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Caitlin Burgoyne
I've never wanted sponsored revenue to be a primary revenue source. Like, I don't care that much about Mr. Because I know that, like, monthly recurring revenue and content also means monthly recurring work. Like, there's nothing more frustrating than when you see a creator that is, like always running a sale.
Chanel
That was Caitlin Burgoyne. Caitlin is the entrepreneur and creator behind the popular why We Buy newsletter where she shares buyer psychology tips you can implement quickly to make more money with your business. Since launching the newsletter in 2021, she has gained significant traction with nearly 75,000 subscribers and over 200,000 followers on VAR various social platforms, earning her just shy of a million dollars in revenue in 2024. This year, she is aiming to double that and hit over $2 million in revenue in the business. If you missed it, I wrote a deep dive on Caitlin's newsletter growth and recorded a video walkthrough of that. So check out the links in the description to get some more context there first. But today we're talking to Caitlin about how she built the newsletter, what her plans are for turning this business into a multi 7 figure 1 in 2025 and so much more. Now on to the show. Well, Caitlin, I'm excited to have you on today because you have so much of a backstory with marketing growth, failure, successes. And the one thing I do want to talk about first is you actually started this why We Buy newsletter in late 2020, and then quickly you've scaled it up monetarily, which is exciting. So in 2022, you hit 400,000 in annual revenue. 2023, you said you crossed 600,000. And then last year you hit a million dollars. And so that gap is, you know.
Caitlin Burgoyne
What, we were 30, 000 below that. I was estimating what it was going to be and we were. But like, for the point of, like, for. Yes, as of January, like in January 5th, we hit it, but it was like five days. That's amazing. So, like, to be fair, minor details, quite so close.
Dylan
For all intents and purposes, it was a million dollars.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yeah.
Dylan
Yeah.
Chanel
And you say now your mission is to build this into a $2 million business while getting lazier. And I love that. Can you talk about how you plan on going from almost a million to 2 million?
Caitlin Burgoyne
I can share, like, what's under the wraps right now. So we have a few lines of revenue and I would like to have. I don't want to have everybody's so excited about, like, mrr for me, I'm not that, like, I don't care that much about. Mr. Because I know that like monthly recurring revenue and content also means monthly recurring work and like major in terms of like content creation, community managed and all that kind of stuff. So that's not necessarily my goal. But what I want to do is I want to create more predictability in our monthly sales. And guess what? Like a lot of businesses that are content focused and launch products and sell digital products like we do, it's very spiky right now. So we might have like, you know, a month where we're doing like 400,000 and then the next two months like 10,000. Like it's very, very spiky. And so my goal is to smooth that out and to actually be doing some what I'm calling kind of like monthly recurring flash sales that from the audience's perspective won't be monthly, but from our perspective it will smooth revenue. So the goal is we've got a few different products. I want to create some kind of like flash sales around those and I want to segment our list so that we're running those sales to a segment of the list. Probably like one third. It'll probably get a little bit more, a little bit more complex than this. But like a third of the people will see that that'll lead to like, you know, 25, 35, $40,000 in sales. And then it's just we're not creating anything new, we're just running a splash sale to a segment of the audience. So that's part of the goal which is like take the things we're doing and Bill, use urgency to sell those things more effectively. Because anybody in this world knows that launches are really effective. And then once that thing's available all the time, people just kind of take their time. They decide when they're going to come. And so that's piece one. The other thing is we're building a better offer suite. So I've been running why we buy with a few of our own products while I'm also the co founder of Unignorable and Unignorable or Winding down because I want to be able to focus fully on our own product suite. So I'm launching at least one new thing that will kind of be an introduction to our new product Painkiller. And then I've got another offer that will live underneath that that is still in development. So new products, rolling flash sales and smoothing monthly revenue is kind of the, the short version.
Chanel
I love it. So is it safe to say that most people won't be able to buy those Past products. Unless they're on the newsletter in a certain segment, they'll still be available, but.
Caitlin Burgoyne
The deals will only be to people on the newsletter. So it's nice because, like, on social, it won't be like sale, sale, sale all the time. Because, like, there's nothing more frustrating, in my opinion, than when you see a creator that is like, always running a sale. Like, or you go to their sales page and it's like, limited time offer, and it's always fucking there. And I'm like. You're like, I'm an idiot. This isn't a limited time offer. This is always happening. And it makes me feel very frustrated. So I would much rather be authentic about the thing being limited, but limit to it to a portion of our audience.
Chanel
Okay, that's super interesting. And you have this growth flywheel that you kind of outlined for getting subscribers. Um, I don't know if this still holds true, but you're paying for subscribers and then you're segmenting them based on their needs, like, kind of like what you just talked about. And then you're gonna have like a personalized welcome sequence, which is that already running too?
Caitlin Burgoyne
That's running and that's doing okay. But we're not doing a sale inside of that. We're not doing a deal necessarily. It's just like softly selling our products. And since implementing that, we doubled our digital product sales. But I think that what will be more impactful than that is, is people that have been around for a little while that have kind of like, been curious about these products. If we give them a reason to buy today instead of tomorrow, like, which I think you can create that kind of urgency with a special promotion. I think we're going to see an increase. So what we have now is we've got kind of our, like, I'd say our core product we want to drive people to is this product, Painkiller, which is a messaging system that helps you to fix your messaging. And we've got a really great lead magnet that's converting super great on meta ads right now. So, like, I think it's like a buck fifty we're getting new subscribers for, which is killer. But the sales sequence we have for that, we're still tinkering with it to like, get the return on ad spend as high as we want it to be. So that I foresee being another path to kind of this lazy approach to 2 million.
Chanel
I love it.
Dylan
Did you mention how you were segmenting your audience? Because you just said you're like, maybe segment Them a third get an offer and that kind of thing. Like, how could you talk about a little bit how you're thinking through that?
Caitlin Burgoyne
So I'm at the early stages of thinking through that, actually, and I'm going to be talking with. I'm a Kit user and we're talking with my growth manager kicks. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do that because obviously the easiest thing is like you take the audience, we've got about 63,000, so 21,000 on segment A, 21,000 and segment B, 21,000 in segment C. Remove actual past buyers and then rotate them through the three offers. Like, that would probably be the easiest way because we have three offers of. The goal for me is like, there's always an offer going on on a monthly basis, but they only see a Flash sale every third month, unless we're launching something new, in which case it'd be. They'd be part of that. So that's what I'm thinking about at the simplest level. But we also have the factor that people that do become new to the list tell us what they're interested in and, like, what their pain point is. Those ones would then be cycled in to the most relevant offer for them. So there's going to be kind of a. It'll be the group, but then it will also be new. People automatically go into the most relevant segment. So I'm figuring out the mechanics of how to do that.
