7 of the Wildest Growth Strategies I’ve Seen From 2 Years of Research

Two years ago I launched Growth In Reverse.

That first edition of the newsletter went out to 4 people, and 1 of them was my own email address 🙂

I’ve learned a lot since that first issue 2 years ago.

I’ve now written over 70 deep dives and spent over 3,000 hours researching and writing about the growth of newsletter creators.

What I’ve learned through researching newsletter creators is there are tons of ways you can grow a newsletter. Even some that look similar can be done very differently.

But there are also some really fascinating ones that have stuck out to me over time. I want to share some of those with you today.

Also, if you missed it, my friend Dylan and I launched the Growth In Reverse podcast this past week (on the actual 2 year anniversary!).

This is also on YouTube as well if that’s more your style.

In that first episode, we talked through some of the wildest growth strategies I’ve come across. But if you’re not a podcast listener, which I imagine many of you aren’t, I wanted to share those with you here. 🙂

1. Codie Sanchez’s Private Equity Newsletter Playbook

Codie Sanchez a savvy businesswoman.

And while this growth strategy was something I had never heard anyone mention — it’s no surprise Codie was doing it.

In the early days of growing her newsletter, Contrarian Thinking, she actually bought other newsletters.

But that’s been done before, right?

Well, it gets much better.

While most people who buy newsletters might do something like this:

1. Buy the newsletter.
2. Send out an email or two to that list saying “hey, this newsletter has been acquired, you’re going to start getting emails from XYZ person and their content is awesome, so make sure to stick around!”
3. Import all of those subscribers into their “main” email database.
4. Continue on like nothing happened.

That’s the typical scenario. But Codie isn’t typical.

Instead, what she did was:

1. Buy the newsletter.
2. Continue growing the newsletter she bought.
3. Position Contrarian Thinking as a guest writer or sponsor of a few issues over the coming weeks/months. Keep promoting Contrarian Thinking until she felt like she got all the subscribers she was going to get from it.
4. Sell it to someone else (probably for a profit).

Here’s how she explained it:

It’s just like a private equity play: you get into the business, you optimize it, grow the subscribers.

Then I transition those subscribers over to Contrarian Thinking. Hopefully the newsletter is still growing at that time.

[Then I] turn around and sell it to somebody else. And they usually want to run the business as a newsletter themselves and they want to keep running that newsletter. So I would actually have less value if all I did was take the subscribers and pull them into Contrarian Thinking. Instead, I act as though Contrarian Thinking is a sponsor or a guest blogger or a guest post.

– Codie on the Bright Ideas podcast

When I first heard this I was like 🤯

I’ve heard of other newsletter operators purchasing other newsletters just for the email list, transitioning those subscribers to their newsletter, and then “killing” the list.

But what Codie does is way smarter from a business perspective. Of course it’s more work, but you’re already continuing to build an asset you can sell in a few months.

Some people flip houses. Codie flipped newsletters.

2. The Anonymous Content Strategy

Growing an audience is hard. But I can’t imagine trying to do it behind an anonymous brand.

But Yossi Levi did exactly that with the Car Dealership Guy.

He didn’t just build an anonymous brand, he grew one extremely fast – to the tune of over 400,000 Twitter followers and 65,000 newsletter subscribers.

Yossi started the Car Dealership Guy account on Twitter where he was sharing all sorts of behind-the-scenes information about the auto industry and things most car dealerships wouldn’t want you to know.

Seriously, he was making many people in the industry quite mad. But, he was helping so many consumers and other dealer’s in the process, which was his goal the whole time.

And building that trust at scale was one of the reasons he grew so quickly. But he wasn’t just haphazardly posting. To execute this content strategy, Yossi created a dialed-in system for building this out.

While he now has multiple team members helping him produce the content, he’s still heavily involved with it.

4-Week Content Sprints

Yossi breaks up his content into 4-week sprints.

He’ll plan 4 weeks at a time, building out a content calendar and plugging in one of 16 types of content for each day of the week.

ABC Posts

Yossi breaks down each piece of content into 10-15 different content buckets and each of those types has its own letter assigned to it.

