← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Scaling to 150k: The Secrets to More Paid Subscribers with Aakash Gupta (#010)
00:47:45
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- [00:00]
Chanel
Someone at Meta was actually sharing around your article, and you got a bunch of new subscribers with Meta.com email address@ that point. And so you must have just seen that and been like, oh, wow, this is like, going viral inside of the company.
- [00:12]
Akash Gupta
To actually convert these people, you have to send a lot of paywall to content. One of the areas I've tried to differentiate is, like, just having more content where most of these guys, they'll do 52 deep dives while I do 88. It's really about my intentional strategy around trying to build a durable business, a business that I can do for 30, 40 years. Frankly, I love this lifestyle. It's a lot easier than being a VP of product.
- [00:35]
Chanel
I tell people that all the time who are just getting started. I'm like, one channel, just one stop trying to be everywhere.
- [00:41]
Akash Gupta
I'm telling you right now, if you don't get any value after this, just email me and I'll refund you. If we're going to charge like 100 times more than the newsletter, how he can actually deliver 100 times the value.
- [00:57]
Chanel
So, Akash, welcome to the show.
- [00:59]
Akash Gupta
Thanks so much for having me. I literally read, like, almost every single one of your newsletter issues as they came out. I was, like, one of the earliest fans, so really excited to be on the podcast. Wow.
- [01:11]
Chanel
Thank you for that. I appreciate it. I remember interacting with you a couple times, but I didn't realize how much you were growing. I felt like it was like underground growth, and then all of a sudden you, like, exploded with this huge newsletter.
- [01:24]
Akash Gupta
It's very niche audience, so sometimes people are like, oh, really? You. You write?
- [01:28]
Dylan
I was like, yep, you write a lot.
- [01:32]
Chanel
That's amazing. Yeah. So at the time, just to give people context, I wrote a deep dive on you back in. I think it was March 2024. So last year at the time, you had 105,000 email subscribers, and now you're at 153,000 with over 350,000 followers. On social. Honestly, the followers was about the same. Same. I mean, it was. It's definitely grown since then, but it was about the same back then. So I. I'm excited to get into that and, like, how you're growing now. But in the deep dive that I wrote, I did talk about a couple of things that I picked out from your growth story and you. A couple of the ones that I thought were the most interesting were the collaborations that you were doing and the optimizing for the internal share. Um, were those two, like, big pieces of your growth at that point or did I miss something?
- [02:22]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, those are critical. I think that collaborations. The study was done on Twitch creators, where Twitch themselves were trying to figure out which creators are growing the fastest, what are they doing? And basically when they ran their multilinear regression, they looked at it and wow, like, the number one factor is how many collaborations they're doing. So that insight always stuck with me, which is that, okay, like, if I want to reach people who read newsletters, maybe I should collaborate with people who write newsletters. And similar strategy with the podcast, maybe I should collaborate with people who host podcasts. And that the approach is really that the types of people who consume content in one area, for instance, social media like LinkedIn, may not be the same as those who consume content in substack. And so trying to reach people where they consume content is the pillar of my collaboration strategy. And I've never forced a collaboration. Like, I've actually rarely ever just sent out like a message like, do you want to collaborate with me? It usually comes out of some sort of organic friendship that I'm trying to build with another creator, where at some point they'll be like, well, we've had dinner together. When are we doing something together? And then we'll write a newsletter or something like that. So that's always really fun to do because it's just. It keeps you excited, keeps you connected to other people doing what you're doing. So I love the collaborations. And then for me, the internal share, about 50% of my content, is a really good fit, not just for product managers and growth people, but for developers, designers, executives, founders, other people within tech companies. And so for me, as I think about how do I kind of grow out of my niche? Like any creator naturally will grow out of their initial niche of product and growth. For me, the internal share is enabling a lot of that, and it's also causing me to reconsider. Then, well, what do I write about? What, how. What length do I write about? How do I talk about certain roles? And before, I might have had a very PM centric point of view. Over time, that has kind of broadened.
- [04:28]
Chanel
I like that. That's so interesting. And just to give context for anybody listening who hasn't read or listened to the deep dive, the internal share, you came across this in one of your posts. You had realized that someone at Meta was actually, like, sharing around your article and you got a bunch of new subscribers with all of that, like, meta.comemail address@ that point. And so you must have just seen that and been like, oh wow, this is like going viral inside of the company.