Dylan
And would those just. Maybe you haven't thought this through quite thoroughly yet, but with those new subscribers also be. Would they be getting multiple offers at the same time or would they be like, excluded from that? Kind of.
Caitlin Burgoyne
They're in a welcome sequence and they're excluded from that. Yes. They wouldn't see that at the same time.
Dylan
Wow. Nice. Okay. Very interesting.
Chanel
Sophisticated. I like it.
Dylan
Yeah.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Well, it hasn't worked. So in my brain it works. We'll see how it works in the.
Chanel
Real world, I guess just selfishly, how are you keeping track of how all of those things function? And so if something breaks where this.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Is the main event. So we have built out a internal dashboard that's monitoring our key sources of revenue. So it looks at meta ads, it's looking at Kit, it's looking at our landing pages. It's somewhat manual. And one. You know, one thing I'm hoping that we can figure out with Kit is Kit's really good at showing you where somebody came in, and it's really good at monitoring if a sale came through, how it came through. So you can see the specific email or the specific segment that they were in. What it's not so good at is the middle of an automation. So, like, I want to be able to know where are the leaks? Like, if I have this complex automation, where is it leaking out? Where are people not opening? Where are they not clicking? How do I know which emails in a specific automation I need to adjust and improve? That's something we, internally, we're still figuring out. I'm fortunate that I've got this really great analytics nerd, Bryce Crosby, who's also based here in Canada, who's helping me to build up the dashboard. He's like, he's like, this is a problem. We've got the beginning, we've got the end, we don't have the middle. I'm like, I know. So he's working on what can we be pulling from the API? How can we get a better insight into that user journey? Because as of right now, it's hard. I don't know if you guys have any tips on that, but it seems harder than it should be.
Chanel
This is why I asked you, because I'm struggling with the same thing. And like, I. I hesitate to make things too complicated. Cause I'm like, if something breaks, like, what, where am I going? Like, I don't know. Maybe we can talk more about that in a few months when you figure it out.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yes, we'll do a kind of recap.
Chanel
A recap. I love it. In the early days, you grew a lot with social media, you know, partnerships, working with other brands and that kind of thing. I'm curious what your, your growth mix, as Dylan likes to call it, looks like these days from like organic paid referrals, that kind of thing.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I mean, I'd say that it's more paid now and probably because I've been pretty shitty on the organic side. It actually been intentional about driving people to the newsletter. I used to be a lot more thoughtful about it. I need to get back to it. Like, you know, every Monday before a newsletter was sent, I would do a little teaser. And then the Tuesday right before it went out, I would kind of do another one. Sharing a testimonial, somebody who loves the newsletter. I used to do that consistently and I stopped doing that consistently. And guess what? Organic growth has not been as good. So it's like go back to doing the thing that, you know, works. But most of our growth right now, like, I would say a portion of it's coming organic. A bigger portion is coming from meta and from Sparkloop paid partnerships. So I, at this point easily, I would say 65% is paid versus 35% organic because Caitlin's not promoting. This is all on me, something I need to work on.
Chanel
Well, it sounds like you have a lot of other things happening in the business at this time too, so too many things.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Something that like, I always try to remind myself like, you know, less is more. And so there's a few things that we need to put in place. I've shared this publicly, so I'll share it on the podcast. Like, I'm hoping that my husband and I are looking to have another baby. We are not pregnant yet, but like, so I feel like I've got this like very condensed timeframe for like working myself out of the business so that I could like actually take a mat leave because last time I did not. And so I feel like I've like, now is the time. There's like, so I'm doing a bunch right now that I probably is more than I would normally do.
Dylan
Do you have somebody else on your team helping you with all this stuff or how big is your team?
Caitlin Burgoyne
My team's small, so it's myself and a full time writer who's helping on. She writes the newsletter primarily. Now she's helping with, you know, sales sequences for the different products that we want to sell. And then I've got a part time virtual assistant who's very much a Jill of all trades. She helps with a lot of the operational stuff. And I'm looking to bring on a fractional CEO. I'm working with somebody now on a kind of like freelance basis, but my next hire will be a fractional, like operations manager because there's more to do than what I can do.
Dylan
Yeah, it sounds like you've got a decent amount going on. I think one thing that I've noticed, like, it's funny that you say, you know, you have been doing the things on social media that you, that you know, you should be doing, but yet I see you posting like I'm on LinkedIn a lot more these days than I was, say a year ago. And you're constantly coming up in my feed. So can you talk to us about even though you say you're not doing, you know, maybe what you should be doing, like what, what is your approach to, to posting on social media and growing that way.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So we run, myself and Neil Grady, we run a program called Unignorable. We're doing our last cohort right now. And the answer to this is never as satisfying as people. People want. The truth is, most days I sit down, I'm like, oh shit, I need to publish something. And like what's top of mind for me right now, what's worked before that I can rework a little bit. I'm lucky to have a bank of content, having been doing this for a few years. So I have know what's kind of like working and I can repurpose a lot of that. But that's my system. And if you talk to a lot of big creators, people like Sahil Bloom, like that's their system, they sit down and they've got kind of a bank of ideas and things that have worked and they reworked them. So when we are doing a launch, I'm much more methodical. So I'm like, okay, we're six weeks out from launching a product. What is the main message that people need to believe to be ready to buy that product? I'm going to start spreading content with that message very, very often. But right now we're in between product launches. So most of my stuff is just like reposting stuff from before and a tool that I love because it makes it easy to surface. That is hype, fury, so hyper. You can kind of like it pre populates with your, like your content. I just happen to have been tweeting for long enough that I've got a lot of content. And so if you look at my posts shamefully when we're in between launches, often it is what is either top of mind for me that day or reworking something that I posted two years ago.
Dylan
Yeah, right.
Chanel
Well, you say it like it's just like, oh, I have this bank of content. But like you worked your butt off to create that. So I would don't gloss over that because I think that's a big piece of this. So for all the people who don't have a bank of content, you will get there one day if you just keep publishing.
Caitlin Burgoyne
The consistency in the beginning is what allowed me to get to here where I can repurpose a lot.
Dylan
I remember when I took ship 30 for 30 way back in the day and Nicholas Cole was like, you want to create this like endless library basically of content that you can always kind of dip into if you need to. You don't necessarily always have to, but that's your proof that that is something that it can be very beneficial when you don't know what you need to post and it's a break.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Right. Like I think that we are. So I don't take a lot of breaks just because I happen to have a lot of content built up. But, like, there are. There are days that I don't post anything. And I think that if you're in the earlier stages where you don't have that bank of content build up, like, you know, it's okay to take a week off, maybe spend one day getting your month's worth of content ready so that you don't feel. So you're constantly on the eight ball to like, figure it out every day. It's okay to take small breaks.