For example, an “A” post is a short-form stat that generally doesn’t have context.

Here is the list of some other post types:

• Short-form stat with no context
• Long-form stats
• Community engagement posts (example)
• User-generated content
• CDG self-promotion
• Meme (example)
• Breaking news/press release
• Best car deals
• Podcast post (example)
• Podcast teaser (example)

This is what I imagine it looks like to some extent:

I love how formulaic this is.

Each day has 2 (or more) pieces of content that get slotted in. And he color codes each one to make sure he can see a good mix of those various content types throughout the month.

They plan out the next 4 weeks of content ahead of time so it’s merely a matter of slotting in that type of content on that specific day.

4 weeks is enough time to plan a bit in advance, but still leaves room for change and breaking news to get added into the mix.

3. Turning 6 Subscribers Per Day Into 10k

Ali’s newsletter is called First1000, where he shares insights into how startups get their first 1000 users.

So it’s probably no coincidence that when Ali started the newsletter, his goal was to get 1,000 subscribers in the first 6 months.

He did the math and figured out that he needed to get 6 subscribers per day to reach that goal.

He knew he could get 6 people per day even if he had to ask people manually to subscribe. But he wanted to try growth experiments to get those people faster.

He decided that on Sundays and Mondays he would try these growth experiments. And if he didn’t hit his goal for that week, he would go and do the tried and tested methods to get 40 subscribers for the week.

The Growth Experiments

Let’s look at all of the things he tried to get to 10k subscribers.

Some of these worked, and some of them failed miserably for the amount of time he ended up putting into them.

Here is the full list I’ve curated from some of his posts here and here.

Growth Experiment	Subscribers Gained
2nd Product Hunt Launch	4250
Referrals	2034
Mentions from The Diff and Replit founder	475
Cross Promotions	465
Twitter	330
SEO	296
PM Resources	274
HN Feature- Doordash	219
Hada News	180
Clubhouse Room	170
HN Feature – Slice (Guy Kawasaki shoutout)	117
MENA Investors Database	73
Joshua @ DoNotPay Retweet	73
Facebook Alma Matter University Group	63
Clubhouse Invites	55
#Intro Slack Communities	55
Screenshots	50
“Who leaves their email on twitter?”	31
Listing on every Newsletter Directory	28
Cold Emailing 1000+ founders	27
Personal Linkedin Posts	25
Reaching out to 1700+ Accelerators	22
Indie Hacker Posts	22
GrowthHackers Posts	22
News Hada – Blocked	19
Interviews	17
Free Ad credit – $450	17
Guest Postings	13
Messaging People he knows	12
Google/Twitter Ads – $212	11
Hacker News 27 posts	6
Giveaways on Linkedin	6
1st Product Hunt Launch	2
Adding newsletter to email signature	2
Adding friends without their consent	2
All In Merch Store	1
Trump Tweet Archive	0
Invites to invite-only software	0
Betalist Launch	0

All of these were things he tried on his journey to 10,000 subscribers. He reached 10k in March of 2021, so that means that all of this happened within an 8-month timeframe.

This intentionality helped him blow past his goal of 1,000 subscribers.

Product Hunt

Ali’s first Product Hunt launch was something he cobbled together in 15 minutes and he got the results of a 15-minute launch as well: 2 subscribers.

Then when Trump got banned from Twitter in 2021, Ali built a “Trump Tweet Archive” tool that was essentially an updated list of all of Trump’s tweets.

It got him 2 subscribers.

His second (technically third) Product Hunt launch for First 1000 was the most successful tactic to get him to 10k subscribers, but it wasn’t easy.

He spent over 100 hours planning for that launch to make sure it went well, and was able to get over 4,000 subscribers in a matter of days with that one.

He ended up interviewing the founders of a product that went viral on Product Hunt to figure out what they did to make it work. He said he spent hours on the phone with them and reverse-engineered their strategy.

Then he started implementing his own version of that, and it worked.

4. Getting to 5k Subscribers Before Publishing the First Issue

Tom’s newsletter, Strategy Breakdowns, now has over 55k subscribers. But 74% of his subscribers came from LinkedIn — all in the first 6 months.

