← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
How “IV Content” Fuels the Fastest-Growing Newsletters—to 50k and Beyond (NMS Talk)
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Hello.
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Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. My name is Chanel Basilio and last month I spoke at the first ever Newsletter Marketing Summit in Austin, Texas. It was a great event and I got to meet a lot of you, which was super fun. So I wanted to highlight the talk that I gave there because it seemed to have struck a nerve with people. And if you didn't make it to the event, I figured why not share it here if you're new here? I've spent the last two and a half years researching and writing about how the top newsletters in the world have grown to 50,000 subscribers and beyond. There is one key thing that each of those newsletters has in common, and honestly, they wouldn't have succeeded without it. And that's what I want to share with you in this talk. And if you're watching this on YouTube, stick around because I was pretty nervous and almost tripped over the lights on stage during the talk. So that's fun. Hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think.
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This is fun. So today I just want to share some growth lessons I've learned from studying creators for the last two years. So just a quick intro slide. I've been in the online space since 2013. I've been studying newsletter growth for the last two years like I mentioned. And I've written over 250,000 words on newsletter growth, which is about three full length nonfiction books, which is kind of insane. And so I started the newsletter growth in reverse back in December of 2022. I reverse engineer how other top creators grow to 50,000 subscribers or more. So I spend 20 to 30 hours of research kind of figuring out how they grew their newsletter and then I send that out every week to 40,000 subscribers. I've written deep dives on people like Caitlin Burgoyne, Yossi Levi, Cody Sanchez, Sahil Bloom, a number of other people. And I found over 275 growth tactics. I've put them all into what I call the Growth levers library and you can actually grab that here. I could probably just stop now and give this to you and be like, great, see ya. But these growth tactics don't actually work as well if you are missing a few key points. So I wanted to give those to you today. So I want to share why it's easier than ever to get to 50,000 subscribers. Why not all subscribers are created equal, some of the force multipliers of newsletter growth and the unique growth tactics that don't rely on social media that you can implement. So when people find out What I do, they often say, how do I get more subscribers? What's the secret? My newsletter is not growing fast enough. To which I would reply, these are the wrong questions. You see, I took all of the data of the people I've studied, and I figured out how long it took them to get to 50,000 subscribers. And so you can see, I guess I'm blocking it over here. You can see in the middle, 25 to 36 months is like the average. And the Overall average was 31 months across all of the people I've studied. But then I took the data and I kind of looked at it a little different. So I looked at it from the date they started. So on the bottom you can see the year they started. And then over on the left is all the months. So if they started in 2014, 2015, it took over 100 months, which is like eight years. That's kind of crazy. But as we go down the years, it just got faster and faster and faster until these were the ones that matured in 2020. So I think they had a little leg up here. But over time, it just continues to get easier and easier. And overall, over the last three years, the average time it took someone to get to 50,000 subscribers was just 24 months. And, like, think about that. That's insane that you can build a business like that in 24 months. So it's easier than ever to get to 50k subscribers. It's also easier than ever to start a newsletter. We have things like substack beehive kit, where you can get up to 10,000 subscribers for free. Sure. There's probably some people cringing with both of these on the slide at the same time. And then I found this number. 4.3 million. And I want to do a little pop quiz here. So do you think that's the number of emails sent every day, hour, minute or second? Just shout it out. Second. You guys are smart. So 4.3 million emails every second, which means during the time I'm on stage, 7.8 billion emails will have been sent. That's crazy. So it's easier than ever to get to 50k. It's easier to start a newsletter. And millions of inboxes or millions of emails are hitting inboxes every single second. So how do you stand out? How do you stand out in the sea of emails that come into people's inbox? I want you to think about Your favorite newsletter, YouTube channel, podcast, whatever it ends up being. Maybe it's morning brew, where they give you the day's news with some personality. Or it's the opposite 1440, where they literally just give you the facts, like how the Eagles won the super bowl and Patrick Mahomes had an awful day and he was sacked six times. Go Birds. Or maybe it's Sam Parr and Sean Puri talking about business ideas and all the interesting people that they know and research. So it's about content and they create great content. But it's not just great, it's insanely valuable content. It's called IV content, where you're waiting for the next newsletter to drop because it's so good. It's the kind of content where you get replies to your emails, like, I can't believe this is free. Or how do you only have a small number of followers? I feel like I'm stealing. Or my personal favorite, how do you put out content like this every week? Are you actually a magician? And if you're not getting replies like that, I hate to tell you, but you have a content problem. It's not a growth problem, it's a content problem. So IV content is the growth multiplier for everything else. It's the difference between something being like, meh, that was okay. And like, oh my God, I have to share