Chanel
I mean, I know you're kind of repurposing stuff from the past and that kind of thing, but have you seen or how do you feel about like the state of social these days? Because I know it's changed quite a bit. So I'm curious what your thoughts are and if you think it's still as valuable as it once was.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I don't know if I've changed. I don't know if it's changed. Like, I think, I mean, X is definitely. I mean, before it was X, it was Twitter. And I loved Twitter. I loved Twitter. Like, all my friends were there, they were producing great content. They were getting great visibility on it because they were producing fun stuff. X doesn't feel the same. Like, the engagement is different on X, but more so, the tone is different. Like, what's surfacing in my feet. I'm like, I don't have enough time to be like, I'm not interested in this. And every fucking conspiracy theory that comes up every time Elon Musk shows up in my feed, Like, I don't have time to groom my feed that much. Like, just show me good stuff. It used to be good stuff, but I think part of why it's not as much good stuff anymore is because a lot of people have moved on. So I'd say that, yeah, social has changed LinkedIn. I am still, I'm. I recognize the value of that channel for my business. I find that it is a mixed bag. Like, most of the content that I actually love consuming on LinkedIn is from Unignorable alumni. Like, I love the content that they're creating and like, I don't know if I just haven't following the wrong people, but, like, I feel like there's just a lot of people, that something will go viral, then somebody else will post the exact same thing and somebody else puts the exact same thing. There's just like, just chase for eyeballs and I want more insight and original point of view thinking. And it feels like it's lacking, but there are lots of folks that are creating it. So I think that there's more people that are trying to get into the game, which means more copying more kind of like ready made formulaic content than there maybe was before because everybody's selling AI pots and like, you know, like formulas and systems and so like there's a lot of formulaic stuff, but there are also things that are people that are breaking out with like, really interesting points of view, really true story. So it's a balance. Those are the two channels I spend the most time on. And honestly I'm like thinking I need to now move to a more visual channel because I do think with the both the channels I'm on, I'm primarily writing. And I think that as it becomes effortless to write, we're going to appreciate more hearing people's voices, like on podcasts, seeing their faces show up in our reels on Instagram or on TikTok. So I'm thinking about that because it's so much more work to produce this type of content. But I think that the return on investment is going to be really high. The. Because people want that so they want to feel more connected. They want to feel like it's not just an AI generated kind of take to try to. Yeah. So I think there's. I think this type of stuff is going to be more valuable.
Dylan
Well, I think with your brand, just like when I think of why we buy, I think of the visual, like the colors, the, the emojis and like your face and everything like that. I think it really lends itself to something like even Instagram, you know, that I could see it being successful there in a lot of ways.
Caitlin Burgoyne
And I need to curate my Instagram feed too, because I feel like when I first started playing on Instagram, it was like, you know, 10 years ago. And most of the people that I feed, like follow are like the make money on the Internet. Like, here's like my like beautiful home and like I work two hours a day and like, I'm like, I need to get rid, I need to do a cleanse and like start following the people that are imbibing the kind of the stories that I want to tell. Because I feel like when I go into Instagram, like I don't like this place, it doesn't make me feel good. But because I'm not following the right.
Chanel
People, I have not done the Instagram thing very much right now. It's just a bunch of dog content.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So. Which is great. Feel good Content.
Chanel
Yeah. Well, that's all I post, too, is my dog.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So all I post is pictures of my son. And the only reason I post them there is because I want to use filters so that I can then share on Facebook where his, like, older relatives are. So, like, Instagram is essentially just a tool for filters for me at this stage. Like, my whole, like, bio, it says, this is where I share random pictures for friends and family. But you can follow, like, you know, on X and, like. So I need. But as an entrepreneur, I'm like, I'm being stupid. Like, this is a channel I could easily be repurposing content on. It wouldn't even have to necessarily be video content or. Or image content. Like, I. You see a lot of folks that are repurposing. You know, I think that most of Justin Welsh's posts are just pictures.
Chanel
I was just going to say that.
Caitlin Burgoyne
His tweets and like. Like, I could so easily be doing that. And the fact that I'm not is just me being a stick in the mud and being like, I don't like this place. I don't want to play here.
Chanel
That's funny. Well, I lurked on Twitter for probably 10 years before I posted anything, so.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Thank you for posting. Yeah. Right.
Chanel
So maybe someone wants you to post on Instagram.
Dylan
I'd follow that for sure. I'm sure Chanel would do. Yeah. You have two followers right there.
Caitlin Burgoyne
All right, perfect. Well, it is. It is in the kind of, like, 2025 plans. It's like, I'm gonna. I need to do it. I need to bring somebody on the team that can actually get excited about it, because I really feel like, as a creator, your energy is going to dictate your output and your success on a channel. And, like, if you don't like a channel and you don't want to hang out there, you're not going to be successful there. But if you've got a bank of content, like I happen to, and you've got somebody who's, like, really good at the channel and likes it, and they can kind of take that and rework it, then why wouldn't you?
Dylan
I think that'd be smart. Be a good chance to run an experiment, at least. Before you came on, me and Chanel were talking about some of the experiments you've run in the past. A few came to mind. One was a podcast that you started back in, like, Covid days, like, 2020. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about that experience?
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yeah. As you guys know, doing A podcast. Like, podcasts are awesome. They're also like, an enormous amount of work and discoverability is hard. And so we ran it and I loved it because it allowed me to connect with a lot of marketers that I may not have otherwise gotten to connect with. One of the. One of my early interviews was with Ren Fishkin, and then like, you know, six months later, he invited me to a founder's retreat in Italy and that actually got canceled because of COVID But then a year or two years later, we did go and it was nice. So I love podcasts. I ran that as an experiment and I had a team member at the time who was helping me to produce it. And when I got pregnant, my first baby, I was trying to figure out, like, am I at a stage to like, step out of the business and like, still keep this full time person on? And just. The business wasn't at that stage. So I ended up letting him go. And it didn't make sense to continue the podcast on my own because I was like, I think you podcast with like a baby, an infant in my arm. This isn't gonna work. But I'm actually, that is something I'm considering. It's like, if I. I think a podcast would probably be the smartest way to produce some really great content that is more intimate than what I'm doing on LinkedIn and Twitter and sorry X and then be able to share that across other channels. So it is something that's on my, like, consideration list. But that experiment, it worked in the sense that, like, the. Actually when I look at the podcast, the podcast did really, really, really well. Like, but to me, I was like, it was way too much effort for the impact at that time in the business. Um, so doing it again now and with what I've learned and now that I have a better vehicle for discovery to actually get people to the podcast, it would make a lot of sense to do it again.