In fact, Tom had grown his email list to 5,000 subscribers before he even published his first edition.

If you’re like me, you’re probably a little jealous and just as confused.

“Uhhhh could you spill the beans on how you managed that, Tom?”

Well Tom is a bit of a LinkedIn savant.

Through trial and error and a lot of posting, he’s figured out what kinds of posts work really well on LinkedIn, and how to convert those impressions into subscribers.

And this period also helped him figure out what kind of content he enjoyed writing about.

LinkedIn Growth Tips 🌵

Here are some of the tactical strategies Tom’s used to grow his LinkedIn audience.

1. Outbound Engagement

For around half an hour before you post, make sure you’re commenting on larger creators posts in your niche.

Tom actually said this was the single best growth hack:

He said at a minimum he tries to do 15-20 outbound comments a day, although I have a feeling that some days it’s double or more than that.

But comment at least that many times before you publish your own post. Think of it like giving before you expect anything in return.

2. The First Hour After Posting

The first hour right after you post is the most important time.

Tom told Dylan Redekop that if a post gets ~100 reactions in the first hour, it will likely end up with around 500 or so reactions after 48-72 hours.

If you get around 200+ reactions, you can pretty reliably expect the post to go a little viral (2,000+ reactions).

3. Engage Like a Real Person

This one goes for almost any social platform I can think of. You need to actually engage with other people that comment or like the post.

This is social media after all 🙂

Tom makes sure to engage with all comments that come in within the first 30 to 60 minutes after posting.

After that, he’ll take a break and come back later in the day to continue engaging with the comments.

4. Add Multiple Comments

Including comments on your own post with bonus information to drive more engagement. You can add things like:

• Include a bonus item in this space. If you’re posting about the 10 best ways to do X, you can include an 11th in the comments.
• Quote by a famous person about that topic
• More insights or even a picture of you doing the thing you talked about

There are a ton of possibilities here. In my opinion, this strategy is starting to feel a little overused, so you’ll want to put more effort into what you’re including there and do it well.

But it still seems to be working. Here’s a recent post of Tom’s where he does this:

5. Adding a Call to Action

Including a link in your post really decreases the reach of your post, and Tom estimates it hurts the reach of your post by 75%.

You want to optimize the first hour for engagement, keeping in mind those metrics we talked about above, but after it gets a bit of traction you can include a link.

It will still decrease your reach, but at that point, you’ve hopefully already hit “escape velocity” with your post which will negate the downsides of editing the post and including a link.

6. Don’t Be the First to Comment

Tom said that LinkedIn also penalizes your post if you’re the first to comment on that post.

After 10 minutes, you can add a comment with a newsletter link, after someone else has hopefully commented as well.

7. Converting LinkedIn Engagement into Newsletter Subscribers

An audience on social is great, but email is better. And Tom has been able to get his followers to become newsletter subscribers.

Shortly after starting Strategy Breakdowns, Tom had a few posts that went insanely viral.

This one took him from 5,000 subscribers to over 7,640 subscribers.

That’s over 2,600 subscribers…from one post. I don’t know about you, but I’d love some newsletter growth like that.

However, not all viral posts gain subscribers.

Sure you can post “10 websites that are so valuable they should be illegal” (please don’t), but if your content is not related to that topic, it’s purely a dopamine game.

Quality over quantity wins when you’re trying to build an email list.

5. Optimizations that led to 1.5M Subscribers

Dan Ni tried all sorts of things to grow the TLDR newsletter. But primarily, he invested heavily in paid growth.

Since he was making such a hefty investment to get subscribers to his sign-up page, he did all sorts of things to optimize conversions.

(The last thing you want to do is spend money on a click-through to your landing page and then light that money on fire with a bad experience or poor pitch.)

And all his optimizations got his landing page to eventually convert 40% of visitors.

In case you don’t know, that is a great conversion rate.

