi Levi, The Car Dealership Guy
Yossi started as an anonymous Twitter account, Car Dealership Guy, sharing inside information about the car dealership industry. He built such trust that people would share sensitive information with him.
Last March, Yossi received a tip in his DMs that Stellantis (the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, and Ram) was mandating a remote workday on Friday. He posted about it at 11:30 PM, noting it might signal layoffs.
Just ten hours later, he posted again: “Layoffs confirmed. 400 positions, engineering, software, and tech.”
The kicker? When Yossi posted this, Stellantis stock was at and all-time high…and his post came out before the market opened.
He alerted people before the stock price went on to take a nose dive.
Back to the buckets:
- His content helped readers make money
- It helped people save money (i.e. get out before the floor drops out of the bottom)
But there’s more to this. And I think there is a sixth bucket I need to add: speed to market.
He was providing crucial information faster than traditional news sources.
In fact, outlets like Yahoo Finance, Fortune, The Street, and more shared Yossi’s tweet as the breaking part of this story.
WILD.
Justin Moore’s Creator Wizard
Now you might be thinking, but I don’t want to write 4,000 word articles, and I don’t have anonymous people messaging me with insider tips.
Neither does Justin Moore.
Justin runs Creator Wizard, where he helps creators earn more through brand deals. Each week, he simply sends out a list of sponsorship opportunities to his free subscriber list.
They sign up for free, and he gives them money-making opportunities via these brand deals.
His content helps people make money, save time, and offers that speed-to-market advantage (because these are super timely).
And it doesn’t require elaborate deep dives or insider information – it’s just straightforward value.
The Ultimate Introvert Growth Hack
When I started Growth In Reverse in December 2022, I grew to 24,000 subscribers in just 11 months – without a pre-existing personal brand.
Most of this happened because people kept sharing my content.
It was so comprehensive, people were shocked that the creators hadn’t written the articles themselves.
Here’s one of my favorite examples:
Just three weeks after launching, Nathan Barry (founder of
He thought Mario Gabriele had written that deep dive because of how detailed it was! That was a helluva compliment to me 🙂
Great content spreads because people want to share valuable things with others.
I like to call it the ultimate introvert growth hack. If you make something so insanely valuable, you don’t have to talk about your work, other people will do it for you.
The Other Growth Multiplier: People
While studying these top newsletters, I discovered that 87% of them had one thing in common: collaboration with other people.
When researching Lenny Rachitsky (who now has over 1 million subscribers), I found an article mentioning a newsletter “creator house” – a group of top newsletter writers including Lenny, Brad Wolverton, Polina Pompliano, Alex Lieberman, Li Jin, Packy McCormick, and others who regularly collaborated, appeared on each other’s podcasts, and did cross-promotions.
The growth power of collaboration is undeniable. Here are some examples:
Podcast Guesting: Codie Sanchez
When I analyzed Codie Sanchez‘s growth, I plotted every podcast appearance she made against her subscriber growth. Almost every month, she appeared on 3-7 podcasts.
She’s still doing this consistently years later, and now has 750,000 email subscribers and 1.7 million YouTube subscribers.
Here’s an updated view of all of those podcast appearances:
Guest Posts: Lenny’s First 1,000
Lenny Rachitsky got his most of his first 1,000 subscribers by writing guest posts. He wrote for First Round Review in February 2021, then for Andrew Chen’s blog a month later. His first hundred subscribers came from a Medium post, and the next thousand from these guest posts.
By publishing on platforms with built-in audiences, Lenny was able to “borrow” credibility and reach people who were already interested in product management. The quality of his guest posts was so high that readers naturally wanted to follow him for more of his insights.
Lenny has since mentioned that these early guest posts continued to bring in subscribers for months afterward through search traffic and reshares. They essentially became “evergreen lead magnets” that worked while he slept.
You don’t have to focus solely on your own platforms when starting out. Find established platforms where your target audience already exists, and create content so valuable that people can’t help but want to follow you for more.
Starting From Zero: Dickie Bush
Dickie Bush was writing on Twitter for nine months with minimal traction (about 1,850 followers).