Chanel
I remember in some of the episodes, maybe all of them, you had promoted like a lead magnet. Do you have, like, don't even remember.
Caitlin Burgoyne
What that lead magnet was.
Chanel
I don't either at this point, but I'm remembering when I was researching for the deep dive, I was like, wait, she. There was a. You almost had it as like your sponsor. I was curious if, like, it was driving any subscribers, but it probably was.
Caitlin Burgoyne
But, like, that was so long ago. I have a very horrible memory.
Chanel
Like, so do I. So I don't know why I brought.
Caitlin Burgoyne
This up without having, like, outlining a product. And I'm like, oh my God, this is like so good. And then like find like a random like document in coda from like two years. Or I'm like, I already spent a week thinking about this two years ago. And none of that is top of mind.
Chanel
Oh, it was a customer ranking calculator.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Oh, I still use that and I love it. And I'm actually working on building a GPT around that right now. It's part of a couple of my programs and I don't call it a calculator anymore. I call it a scorecard. But it essentially allows you to identify, you know, five or six potential customer segments that you could serve. Because this is a huge problem that a lot of business owners have, which is they like they've bought in this idea like I need to niche down. And by niche down, generally what they think that means is like I'm going to go after seven figure entrepreneurs who want to pay me a lot of money. They're not thinking enough about like the value that their product delivers, the problems that their customers have, who's actually dissatisfied with other solutions. So this tool allows you to identify six potential customer segments you could serve and then rank them on dimensions that are relevant to their transformation and to your business to help you identify who might be the best fit customer. And it's an exercise that I still use myself all the time. It's really useful. And now I'm working on like what does a more thoughtful version of this look like? And I'm building that out right now as a GPT so you'll see that lead magnet come back. I love it.
Dylan
Very cool.
Chanel
Building out like almost like product business in a box with these GPTs because you're building, okay, so you have figure out which customer you're targeting, then you have like your messaging and then I feel like the next step is to be like, what do they actually want?
Caitlin Burgoyne
Very savvy. So they're like, when I think about, when I reflect on the customers who've gotten the most value out of our products being unignorable, painkiller, wallet opening, words that love the newsletter, that see like a huge transformation, they all tend to fall into this one category which is that they are generally service based businesses that want to scale and they want to stop selling their time for money and they assume that the way to do that is by launching a course or a community or a group coaching program. And I think that that is maybe used to be true, but looking at the future with AI no longer going to be true, there's going to be ways to scale a service based business that is highly productized, leveraging like AI agents and it's still going to deliver massive value for customers, the one to many that we all want, without necessarily having to just educate. And so I'm really excited about that future and I think a lot of service providers should be thinking about that future because we've always been in this position where it's like what's in my head. It's so hard to put it into my team's head and have them do things the same way that I do. But like, imagine if you could like train your own little army of team members to deliver the value for your clients. This is the future we're moving towards and I'm really excited about helping service based businesses to get there. And so I'm thinking a lot about the customer journey to moving towards that being the core offer. You're hearing something that I really haven't shared with a lot of people yet.
Dylan
You heard it here first.
Chanel
Yes. Are you building these bots and these agents by yourself or do you have somebody helping you or.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So it's like myself and my teammate Jordan, we build them together and we kind of just, we have a process that we use and I build some, she builds some. These take a long time. I think one of the things that really annoys me when I see like the AI experts sharing like use this prompt and it's going to blow your mind. It's like four sentences with a few. Fill in the blanks. Like our bots take a day to build. They're based on. Usually we're feeding them a ton of context, setting information or frameworks or examples to help them to produce results. No. You know, it's very common for us to spend a whole day to create one bottle. Like and so there's, I think that there's a huge opportunity to like. But the thing that I think that we're really good at is taking existing frameworks or our own frameworks and then training the bot in that way of thinking so that they can produce outcomes that are actually way more valuable than what people are used to. So I recently had a really great freelance writer, he's working on one of these, these Flash sales sequences that we're going to start doing. And he's awesome. And he had looked at our wallet opening word product and he looked at it as a copywriter and he's like, I'm a conversion copywriter. I'm really good at what I do. I probably don't need this thing. He never bought it. And so now he's work. He was helping me to write copy to promote it, and he. I gave him access to it. Of course he could explore it. And he played with the boss. He's like, holy shit. He's like. Like, whenever anybody tries to sell me on their boss, I think they're going to be garbage, and they always are, so I just assumed yours were too. He's like, this is really effing good. Like, how are you doing this? I'm like, I should tell people. I should help them learn to do this, too. So that's part of kind of like what we're maybe working towards. I'm still in the customer discovery phase and doing interviews with, like, past customers, trying to figure out if that's the direction we want to go in. But every conversation I've had has been, how are you doing this? I would pay for just those, like, show me how to make. Mine is good.
Chanel
So I was getting ready to say, if you just like record a loom or record your screen for a day, I'll pay you like, a grand for it.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Well, there's going to be. What I'm thinking for me to test this out is there's going to be for painkiller, there's going to be a painkiller pro tier, which gives you access to the bots, but it actually gives you access to the prompts. And it will walk through how we built them, and then you'll be able to modify them for your own use case. So right now they don't see them because they're a GPT. So they just go in, they answer a few questions generally, or they upload. In our case, we have people create a messaging strategy. They upload that, then it produces a bunch of content for them, but they're not seeing what's happening in the back end. The pro version will give them the back end and it will allow them to take them and customize and tailor them to their own use case. And it will also allow them to sell this, like, you know, fix your messaging as a package service to their clients. So it's going to be hopefully a good offer and it'll kind of validate the bigger thing we're working on.
Chanel
Sign me up.
Dylan
Yeah, that's pretty cool. That is cool. I got one more question about experiments before we hop off. We talked about the podcast briefly. You tried a LinkedIn newsletter about a year and a half ago, and I've never published a LinkedIn newsletter or anything along Those lines. I haven't talked to many people who have, a few people, but can you just tell us you did. It looks like you published about 10 editions. What. What was that? Like, why did you start? Why did you stop?
Caitlin Burgoyne
It's one of those, like, it's one of those things again, it's like, why did I stop promoting the newsletter every week? Because I got. So. I've recently been diagnosed with adhd. And once I got that diagnosis, I was like, okay, that makes still. And you know what I'm talking about.
Chanel
Same.
Dylan
I think Chanel does, too. I think we are all on the same spectrum.
Caitlin Burgoyne
There are these things that work, and they're good, and your brain is like, but I want to fly over here and chase this new, fun, shiny thing. And so that was working, and we should keep doing it. And so when I talk about this new operations manager that I want to bring in, like, one of the roles is going to be I want to find somebody who's specifically a freelancer, who's going to help us with content repurposing and help us with these few initiatives, which are, like, weekly promotions of the newsletter. Doing the LinkedIn newsletter drive people back to the other. Like, these things were working and I just stopped doing them. So if you're listening and you're not a complete squirrel brain, do these things. They were.