this right now with a friend. So how do we fix it? Well, I'm going to give some examples, but I found that there are five buckets of great content and they all follow these rules. So you're either helping someone make money, save money, save time, make them laugh, teach them something, slash, make them feel smart. And so if you can combine two or more of these, you are golden. This is like the key. So let's walk through some examples. So this is Mario Gabrielli of the Generalist. He is the first guy that I actually wrote a deep dive on and he wrote these posts. He used to write this thing called the S1 Club. And so the S1 report, if you're not familiar, startups have to submit this report to the SEC before they go public and do an ipo. And these documents are like hundreds of pages long. And so him and a couple of friends would get together and they would spend multiple weeks looking at these companies and trying to distill if it was a good investment, if it's a bad investment, that kind of thing. They would put together a brief. You don't need to read all this. I'm just giving examples of how valuable it is. Charts on market size, total revenue, revenue mix, if Covid impacted the industry. And then they would give you like, hey, maybe you should invest or not kind of thing. And so this was super long. So I downloaded it as a PDF and I was like, how long is this thing? This is really crazy. 29 pages. I was like, wow, that's kind of a lot. But then I was like, wait, these S1 reports are public. Let me go see how long the S1 report is. 317 pages. So him and his friends would distill this down to about 9% of this content, give you extra stuff on like the industry, the market, all this stuff, if it's a good investment or not. And so with this, if we go back to the buckets of content, he's helping you potentially make money, he's helping you potentially save money, and you're definitely saving time. So this is a good one. So is your content that good? Is it that good that you can save that much time for someone and help them out? Let's look at another example with Yossi Levi, the car dealership guy. Yossi started as a anonymous Twitter account and if you don't know his story, you should follow it. It's really, really fascinating. But Yossi would put out tweets of like, so he was in the car dealership industry and he would explain like the behind the scenes kind of things of what was happening, facts that maybe potential car dealerships didn't want getting leaked. And so he would put all this information out. He now has over 90,000 subscribers on his email list and he was getting DMs like this all the time of people just like trusting this anonymous Twitter account with like, I had to close my business, $100,000 loss, had to sell 38 units, I'm so ashamed of myself, etc. He was posting this and, and he was just sharing like, there's some stuff going on here in the dealership market. And so people started to learn that they could trust him with sensitive information. And so he continues to do content like this, put out information, help people. And so this happened last March, he says. Breaking Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge Ram, is sending notices to its employees about a mandatory remote workday on Friday. The reason, your guess is as good as mine. But a notice like this on a Thursday could potentially signal layoff. And he shared this, that someone had DM'd him anonymously. This was at 11:30pm on March 21, 2024. Ten hours later, he posted an update. Layoffs confirmed, 400 positions, engineering, software and tech. Then he goes on to say, if you're Impacted. I have a job board. I can help if you need to find a new role. And then people are like, you're on the inside of the inside with this info. And he said, salute. So I want you to look at this chart because when Yossi posted about that this is where Stellantis was their stock. This is over the last five years, they were at the very tippy top. And he posted that update before the market opened. So can you imagine, like the impact that had for people who were invested or potentially wanted to invest? So he's helping make money, he's helping save money. But I feel like there's actually might be a sixth bucket. So let's add one here, speed to market. Because I'm pretty sure he was one of the only ones actually covering this at the time. So think about that. Is your content that good that you can save someone money like that? One more example. Justin Moore, creator wizard. He is a sponsorship coach for creators. He helps people earn more money with brand deals. And he just sends out sponsorships every week. If you want to get sponsorships for your newsletter, hey. He's like, hey, I'll send them to you every week. Him and his team put this together. These companies are actually looking to partner with creators. Super simple. And it's all free. And so I wanted to give this example because it doesn't have to be a deep dive, it doesn't have to be something super in depth where people are sending you anonymous information. It can be something as simple as giving away free money, essentially. So he's helping someone make money, he's helping them save time and speed to market again. So, like, is your content that good? Because if you spend the time getting this right, everything else becomes easier. I don't know how many times I can say this. Everyone always wants the secret, the growth hack. It's this, it's the content. And I was actually talking to Yossi last night and he was like, it's the content. So, like just over and over, want to hammer this home. This helps with growth, retention, monetization, brand affinity, community. This is the secret. It's the force multiplier that makes all the growth hacks work better. And I like to call it the ultimate introvert growth hack, because I'll give you an example here. So this was my growth with my newsletter, started in December of 2022 and in 11 months I hit 24,000 subscribers and I did not have a personal brand. This was because it was just getting shared over and over because people saw how unique this Content was nobody was doing this. And I want to give you this example because this is my favorite one. So Nathan Barry, founder of Kit, he has a newsletter, and he actually shared that Mario Gabrielli Deep Dive in his newsletter. So this is like three weeks into mine. And I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. And then I saw this. He thought Mario had written that Deep dive. That's pretty comprehensive. If he thinks someone else, like the actual creator, wrote that thing, he had no idea. I thought that was super cool. Okay, so good content. There's one more growth multiplier. 