← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
$624k/Year From a Newsletter - How Aakash Gupta Grew His Newsletter From 0 to 105k in 3 Years. (#009)
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All right, so today I want to share some insights from a deep dive that I wrote back in March of 2024. This deep dive was into Akash Gupta and the Product growth newsletter and how akash went from 0 to 624k and annual recurring revenue from a newsletter. So I want to share this with you again because we are going to talk to Akash in a few weeks and I thought it would be interesting to kind of share this with you beforehand. Okay, so Akash had no audience in 2021 and now just a few years later, he has over 300,000 followers and at the time of writing had 105k email subscribers, which I looked and he now has 153,000 email subscribers, which is just like, all right, good job, buddy. Um, I'm excited for him. So he's been able to turn that audience into 624k annual recurring revenue with his paid newsletter about product management. So like I said, he writes a newsletter called Product Growth and he shares deep dives insights and strategies that product managers can use to get better at their jobs. While he has a huge audience now, he was not always an influencer in this space and we'll get into that. But first let's take a look at how he makes his money. So the main way Akash makes money is through his paid newsletter on Substack. Um, he charges $15 a month or $150 a year. And there's also an option where you can pay 300 or more which will get you a call with Akash as well as the annual subscription. And this is a super smart option because the people he's targeting generally have money to spend. Uh, their employers will pay for this kind of thing so that they can get better at their job. So giving an open ended subscription is a great idea. Uh, the average newsletter conversion rate from free to paid, from my research I found around 4% convert. Now that can drop quite a bit as you grow your audience. So that's in the early days. So even if we went with like a smaller number, I think he's still doing really well. Uh, when he had 104,000 subscribers, I estimated he was making about 624k. Since he's now grown to 150,000 free subscribers, I mean, he's probably pushing 800,000 from the newsletter by itself. Um, again, who knows if those numbers are real? That's just me kind of backing into the numbers now. He also had a paid Twitter feed and I did look, he was still running this at the time you pay 10amonth, you get more product tips and that kind of thing on Twitter itself. So not even on Substack, not through his newsletter. This is like an additional bonus thing you can get which is pretty cool. And it's still running. He also has a book that he self published called the Ultimate Guide to Getting a PM Job. And I looked on Amazon, he has this listed for 29.99. Put pretty much all of the versions, Kindle paperback, that's the price. Um, but it's actually super smart if you dig into this a little bit because you actually get this included with your membership as a paid subscriber. So you get the virtual copy as a paid subscriber, which so smart it almost makes you feel like you're immediately getting $30 of your money back because you're paying for this and getting it free. Uh, he also does coaching with a, on a site called Intro Code. Um, he has 15 minute sessions all the way up to 60 minute sessions, uh, for an hour of his time. You're spending about a thousand dollars to get that. But with his experience and that kind of thing could be worth it for you. It looks like he still does have some availability. So I think he's still doing this, but I'm not sure if this is like a lucrative thing for him at this point. Now with his growth timeline, I actually started it around March of 2021 and he was writing beforehand before that online just about other kinds of things. He was talking about crypto, he was talking about Tom Brady's career and lessons learned from that. But he really started honing in on the product space right around March of 2021. So super interesting. He realized, I think that people wanted to learn from his experience and he was able to answer questions that they might have had. So very smart for him to niche down at that point. So I pulled out four different growth levers that I saw for him going from zero to 625k. Uh, first discovery platforms. I was just mentioning Twitter and LinkedIn on his growth journey. He uses them differently along different stages of his journey and we'll get into that. But that was the first one. The second one is probably my favorite. Is optimizing for the internal share. I'll explain more on what that means. But he essentially found this growth hack buried in his data of people who are paying for his newsletter and started doubling down on that. The third one is something we can all do, creator collabs. Uh, he comes together with different creators and, and it can be Very impactful. I've seen him do this more and more recently, so I think it's still working. And last but not least, learn from top creators. You know, I love this one. Learning from creators and how they've done certain things. And if you can replicate that in your own journey, super smart. So let's dig into each of these. All right, so on his discovery platforms, he wasn't really planning on doing social media, I'll say that. But he learned early on that posting his content on his website was not going to get him the eyeballs and visibility he wanted. So one of his first really well researched pieces that he spent a bunch of time creating was about how Roblox was becoming the Shopify of gaming. And he hit publish on that piece March 26th of 2021. Um, he spent a good bit of time. This was like, fascinating. He had a bunch of numbers in here, but once he hit publish, he actually heard crickets. Did not have a huge audience at that point. So him hitting publish on his website like no one was there to read it. Essentially he didn't have distribution, so he got frustrated and ended up posting the article on LinkedIn or at least some piece of it, and then had them link over to his website. And once he did that is when things really started to change for him. He posted on LinkedIn, got 60 likes, which might not seem like a ton, but compared to his practically zero from his website, this is a lot. Um, if you're looking, if you're watching the video, you can