Dylan
So the 10 editions was literally just like, oh, I just stopped doing that.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Because I had a team member who was working on them. And then we ended up parting ways. She's doing amazing. She's helping with. She's helping with other things. But, like, I was like, well, I'm not going to keep this up because this is not my dopamine brain at all.
Dylan
Right, right, right. This feels like work.
Chanel
So interesting. So were you sharing the exact same content or was it like half of the content? And then.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So what we do, and I thought was kind of clever, is we're sharing past issues versus the most recent one. Um, so it was like, you know, this is a passage. And we were sharing only there was a lead magnet in the middle of the issue. So they would start to read. Then there would be a lead magnet that they'd have to join the list to get. Um, and I think we shared in our particular newsletter outline, there's kind of like three tips. And then it was a. I think, no, I don't think we did this. It was an idea, but we didn't end up executing it. It was. It was the whole issue. It was not the most recent one. It was a past issue. And it started with like you're reading a past issue. If you want to get the most recent one that's going to be on this topic, sign up here. And then midway through, there was a lead magnet in the issue. So everything was designed to drive them back to the newsletter. And it was working.
Dylan
And I stopped doing Clarify. When you say newsletter, you mean your actual why we buy newsletter, not the email list?
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yes. Not the LinkedIn version. Because you know what? We don't want LinkedIn to own our audience. Like ultimately we want those people on our own list.
Dylan
Exactly, exactly.
Chanel
This is why I've been so hesitant to do a LinkedIn newsletter. Because one. It's like that extra step. But also is it worth it? But sounds like it might be.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I think it absolutely is worth experimenting with.
Dylan
I think you could, you could very much just publish. You've always got a few different. I'm not. And we're not doing a whole how Chanel can improve her growth. But, but really quickly. Like you could just do a teaser section of your newsletter. Like here's the first growth lever or the first two growth levers that this creator built. You know, sign up for my newsletter and I'll send you the rest kind of thing.
Caitlin Burgoyne
That was what we were talking about doing and that would have included like having like each one would have had to have like a follow up email. But I think it will be absolutely worth the effort, especially if you've got somebody on your team that can help execute that. Cause I think in your case, I mean you spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing these businesses and the content that you produce is so effing good. That should be shared a lot. Like you should be repurposing that a lot.
Chanel
I'm thinking about doing a second weekly edition to share some of the past ones.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yes, I think, I mean, I think people would want it, right?
Chanel
Yeah, I think so. We'll see. It's another thing.
Caitlin Burgoyne
This is the thing we need to love organizing the things. And that's like, for me, that's my priority right now is finding that person who like, likes to take the stuff and like make it. Like they're great at the reorganization and like execution as opposed to me, which is great at the ideas and the execution. Then once something's working, I'm like. And next.
Chanel
Uh, amazing. Well, so I think this is a good time to talk about this new newsletter that you're doing. Can you share some of like what the new framework of the content looks like and everything Absolutely.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So like what I was thinking about is we were talking about, should we add a second newsletter? It may end up being a weekly thing at this point. It's bi weekly, so two a month. But it's called Fry. Yay. And the idea is it's the only newsletter that rewards you for getting smarter. So it's super short and each issue is a, you know, a little quick tactical biopsychology based lesson with an example. But then it doesn't give away everything like our current issues. It's like we're going to talk to you about scarcity or we're going to talk to you about framing. So you know what the example is in this we share the example, we show kind of the use case and then we do a little poll using Kit's polling feature where we ask, you know, do you know what this specific buyer technology like buyer psychology technique is? And then you give them three options and, and they click on it. And when they submit their answer they're actually entering a contest to win a prize. Sometimes it's gonna be a cash prize. Our first one was a cash prize. Sometimes it might be something from our sponsor. So it's like, you know, an annual subscription to their shirt, to their software, a ticket to their conference, whatever. The thing is that makes sense. What I love about this is a couple of things. It is so short that super bite sized people open and consume it right away. It makes it easier for us to promote our own products because right now I feel like they're buried at the end of our newsletter. So this allows us to choose our topics so that we can frame them around the products that we want to promote that are our own. And because we send them to this thank you page after they complete their poll, we can promote something else. So we can promote our own stuff. We can promote a continuation of our sponsors stuff. So it gives us a second ad spot that isn't directly in the newsletter. So we ran our first one last week. The open rate was super high, the click rate was super high and we're going to run our next one next week and it's fun. It's harder for us to do production wise than our standard newsletter in some ways. But I hope that the long term value will be there.
Dylan
I love that I just opened it now. I went back into my email, I'm like, I got to find this because I remember seeing it and I'm like, I'll get to that. And of course I did the thing where you, you know, you say you'll do something and you forget. And I'm just going through and it's awesome.
Caitlin Burgoyne
So it's fun. And the other thing that I think is our newsletter buy, it continued to get a little. It's quite meaty, as is yours, Chanel, which is why it's so smart to push them through to the website. It's quite meaty. And I know that my ADHD brain sometimes just wants a snack. Like, I just want a brainy snack that makes me feel like, oh, I just learned something, but I didn't have to work very hard for it. And maybe something fun will come out of it for me. It's like a gumball machine, right? Like, I'm like, can I create a little bit of a gumball machine? Give us a second opportunity to promote our stuff that is now kind of falling in the footer of the newsletter and the kind of like. And you should know. And so it's an experiment and my hope is that it will pan out and that it will lead to sponsors getting great return on their investment, us seeing more product sales internally and our most importantly, our readers loving it and opening it consistently. So we'll see.
Chanel
Yeah. Not to mention you get to all the engagement metrics. Like, that's like gold for a newsletter operator. It's like, yeah, yeah. Like for me, I know a ton of people just like stack them up and read them all at once. And that's like, well, you're kind of like killing my open right here, people. But which is fine. But like having this, this extra, like really short one that completely erases that.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I wonder if for you, you're talking about doing your second issue weekly. Like, maybe the format of your second issue weekly should be super short. It should be like, here were the like five best takeaways from let's say like Caitlyn or Saw who Blooms Tear down and each one links back to the original, but it's super condensed as opposed to just being another one shared in its full format. So you kind of get the. The meaty bits, but then it keeps driving them back to your website instead of it being as long as an intro and then pushing to read the rest. Maybe it could just be the. The takeaways.
Chanel
Okay, that's interesting. I like it.
Dylan
Less is more sometimes.