Here are some of the tweaks that Dan used to get his landing page converting at such a high percentage:

1. Make your website lightning fast ⚡️

One of the bigger improvements you can make to your website or landing pages is improving the page speed. This is especially true if you are running paid ads and/or have a lot of people coming to your site on mobile devices.

There are a ton of benefits to doing this, namely improving your audience’s experience, but also improving your sign-up rate.

An easy (and free!) way to get started with this is using Cloudflare. There is a little bit of technical stuff required to set this up, but it’s not hard. And there are tons of YouTube videos on how to do this.

2. Adding OAuth signup buttons

Dan implemented this on his landing page and said that over 50% of mobile visitors used those buttons to sign up. Instead of having to type their email, they could just click a button to sign up with Twitter, and then Dan can add that email address to his subscriber list.

This is much more technical, but it’s doable. I looked at the directions and it seems a little intense, but I’m adding it to my future list of things to try.

As a side note, Dan has since removed those buttons, so I’m wondering if they weren’t giving him as big of a gain in conversion rate anymore.

3. Autofocusing the Cursor

This one sounds super technical, but it seems easy enough to implement.

You can add a piece of code to your email signup forms so that when someone visits the page, their cursor is already in the email box.

While this might sound like overkill, any way you can remove friction for the people visiting your page, the better.

This only works on Desktop but seems like a no-brainer to try out. Here are the directions I found that were the most helpful.

4. Minimalistic Sign-Up Page

If you look at Dan’s current sign-up page in the image above, you’ll notice that there isn’t much on the page.

And there isn’t much on his other newsletter pages, either.

That is 100% intentional.

When you set up a landing page to get people to sign up for your newsletter, you want to keep it minimal.

You don’t need to include links to all of the previous issues and paragraphs of text about what people get each week.

While you want to be clear about what this is about, too much can confuse or distract people.

I used to have the full latest issue of the newsletter on the landing page and that performed a lot worse than the current signup page because people would get distracted clicking on links and never come back.

Dan Ni, Indie Hackers post

When in doubt, take it out. 🙂

6. Video Based Cross Promotions

I haven’t seen this one done that many times – or at least not by someone who talked about it afterward.

In June 2023, Alex put out a thread and article about how Pat Walls from Starter Story grew his email list.

A month later, Pat Walls published an interview with Alex on his YouTube Channel.

The video went live in July 2023 and got over 80k views.

Alex says this “swap” got him an additional 5-10k subscribers.

Can you imagine? A “typical” swap can get maybe a few hundred subscribers.

But something like this is so unique, and ended up benefiting both sides really well.

I really think more people should give this strategy a try.

7. Justin Welsh Borrowed an Audience to Validate and Create a $1M Digital Product

Justin Welsh has become the solopreneurship guy.

In February of 2022, he recorded a podcast episode with Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole of Ship 30 For 30.

At that point, Justin had already “figured out” LinkedIn with well over 100k+ followers. And by sharing some of his strategy, he turned this one episode into a $2 million product.

He was talking with them on the show, and about 20 minutes in he said something to the effect of, “Hey guys, can I share my screen and show you how I come up with content?”

He blew everyone’s minds and took that excitement and energy and turned it into a $2M product called ContentOS.

What does this have to do with growth?

Well, Justin also went from ~30k Twitter followers during that February 2022 episode to over 150k followers just 5 months later when he made his return appearance on Dickie and Cole’s podcast.

I’m not saying his one appearance was the reason for a 120,000 increase in Twitter followers, but there’s no question in my mind that his appearance on that podcast was the impetus to his massive growth—both in audience and in income.

2 Years — What’s Next?

These growth strategies are awesome, but they’re honestly just scratching the surface of the growth strategies I’ve found over the past few years.

I’m really excited to explore more and more in our new Growth In Reverse podcast—and of course, I’ll still be sharing all the gems here in written form as well.

I’d love to know which of these growth strategies stood out to you?

Are you going to start flipping newsletters or optimize your landing page for high conversions?

Whatever you choose, I’d love to hear about it. Share it with me on LinkedIn or Bluesky and maybe you’ll find yourself in one of my deep dives.

Cheers to two years, and here’s to many more! 🥂