Instead of giving up, which is what most people would do, he tweeted asking if people wanted to join a group where they’d write every day for 30 days, with each post under 200 words.
This tweet transformed into Ship 30, one of the most popular cohort-based courses, and a multi-million dollar business with co-founder Nicolas Cole.
From a TWEET.
Get started with a small idea, and keep going if it works, if not, all you wasted was a tweet.
Maja Voje’s Smart Collaboration Strategy
I found Maja Voje when I was doing research for my deep dive into Aakash Gupta. I found a piece they had co-written and thought, “Well, Aakash has over 150k subscribers, this other person has to have this big audience too.”
Wrong.
Maja had just 3,000 subscribers when she wrote that post with Aakash.
These co-written posts weren’t lightweight 500-word fluff pieces either. The article she wrote with Aakash was over 19,000 words long and an 88-minute read (yes, you read that right!) that went extremely deep on product go-to-market strategy.
I dug a little deeper and found that 2 weeks earlier, she’d done something similar with the VC Corner newsletter that had 27,000 subscribers.
The brilliance of Maja’s strategy is that she didn’t wait until she had a “big enough” audience to start collaborations. At just 3,000 subscribers, many creators would think they don’t have enough leverage to approach someone with 27,000 subscribers, let alone over 100k. But Maja focused on the value exchange rather than the subscriber count.
How did she get these opportunities? When we spoke with Aakash on the podcast, and he said that they had simply been interacting via DMs. They built a relationship first, and then the collaboration naturally emerged from their conversations.
Maja has continued this strategy consistently, systematically collaborating with larger creators. This approach helped her grow to 15,000+ subscribers from that 3k she had when I found her.
Don’t wait until you’re “big enough” to start collaborating. Build relationships, create insanely valuable content that gets other creator’s attention, and be willing to put in the work to create something epic when the opportunity arises.
The Triple-Stack Approach: CJ Gustafson
CJ Gustafson of Mostly Metrics (57,000 subscribers) writes for CFOs and finance leaders. Financial SaaS companies are constantly looking for ways to provide value to their audiences through educational content, but they often don’t have the specialized knowledge or writing skills in-house.
By partnering with CJ, these companies get high-quality, specialized content their audience loves.
Through this content strategy, CJ developed what I call a “triple-stack approach”:
- They’re distributing his content to their readers. Oftentimes these are perfectly aligned to his content and probably drive a good deal of subscribers.
- The content also lives on their (high domain authority) website for years.
- He gets a nice backlink to his website. Which can lead to folks discovering CJ long after that article is published.
- He’s either already written the content, or is writing something he can send to his audience anyway. There’s no duplicated effort here.
- More subscribers. Since these kinds of articles are exactly what he writes on his own site, when someone gets to the bottom and thinks “I really like that guys dad jokes”, they see that link over to Mostly Metrics, and wham – CJ has a new subscriber.
What makes CJ’s strategy brilliant is that he’s not creating unique content for these brand partnerships. The same article that appears in his newsletter is what gets published on the partner’s site.
He’s essentially monetizing his existing content creation process while simultaneously growing his audience.
It’s actually a quadruple-stack because he has a paid newsletter – so people who find him through these partnerships might convert to paying subscribers, creating yet another revenue stream from the same content.
The lesson here? Look for companies whose audience overlaps with yours but who might not have the expertise or bandwidth to create the content you specialize in.
You can get paid to grow your audience while building your authority in your niche.
The Real Secret to Newsletter Growth
Let’s recap a bit. After two years studying newsletter growth, all of these strategies work:
- Referral programs work
- Paid recommendations work
- Paid ads work
- All the growth hacks work
But they work 100x better when you have insanely valuable content.
Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot co-founder) recently posted this on LinkedIn and I feel like it sums up everything much more succinctly:
“The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.”
Or in this case: The best way to grow a newsletter is to be worthy of those subscribers attention.
Create insanely valuable content. Blow their minds whenever you can.
That’s the secret to growth.
So the next time you’re tempted to ask “How do I get more subscribers?” or “What’s the secret to growing faster?” ask yourself instead:
Is my content that good?
That’s the question that actually matters.