87% of the people I studied have this one thing in common as well. Doesn't rely on algorithms. And the other 13%, I guarantee they use this. But I can't read personal DMs. People. It's other people. So I was doing a deep dive on Lenny Ryczycki at the time. He had a newsletter of 377,000 subscribers. He's now pushing over a million. I think he hit it yesterday. And I was on the eighth page of Google. I was like, almost done my research. And then I found this article from 2pm called Type House. And it says, a play on the TikTok craze. The newsletter industry has its own brand of collaborative house. And then it goes on to list all of the people that are in this community. People like Lenny and Brad Wolverton, Polina Pompliano, Alex Lieberman, Li Jin, Paki McCormack, like, all of these big newsletter names. And I was like, o. Then I started looking, and I was like, wait, they're all on each other's podcasts. They all collaborate. They're doing cross promos. Like people. You need other people. So how can we implement this? I'm gonna give some examples of this as well. First one comes from Cody Sanchez. She is the master of podcast guesting. So when I wrote her deep dive In February of 2023, I put her growth timeline on a chart, and then I plotted every single time she was on a guest podcast. So all of those little microphones are when she was on a podcast. So every month, except for, like, December and maybe a few others, she had pretty much three, and then sometimes six, seven. And then I recently went back and added to this, and she is still doing this consistently every single month, except for the last one. That spike was when she launched her book. So, you know, people with books go on a lot of podcasts, but you can see, like, the consistent podcast guesting. Now she has 750,000 email subscribers. 1.7 million YouTube subscribers. She's killing it. So if we go back to Lenny, Lenny actually also wrote some guest posts. This is the first the way he got his first thousand subscribers. So this one he wrote for First Round back in February of 2021. Then he wrote another one for Andrew Chen's blog a month later. And he even said the first hundred subscribers were a medium post. He wrote next thousand guest posts. So this stuff works if you collaborate with other people, you write an article for their blog and they do the same for you. It might not get you 1000, but you'll probably get 10, 20, 50. It's a slow game in the beginning. Okay, so how do we do this if we don't have contacts? Because I'm sure somebody's out there like, well, he knows all these people. Okay, so Dicky Bush, great example. He was writing on Twitter for about nine months and he wasn't seeing too much traction. He got to about 1850 followers on Twitter and at this point a lot of people would have given up. Eight months, nine months, that's not a huge showing. But instead what he did was he asked his followers, who wants to be part of a group where we write every day for 30 days? Eliminate friction of shipping. Each post is under 200 words. Accountability from a group got about 206 likes, 43 comments. And he asked people to pay him 50 bucks via PayPal just to keep them accountable. He's like, I'll send the money back if you complete it. I just want you to be held accountable. He wasn't trying to make money from this at first. This was in November of 2020. And since then he's launched ship 30, which was probably one of the most popular cohort based courses out there. It turned into a multimillion dollar business with him and his co founder, Nicholas Cole. From a tweet. This is from a tweet. Guys, this isn't anything crazy. At the beginning when he started, he was all the way down here. And since then he's just continued to grow. They've now launched another cohort based course and coaching and all kinds of stuff. Stuff. All right, this one is even a smaller list. This is Maya Voyer. Maya, I found when I was doing research on a guy named Akash Gupta. He runs a product growth newsletter and akash has about 114,000 subscribers. When I wrote this and I saw that she did a guest post and I was like, oh, she must have a big following. Nope. 3,000 subscribers. How did she get Akash to Let her do a deep dive or a guest post with him on his newsletter. And so I actually had him on the podcast recently and he said they were just like interacting via DMs. And then he was like, hey, why don't we write something together? It's an 88 minute read. This wasn't like a schlubby piece of content. It was like very, very in depth. And then I was like, I went to her her profile and I was like, wait a second. She did the same thing two weeks before with somebody else. Ruben Dominguez of VC Corner. And that guy had 27000 subscribers. And then I saw this post a couple weeks ago. 2024. 2024 in review. She said, In 2024 I did dozens of podcasts and substack placements with other mega creators. This is just like her thing. This is how she's growing her newsletter. That's it. She goes on to list the three popular Kayle, Poyar, Akash, and this guy named Pawal. The one has 98,000 subscribers, the other one's 66,000. And now Maya has over 15,000 subscribers. That's a heck of a newsletter. 15,000, you don't need 50K. That's like a really solid newsletter. Okay, one more example. This is probably my favorite one from recently. See D.J. gustafson, he writes a newsletter called Mostly Metrics. 