Caitlin Burgoyne
It could also be a they're not over complicated, but I tend to do that. It could also be like a lesson and then it's proven by a few different. Because oftentimes I'm sure you're hearing a lot of wisdom that is repeatable. Right. But different applications of it. So it could be a big learning. And then it's backed up by. Justin Welsh did this and, like, you know, Dickie Bush did this. Like, and so it could be kind of like a one takeaway. Backed up by a few issues.
Chanel
Yeah. I've been considering writing those pieces because it just. At this point, I'm. I'm not getting bored, but I feel like the story's the same, but the names are different. Like. Well, I think they're for three years. Here are the things that they do and, like, it's just all the same. But.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Well, when it comes to newsletter growth, too, I feel like you're probably actually on the forefront of, like, driving that. It's all the same because people are reading your newsletter because, like, religiously and then they're doing the same things and they're growing.
Chanel
So I'm the problem. It's me kind of thing.
Dylan
Yeah, yeah.
Caitlin Burgoyne
No, but you're. You're the. You're the leader. You're, like, moving the needle in terms of what growth people are investing in.
Chanel
Okay, this is interesting. I'm glad I didn't start the second newsletter yet. Maybe I should rethink this.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Don't just ignore me. But, like, I just. I think it's fun to play with a completely different format because I wanted to see. I was like, I. When we started why We Buy, it was a lot shorter. It was. My original concept for why We Buy is like, I liked James Clear's newsletter and I liked how short and punchy. Like, I think his promise is, like, the most wisdom per word. And I was like, I love that because, like, if I'm going to open something consistently, I want it to feed me, and I want it to feed me fast and, like, nutrient dense, but I want it to be fun. And so our original was based on that, but over time, as we, like, we never planned to work with sponsors. Like, it's like, how do you hook them in the beginning? And then you have to have room for your sponsor spot. And then you also have to, like. So, like, it generally just became longer. And I was like, I want something super, super tight. And so it's fun to have a completely different format to see how. How it works.
Chanel
I like that. I'm curious to see how that does for you over time.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Me too. Yeah, we'll see.
Chanel
Speaking of sponsors, you used to do. I know you used to work with, like, Mad rev and the ConvertKit network, and then you had this, like, Justin Moore call on YouTube. And I'm curious like if your strategy has changed since then or if it was like, Justin, that's a lot. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I think that Justin's approach makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. I think that for me, I've not, I've never wanted sponsor revenue to be a primary revenue source. Like for me it's like, can we use sponsor revenue to basically cover our production costs? And me still put money in my pocket so that if we did nothing else I would be taking home some money. But I've always wanted to build our own products. I never want to be reliant on sponsor revenue and doing all the hyper personalized campaigns. We tried it in Q3 and we worked with three brands that I like, absolutely love. And I was like, really? It was, it was great to just try something different. But it was a lot more work. It was a lot more work to think through. Like how are we going to frame this and how do we work these topics so that they're, we're working them in and we're going to do this webinar with these folks and we're going to do these social posts. And it became for me, at least in my brain, I was like, this is a lot. And I'm like, I like it when like they come in. We already know what we're publishing. They like, you know, they provide like direction on the ad creative. And so I think that I'd like to see a future that's like a hybrid where maybe when we will reach out to specific brands and like we can see you working really well for our Friday issue and, and we would do something special with you where it's not just the newsletter but I'll do something on social as well. I think I'd like to do it more like that but the, the bigger, more complex campaigns, lucrative financially but really mentally draining for me. Cause like I want to make everyone the like really really high value for them. And that takes a lot of thinking when you're also trying to create a newsletter that's really, really high value. Products that are really, really high value. So I'm, I'm still trying to figure out that mix.
Chanel
Yeah, at some point it kind of changes the content and like your content schedule. And that's not great for someone who's creative and wants to do their thing.
Caitlin Burgoyne
And I found that I, there was a couple issues where like I got some feedback from readers and they were like, this felt like a big ad and I was like, I see that. Like, you know, because I was trying so hard to produce something that, like, the content itself would be advertorial style, where it was like, it's showing the value of the product. But normally we're not thinking about that. We're just thinking about, like, what's the best lesson we can teach, like, what's the best content we can create? And then the sponsor gets to be a part of that. And so it was the balance for me of, like, be producing really good content and working the sponsors into it in a way that feels really organic and valuable to the reader is an ongoing thing that we're figuring out. Because I don't want it to feel like a big ad because people don't want to read big ads.
Chanel
Nope, nope, nope. Definitely not. Yeah, I know. Justin's formula is so good and I'm like, I want someone on my team just to do that. Like, if you can figure that out and do that for me, great. But I just don't think I have the mental capacity for it.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I think it probably works a lot better for creators that are in the more visual means, like, you know, the YouTubers, the Instagrammers, like, I think it probably works a lot better for those types of brands because their feed is such a. This is my life, like, oftentimes. And like, it's really easy to integrate, like, physical consumer products into your life and do it in a really authentic way. It's a lot harder for me to be like, here's this B2B software that I don't personally use, but I'm going to find a way to make it like this, tell the story around it. Even though my small business would never need this because it's for enterprise, like, that's, that's hard.
Chanel
Yeah, yeah.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yet those brands still get huge value from having their sponsored placement in the newsletter because they're getting in front of their ideal customers in a place from a person they trust. The value still there brands. I think on the B2B side, it's just hard because it's like, it's much harder to pretend that you're using something or that you're applying some like. Or that you're going to some conference or whatever if you're not right. Like, on the consumer side, it's like, yeah, I love this cleaner. And then it's like in the garbage.
Dylan
Yeah, just kidding.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yeah, exactly. What's funny, a friend of mine, his wife is a big influencer and we started working with him. He's an incredible designer and he was working on a brand for my husband's previous business, business. And like, he was like, he's like, our house is just full of boxes. Like, it's just so full of boxes. And she's awesome. If you were to look at any of her content, like, she does an incredible job. I'm sure her, her partners get huge value. But it's just like this thought that, like, you know how exciting it is to get a parcel as an adult. And then imagine if every single day you were just getting gadgets and like, stuff in the mail from, like, brands that you don't know, but they just want you to rep yourself. Like, you'd stop having that, you'd stop having that excitement about it. It wouldn't be like, oh, my God, this, like, new cleaner, this new hair, products, like, be a job. I'm going to say about this.
Dylan
Yeah, it's like, oh, I've got a new. A new job in the mail.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Just. Exactly.
Dylan
Yeah. It takes a fun out of it a bit.
Chanel
So true.
Dylan
We've talked a lot about newsletters and sort of. We haven't really talked a lot about why we buy itself. I'm curious what goes in because you guys put a lot of effort and it's a really high quality, in my opinion, high quality newsletter. What goes into, like, basically an average addition from, like, you know, ideation to actually publishing it?