see, uh, he put a couple of paragraphs about what he was talking about and then just said, roblox is the Shopify of gaming, and had a link off to his website and said it did pretty well. So that was the first, like, inkling for him to realize, like, oh, I need to get some distribution here. The second piece of this came when he, after he started writing more and more, he discovered David Perel's Right of Passage course. It's an expensive course. At the time it was costing $4000 for the cohort. But he had seen that Paki McCormick's newsletter was blowing up and he had actually taken David Perel's course. And so Akash was like, all right, I'm going to do this. And through that course, he learned about David's philosophy of the personal monopoly. So essentially you want to be the only person creating content around a specific topic. You can equate this to kind of like a blue ocean strategy. I didn't actually read that book, but I feel like the concept is pretty clear. Lots of people write about product management, but only Akash had his unique experiences working with product management teams in both B2B and B2C companies. So he had that like double experience, if you will. He leaned into that niche and that's when his newsletter and social media really started taking off. At the time, he was still working his full time job and writing on the side. But early in 2023 he was let go from his job and now had a full time focus to grow the newsletter. And I redid this growth timeline and you can just see this spike. He was humming along. He probably had, well estimate about 25,000 Twitter followers, probably about about 20, 25,000 email subscribers and let's call it a hundred thousand LinkedIn followers. And right when he got laid off, you can just see this like almost doubles in the growth timeline, which is just so cool to see, like when you actually spend time on something and you focus on the one thing, it can really pay off. Okay, so it's not just posting on social and figuring out how to get people over to your newsletter. He had this strategy, what he called top of funnel content. And instead of his content being solely focused on product management and questions about product management, he started sharing stories with much broader appeal. So he talked about tech and other more quote unquote, viral topics in general, but in a way that product managers would still be interested in. Some of these viral tweets that happened, one was about Barbie, the movie, the marketing stunts that they did. So he had this whole thread about their marketing stunts and how they made $337 million opening weekend. And that tweet thread alone got 40 million views, which is just like a lot. That's a lot of people seeing your content. He also wrote one about the Las Vegas Sphere, which got 25 million views. And it's just like, yes, this is like a ton of people. So his following probably grew quite a bit from these. You could make the argument that these aren't going to attract the right kinds of readers that you necessarily want. But Akash actually felt the opposite way. He said he was doing these because he felt like it would grow the whole pie of potential readers, not just like focusing on specific types of people. But he ended up getting hired at Apollo I.O. as their VP of Product and had to dial back some of the content so he could devote more time to his full time job job. And so he stopped doing some of these viral tweets at that point. But I think at that point he had Kind of hit that escape velocity of like, all right, you have enough subscribers, you have enough followers, you don't really need these viral posts anymore. So you can kind of condense your focus of your content down into actually just product stuff. And if we go back to the growth timeline, you can see like right where it levels off is where he stopped doing these. So again, it's very clear, like, once you figure out what's working, focus on it, but you don't have to do it forever. All right, let's get into the optimize for the internal share, because this is, this is really cool. So in May of 2023, he stumbled into a quote unquote growth hack for his newsletter. He wrote a piece called the Ultimate Guide to Onboarding. And it went a little viral for him in terms of readers. Like, the topic itself was just good. But he actually realized, like, he dug into the back end of his data and he realized that a product manager from the Meta company, Facebook and Instagram's umbrella corporation had actually read the piece. And they must have shared it around with their internal teams because he was seeing a ton of new subscribers coming from Meta. And so, I mean, why else would that have happened unless they shared it? So he realized that these big companies have huge learning and development budgets, so they can easily afford a $150 a year subscription to a newsletter, especially if it's going to help them be better at their job. And of course, on the Ultimate Guide to Onboarding, the only way that you could read the full thing was to become a paying member. So if you scroll, you know, you can read some of it and then about half, probably a third of the way down, it's like, oh, you can keep reading, you gotta pay or try a seven day trial. Um, so he realized that this was happening and a light bulb went off for him. He said writing more pieces like that that can potentially go viral within these big tech companies with learning and development budgets is my number one goal. So it's just like so smart. He's seeing what's happening in the data and continuing to double down on it. So now he goes back through the pieces that drove the most paid subscriptions and re raised them to see how he can replicate that in the future. And he started reverse engineering how to get more people to share internally with their teams. He said this built in a great flywheel. He actually created a visual for it. So it starts with input, which is I write better. Deep dives the action. Readers share these with coworkers and friends and the output, this grows the paid user base. So super simple flywheel, but it totally works. And the part that's not pictured is also his deep research into topic selection, which leads to even more referrals in house at larger companies. Okay, let's dig into creator collaborations. So Akash has done several of these collaborations over the years, over the last few years, and he's still doing them. I actually went and