57,000 email subscribers. When I wrote the Deep Dive, I estimated he made 500k annual revenue. And he DMed me and he's like, you're way off. So I just lifted it a little bit for. It's probably higher than this, but so cj so smart. This is like my favorite thing. Okay, so he's writing guest posts for brands. So Brex is like a financial software. CJ writes content for CFOs. So he wrote this guest post. He's getting paid at this point. The first couple were free. Now he gets paid to write 1 to 2k per post and he sells them in 6 or more packages. So he's getting like 6 to 12 grand every time he sells one of these. Okay, so the second part of this triple stack approach, he gets to publish this content on his own site. And for this Brex one, this originally appeared on his newsletter. He's not creating an extra word and he's getting paid for them to essentially post it on their website. Okay, third part he gets in front of their audience. These financial SaaS tools often have tens of thousands of email subscribers, if not hundreds of thousands. So you essentially are getting sent out to their email list. You're getting paid for it, and you get to put the content on your site. And the fourth part of this is probably a quadruple stack approach, is that he has a paid subscriber or a paid newsletter. So if someone finds him through their email list, not only did he get paid to write it, he could potentially have just gained another subscriber that pays him. So good. It's so good. I really hope some of you do this because it's just. It's so valuable. Yeah. Thanks, Seth. Chef's kiss. Okay, last one. Crowdsource research. Chris wanted to start a podcast. The problem was Chris knew almost nothing about how to grow a podcast. So he did something smart. He made a list of 15 to 20 pro podcasters. Then he listened to all of the interviews they had done about podcasting so that he wasn't, like, asking them the same questions that they had been asked over and over again on podcasts. And then he was like, hey, can I ask you a couple questions? And he interviewed them. So he got all of, like, essentially this giant brain dump of golden nuggets from these pro podcasters, and he was like, brilliant. Now he has all this great information. He knows how to grow a podcast. It's Now a top 10 business podcast. He's been on the Ali Abdal show, he's been on Erica Kohlberg's podcast, and he's been on the freaking Tim Ferriss show. So cool. And so it just probably looks like, you know, kittens and rainbows for Chris. Right? But the story's not over yet, because I'm sure some of you are thinking, like, I never have the confidence to just reach out to someone and ask them for advice. These are huge names. Like, why would they help little old me? I might not have the right connections. Like I said, why would they help me? So that's not the end of the story. So Chris took all that information that they had given him, and he turned it into this 54 minute video of everything he had learned from each person. So maybe this person, number one, taught him this one thing about podcast ads, this other person taught him something else. He put that into this video. Then he turned around and he gave it back to all of the people that had initially helped him. So not only were they, like, I helped Chris, you know, I spent some time. It's great. Now he turns around and he gives them more than they gave him because he's helping and synthesizing all this other information that he had gotten from these other podcasters. And now I'm sure these guys are like, I'll help you whenever you want. You just gave me like freaking gold of this video. And I just want to point out that in this video, Chris points out content. It's content. Make good content. Okay? But if he did not have the insane, insanely valuable content, and if he was not building his network, he probably would not have been on the Ali Abdel show or Erica Culver's podcast or the freaking Tim Ferriss show, and he wouldn't have a top 10 business podcast. So what's the secret? After spending two years studying newsletter growth referral programs, they work. They definitely work. You can see it time and time again. Morning brew. Alex Lieberman was just saying, like, his referral program did great because their content was good. People wanted to share the content. They're not just going to share to get a random hat from some brand that they don't care about. They actually love the content. So that works. Paid recommendations, they work. Beehive boosts, Sparkloop ads, all those things, they work. But if you don't have good content, they're not going to work as well. Paid ads work. All of the things over here, they work. But they work 100 times better when you have insanely valuable content. So just to recap, there's more competition than ever. The best way to stand out is through content. Insanely valuable content makes growth hacks work better. Experiment, have fun, collaborate with people. And I want to leave you with this quote, this LinkedIn post that I saw from Dharmesh the other day. He said, a long time ago, when starting HubSpot and figuring out SEO, I learned that the best way to rank in Google was to be ranking worthy. Create the web page that should not or that should rank compared to the alternatives. And then he said, I came across this Charlie Munger quote. The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want. And I think that the best way to grow a newsletter is to be subscribe worthy instead of rank worthy. Be subscribe worthy. Why is someone going to subscribe to your content? Why are they going to share it? Why is all this stuff going to work? And if you're not, focus on the content, like, what's the point? Why are you creating a newsletter if it's not good? Like, I just want to drill this home because it's so key. So the next time you go to ask, how do I get more subscribers? My newsletter is not growing fast enough. What's the secret? I think that instead you should be asking, is your content that good? Is there a way to experiment, make it better? What else can you try? Chris yesterday was talking about different types of podcast episodes that did better when he tried to experiment. Like, how can you improve even if you've been doing this for years and you have 20,000 plus subscribers? Like, how can you keep improving your content and make it referral worthy and share worthy and all of the things. So just keep asking, how is your content that good? Thank you. It.