Caitlin Burgoyne
I think that we are fortunate because we are basically, conceptually, we've kind of got it down to these three things. It is. We are actually talking about, like, what's considered a cognitive bias, which is a. That's a geeky term for like a buyer psychology technique, something that's been proven by science. Or we're talking about a brand and we're kind of like doing an examination of them and like, what are they actually applying and using in their own marketing, but which are fun to find out. Chanel, you do this all the time. Like, you do the deep dives and then sometimes we'll do a particular marketing tactic. So we'll look at, like, subject lines and share. Like, here are different, like, ways from buyer psychology perspective, you can write better subject lines. So like, format, like every format is the same and we've got that locked down. So coming up with the actual ideas for the issue, pretty easy. Like, there's 400, 500 different cognitive biases. We haven't been running it that long. We've got hundreds to go through still. There's lots of brands that are doing lots of fun, smart Stuff. So it's the. Choosing a topic for us is quite easy. The format is consistent. We make tweaks and we adjust and we try to make it better, but the format is fairly consistent. I'd say that the thing that is the trickiest is finding depending on what the topic of the newsletter is. So this most recent issue was on Stealing Thunder, which is the idea of like, instead of somebody else being able to poke a hole and say something bad about your brand or your product, you do it first and you're basically Stealing Thunder and people trust you more. And so that's fun. The trickiest part is usually finding, finding examples. And that used to be the hard part. We'd spend a lot, a lot of time looking for like, good examples that represented. Because, like, the, the scientific studies that we're pulling from generally are not marketing applications. So it was like a lot of time trying to find the examples. Now with like, you know, perplexity, it's lot easier.
Dylan
So I was gonna say AI is beneficial in some ways.
Caitlin Burgoyne
It is. It is. So like the, you know, producing an issue from idea through to like publish to the audience. It's probably a day and a half of the team's time, like, you know, a day of writing, pop, creating the images, populating it. Like, it's not an insignificant effort, but it's quite systematic.
Dylan
In terms of sponsorships, do you. Do you have somebody on the team who's responsible for going after sponsorships, or is it mostly dealing with inbound sponsorship requests?
Caitlin Burgoyne
We're working on figuring that out. So we have previously. This is one of those things where it was working. We stopped doing it. So previously we had had. I have an amazing, I said like, virtual assistant who also kind of like manages all of our sponsorships. And she had been doing some outreach directly to brands and that was working. And then we stopped doing it because we got busy with like launching some other products. So we're going to start redoing that. But like, most of our sponsorships right now come inbound or through our third party partners. And Madrev is certainly the partner that delivers the most shout out to Katie event there.
Dylan
I was just going to say shout out. Shout out to Madrev. Yeah, that's great.
Chanel
I just had a call with her last week or something. I'm going to try and start doing that as well.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yeah. Oh, they're. They're terrific. Yeah, they're awesome.
Chanel
I guess now that you have the two issues, that's going to add some more time to your team's work as well because those are kind of new. They're not like a trick tried and true formula.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Right. And we'll see. We'll have to see how things work. So we've got three can in the can for this new Friday issue and we're evaluating it because like, it's like, is this, you know, A, does the audience like it? B, are we able to fill the extra ad inventory because we're not going to produce it if we can. And C, is it delivering on our goal, which is actually selling more of our own products on the back end of like the thank you page or like having being able to choose our topics more specifically because they're good examples that lead to our own products. So we will see. I'd say we'll probably give it a good three months and then decide.
Dylan
Also, I was going to ask how long you'd take before you decide to continue on or just it's not very scientific on my.
Caitlin Burgoyne
It should be a lot worse. So usually it's like, what else have I been distracted by? Which is why I really need that like person who's going to be like, okay, we said we do it for this amount of time. Like, you know, what are our metrics to decide if this is success or not? For me, I look at all that stuff, but it's more gut based. It should be.
Dylan
Right?
Chanel
Yeah.
Dylan
What's one, what's one thing you think you should be. You could be doing better with why we buy?
Caitlin Burgoyne
I think we certainly could be doing a lot more on the like in like outreach, like internal outreach, like to sponsors. Because there are lots of products that are really a good fit for our audience that we're not actually intentionally reaching out to. So I think that from a business perspective we should do that. It just makes sense. From a reader perspective, I think that there's some formatting improvements we could make to the newsletter. I think that there's some changes I'd like to make to the layout. It feels, I feel like we've like over indexed on design and I want to kind of pull back a little bit. So that's, that's an improvement I think it would make especially for mobile reading. So that's on my kind of like to do list. From a content side, I think we could do a better job, which we've started doing, of linking to past issues. Right. Because so many of these topics have overlap with other things we've covered and so we're getting better at using links in the issue to go back to our own archive of newsletters, which is where our products live on that website. Like we want to get people there so we need to be better at that. And we're working on that.
Dylan
Yeah, I think I noticed in the issue you mentioned the Stealing Thunder. You had a few. A few mentions from past additions and links and clicks through.
Caitlin Burgoyne
Up until three months ago, we really didn't have a website that made any sense because like my original business was a consulting business, customer camp that then became why we buy. So like I was like resistant to send people to the archive because I was like this is just going to confuse people. But like I've got so much other shit on the go that like this is not a priority. So now that we have one thing. Actually I have. I should answer a better answer. So. So we built out something really cool on our new website which is that we have the ability within when we produce a new newsletter, we have this kit integration that automatically kind of pulls it through to our WordPress blog and we have to do a little bit of formatting to make it look good, but it's pretty seamless. But within that, we embed these ad placements that are global, meaning we can change them in one place on the website and they change everywhere. And we should be using those way more thoughtfully than we are. They're like on. They're there and like I think I updated them one time in the last four months.
Chanel
Whoops.
Dylan
Yeah. Oh man.
Chanel
I love the new website by the way.
Caitlin Burgoyne
The team at Studio did an amazing job. They killed it.
Dylan
That's great. What is the website just so for.
Caitlin Burgoyne
People learn why we buy dot com.
Dylan
Nice. Okay, sweet.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I could not get the why we buy.com domain. Somebody has parked on it since 2008 and I'm like, like I don't even want to know what they're going to ask for that. So I just have never inquired and.
Chanel
Maybe it's super cheap. Maybe like sadly they are no longer with us and they just have this domain in their name. Cheap account or something.
Caitlin Burgoyne
I wonder how they you negotiate that.
Chanel
Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, no, I mean it looks great. I love that you can segment by who you are and be a lot.
Caitlin Burgoyne
More thoughtful with that. So because like the initial intent was like, okay, like you can segment by who you are and we're going to give them issues that are relevant to their Persona and then we should present offers that are relevant to their Persona, which we are not doing right now. We built the functionality to do it. We're not doing it. So, like, I like to think that we're a big company with a lot of resource. And then I remember it's me and one writer and one part time virtual assistant. And I'm like, all right, scale back, scale back. The ambition.