looked recently and he's doing quite a few. Um, and since we know based on his optimizing for the internal share that he follows the numbers and double down, doubles down on what's working, I have to imagine that collaborations are doing quite well for him. So at the time when I was writing this, I looked at his last 10 posts and four of them were collabs of some sort. Whether he has someone come in and write a full article or he co authors a piece with someone who has like a niche specialty, like how to become an AI product manager, you can do something like that. And the cool thing about these collabs on Substack is the other creator can publish them to their like, newsletter feed, essentially. So all of their followers then see that article and they're like, hey, who's this other guy? Let me subscribe to his newsletter. And vice versa. So these smaller creators also get some great visibility out of writing a piece on his newsletter. The these can be a great way to get in front of other audiences as well as giving your readers more robust content. Like we don't know every single thing about a certain topic. So bringing in guest experts can really help you fill in those gaps. And I've just seen him do a number of these. Let's go see if we can find some from recent posts. Um, yeah, I mean today is January 14th. His most recent article is on January 8th. But on January 7th he posted a collaboration post. It's actually a podcast episode that he now has people on as well. But on December 26 he published the Product Leaders Ultimate Guide to Process Changes. And it's a three person collaboration, so these are definitely still working for him, which is really cool to see. Okay, number four, last but not least, learn from top creators, obviously. You know, I like this one. Akash talks about how he studied the work of Lenny Rachitsky. Could call him the godfather of product. And Justin Welsh about how he refined his systems and has refined his systems based on what they do. He mentions Justin's repurposing strategy, which I dove into in a prior deep dive, which I'll link to down in the show notes, Akash will spend the nine to five hours of the day working on his newsletter articles, his deep dives, but then on the off hours, he'll actually work on repurposing that into tweets and LinkedIn posts. And from Lenny, he learned to start working on multiple pieces at once. And this makes you a lot less stressed each week because you're not on the content hamster wheel. When you start working on multiple pieces, you have a head start on the next week's article or deep dive, and you can kind of come back to certain things if you get stuck. Akasha says that Lenny is so chill and a lot less stressed than other creators, and he strives to follow that lead. So I think that's fascinating. I also included a few ways of how you can replicate Akasha's success and I want to share those with you here. So try out top of funnel content. While it's not great for converting paid subscribers, necessarily, widening the net just a little bit on social media can really help you grow your audience and lead to free subscribers who can eventually turn into paid subscribers. Akash eventually gave up on this because it wasn't providing as much value as it did in the beginning. But I do think there is something about building your following up to a certain point to add credibility and get more people following you. So if you get up to, let's say, 30,000 or 50,000 LinkedIn followers, the people who then go to see your profile after that are going to be like, wow, this person is a little bit more credible than the next guy who might have 500 followers. For better or worse, I think that's just the way humans are wired. Double down on what's working is the next one. Akash regularly goes through his analytics to see which articles are driving the most paid subscriptions and figures out why they're getting so many people to subscribe. Then he starts doing more of that thing. So essentially double down, look at your data, see what's working, and keep doing more of that. You can collaborate with other creators as well. There are a number of benefits to this, which a few of which are you're giving your readers a break from the typical content style. So instead of them just hearing your take on everything every week, they can hear from other people, get a different outlook. Your workload's a little easier because it's being shared. Now, this could be said that now it could be said that having another person write an article with you is actually harder, but I don't know, it could also be easier. Building relationships is probably the lifeblood of a creator, in my opinion. They just carry with you through your life so you don't have to worry about losing them or something else happening. You get in front of the other person's audiences and vice versa. You and they might share their piece with their audience on both social and their newsletter, and you can do the same for them. And you're learning from other creators. I think this is underrated in a sense. We often get so bogged down with thinking we know quite a bit about our own topic. But once you have someone come in and give you a different frame of mind, it can really help unlock certain things for you and for your readers. So I think the X factor of newsletter growth is building relationships and collaborations are great, great way to kickstart that process. Okay, that was my deep dive into Akash Gupta. If you enjoyed that, let me know. I can do more of these kind of deep dive walkthroughs. And I thought it would be an interesting idea because unless you were subscribed to my newsletter at that point, you probably haven't seen this article yet or heard of this content or seen how Akash has grown his newsletter. So I wanted to kind of repurpose this and share this with you guys, especially since later this week we're going to be releasing an interview with Akash, um, kind of sharing what he's been doing now since he's grown from a hundred thousand to 150,000 followers or subscribers and just really taken off. He's launched a podcast and done quite a few other things. So I'm excited to share that with you as well, but wanted to give you this primer into his story before we do that, just so you have a little bit more context. If you enjoyed this, let me know. I will happily do more of them. If not. Oh well, sorry for if I wasted any of your time. I hope that.