Chanel
Well, I think you've done a kick ass job growing this, and I'm excited to see you hit the 2 million number. Thank you.
Growth In Reverse Podcast Summary
Episode: Building a $2M Newsletter While Getting Lazier with Caitlin Burgoyne
Release Date: February 26, 2025
Introduction
In this enlightening episode of the Growth In Reverse podcast, hosts Chenell Basilio and Dylan Redekop sit down with Caitlin Burgoyne, the entrepreneur behind the highly successful Why We Buy newsletter. Caitlin shares her journey from launching the newsletter in 2021 to scaling it into a formidable business aiming for $2 million in revenue by 2025. The conversation delves into her unique growth strategies, revenue diversification, content creation, and future plans to streamline operations while maintaining growth.
Growth Journey and Revenue Milestones
Caitlin highlights the rapid growth and financial milestones her newsletter has achieved over the years. She reflects on surpassing $1 million in revenue in 2024, just shy of her projections, and outlines her ambitious goal to double that in the coming year.
Caitlin Burgoyne (00:13): “Since launching the newsletter in 2021, she has gained significant traction with nearly 75,000 subscribers and over 200,000 followers on various social platforms, earning her just shy of a million dollars in revenue in 2024.”
She recounts hitting the $1 million mark within a mere five days in January 2025, underscoring the scalability and demand for her content.
Caitlin Burgoyne (01:35): “To be fair, minor details, quite so close. For all intents and purposes, it was a million dollars.”
Revenue Strategy: Flash Sales and Offer Suite
Transitioning from traditional revenue streams, Caitlin discusses her innovative approach to creating more predictable monthly sales through "monthly recurring flash sales." This strategy involves segmenting her audience and targeting specific groups with time-sensitive offers, thereby smoothing out the typically spiky revenue pattern associated with digital product launches.
Caitlin Burgoyne (02:09): “We might have like, you know, a month where we're doing like 400,000 and then the next two months like 10,000. It's very, very spiky.”
In addition to flash sales, Caitlin is focused on building a more robust offer suite. She plans to introduce new products, including a messaging system called Painkiller, and other offerings aimed at enhancing customer value without increasing her workload.
Caitlin Burgoyne (03:00): “Painkiller, which is a messaging system that helps you to fix your messaging.”
Audience Segmentation and Automation
A key component of Caitlin's strategy is audience segmentation. By dividing her subscriber base into distinct groups, she can tailor her flash sales and product promotions more effectively. Caitlin is currently refining her segmentation process, ensuring that each segment receives offers that best match their needs and interests.
Caitlin Burgoyne (06:39): “The goal for me is like, there's always an offer going on on a monthly basis, but they only see a Flash sale every third month.”
This approach not only increases sales but also enhances the subscriber experience by delivering more relevant and timely offers.
Social Media and Content Strategy
Though Caitlin acknowledges a decline in organic growth due to inconsistent social media efforts, she emphasizes the importance of maintaining a strong online presence. Her current growth mix is heavily reliant on paid strategies, with approximately 65% of her growth stemming from paid channels compared to 35% organic.
Caitlin Burgoyne (10:03): “It's more paid now and probably because I've been pretty shitty on the organic side.”
Caitlin plans to reinvigorate her organic growth by returning to proven tactics like teaser posts and testimonials, which previously doubled her digital product sales.
Team Structure and Scaling Operations
Managing a growing business requires a dedicated team. Caitlin's current team comprises herself, a full-time writer, and a part-time virtual assistant. To further scale operations and streamline processes, she intends to hire a fractional CEO and an operations manager. This expansion will allow her to focus more on strategic growth rather than day-to-day tasks.
Caitlin Burgoyne (11:36): “I'm looking to bring on a fractional CEO. I'm working with somebody now on a kind of like, freelance basis.”
Experiments with New Formats
Caitlin is continuously experimenting with new content formats to keep her audience engaged and attract new subscribers. One such experiment involves launching a second, more interactive newsletter called Fry Yay. This bi-monthly edition rewards subscribers with cash prizes and other incentives for participating in quick, tactical lessons and polls.
Caitlin Burgoyne (33:12): “It's super short and each issue is a little quick tactical biopsychology based lesson with an example.”
This format not only enhances reader engagement but also provides additional opportunities to promote her products and sponsor offerings.
Sponsorships and Their Challenges
While sponsorships have been a revenue source, Caitlin expresses a preference for not relying solely on them. She aims to use sponsorships to cover production costs while primarily focusing on building her own product lines. Caitlin shares her challenges in integrating sponsors authentically without compromising the value of her content.
Caitlin Burgoyne (39:29): “I’ve never wanted sponsor revenue to be a primary revenue source.”
She seeks a hybrid sponsorship model that allows for more natural and less intrusive integrations, ensuring that sponsored content remains valuable and relevant to her audience.
Content Creation Process
Creating high-quality content is at the heart of Caitlin's success. She utilizes cognitive biases and buyer psychology techniques to inform her newsletter topics, ensuring that each issue provides actionable insights and compelling examples. AI tools like Perplexity have streamlined her content creation process, making it easier to find relevant examples and data.
Caitlin Burgoyne (46:25): “Producing an issue from idea through to publish to the audience. It's probably a day and a half of the team's time.”
Her systematic approach allows for consistent and valuable content delivery, which has been pivotal in retaining and growing her subscriber base.
Future Plans and Improvements
Looking ahead, Caitlin aims to refine her newsletter layout for better mobile readability and enhance her internal dashboards for better tracking of revenue streams and user engagement. She also plans to leverage AI more effectively to identify and address leaks in her automation processes, ensuring a smoother subscriber journey.
Caitlin Burgoyne (48:49): “I think we could do a better job, which we've started doing, of linking to past issues.”
Moreover, Caitlin is exploring opportunities to expand her visual content presence, recognizing the increasing value of video and image-based platforms in fostering deeper connections with her audience.
Conclusion
Caitlin Burgoyne's journey with the Why We Buy newsletter exemplifies strategic growth through innovative revenue models, meticulous audience segmentation, and a relentless focus on content quality. As she strides towards her $2 million revenue goal, her willingness to experiment and adapt underscores the dynamic nature of successful newsletter businesses. For entrepreneurs looking to scale their newsletters, Caitlin's insights offer valuable lessons in balancing growth with operational efficiency.
Notable Quotes
This comprehensive summary encapsulates Caitlin Burgoyne's insightful discussion on building a multi-million dollar newsletter business while intentionally reducing her workload. Her strategies offer a blueprint for sustained growth, effective monetization, and maintaining content excellence in the competitive newsletter landscape.