- [04:53]
Akash Gupta
I loved that. Yeah. Substack can allows you to just get an email every time you get a free subscriber. And up until about 60, 70,000 subscribers. I just left that email on so that I could see the types of names coming in, the types of times of day and it was fun seeing that.
- [05:09]
Chanel
That's so fascinating.
- [05:11]
Dylan
Wow, so like 70,000 emails in your inbox of a new subscriber coming in basically.
- [05:15]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, over like three years or something. It was just like the only good part of my inbox, you know, that's fair.
- [05:23]
Chanel
That's totally fair. Based on that, like how do you diving into that just a little bit more? Because I'm trying to think for the people who don't have a B2B newsletter, like, is there a strategy or a way to think about this kind of content that you think somebody else could use that doesn't necessarily have like a product growth newsletter or something like that?
- [05:41]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, well, in particular, like if you're studying product growth, you're studying like how I grew the paid subscriptions. Because you know, in the newsletter deep dive that you wrote, you assumed a 5% growth rate. 5% conversion rate. Right. That conversion rate is everything. Like are you actually getting 5%? Are you getting 2 1/2%? 7 1/2%. The headline number for the article will vary wildly just based on that one percentage point. And to drive paid subscriptions, first of all, you need to think about, you know, who has a lot of disposable income. Typically, people working at corporate jobs tend to have the most disposable income. You know, bigger corporations, especially corporations whose stock prices have appreciated as much as metas even more so and so in terms of thinking about how to grow a paid newsletter, understanding and learning more deeply who my potential buyer actually is, and then creating content for them. And you know, as a, even within the space of product and growth content, I could create a lot of content for small and medium sized businesses. There'd be a certain flavor of content or I could create more content for these larger companies. And what I noticed, especially while analyzing my internal shares, because it's such an important metric, is that when I tailor that content for those enterprise people who have a lot of income, especially in areas like California and New York, a substack also shows where those people are coming from. That's when I see really, really good conversion rates into those paid subscribers. And those paid subscribers tend to retain a lot better. So for me it was really Latching on to figuring out where are the number of internal shares, how are those internal shares converting to paid, and how well are those paid subscribers retaining?
- [07:21]
Dylan
I could tell when I was researching as well for this that you've really kind of honed in on the expensing, you know, the expensing aspect of this to the point where you've created a document like a Google Doc that's called Expensing Product Growth that just shows a whole bunch of different ways. Or for product managers, product leaders, for designers, for engineers, ways people can email their boss and say, hey, I've, I've signed up for this newsletter and I think it's going to help me in my job. Can I expense it? Basically? So can you walk us through, like when you decided, like, this is probably a good idea and I need to do this?
- [07:52]
Akash Gupta
Yeah. So if you think about the big bad killer of subscription newsletter businesses, it's really churn. And so if you think about what drives churn, a lot of it is who are the subscribers you are acquiring and how are they paying? And the subscribers you acquire, if you can get them to pay for their company credit card, they're not going to feel the pain every $15 a month that they get charged or every $150 a year that they get charged. And so the subscriber you gain, who is doing it on their own maybe for six months, they're reading it a lot and they want to pay, but then they're going on vacation, they might just cancel it while they're on vacation for a month, but then never resubscribe versus if they're on a corporate account, they're not going to compare it to their Netflix bill. It's just going to be one of the benefits. I expect my next explorer to give me one more tactic to negotiate on at the very end of my negotiation. Oh, and I want a 500 learning and development budget and then this $150, it feels like nothing. Right. So it's really about my intentional strategy around trying to build a durable business, a business that I can do for 30, 40 years. Frankly, I love this lifestyle. It's a lot easier than being a VP of product. So I want to do this for a lot longer. And trying to acquire those customers then that are the stickiest. Looking at my retention rates when I have a corporate credit card, you know, the retention rates are basically double. So if we're looking at like double retention rate, way less churn, half as much churn after 12 months, after 24 months now I have that data as well. Then I want to acquire more of those users. So it's really that intentional strategy of trying to increase my retention rate as much as possible.
- [09:30]
Chanel
So how do you know if it's a corporate credit card? Is it just like Amex mostly?
- [09:35]
Akash Gupta
You should be able to like Stripe or wherever you look at will help you look at these things. And then you can also, for me, a lot of times a lot of my corporate accounts, they'll be bought under a group discount. So I can also look at people under a specific discount code that makes sense.
- [09:51]
Chanel
I was like, how do you know that? That's so interesting. Little rabbit hole question on my end. But no, that's awesome. That's. It's fascinating just to see how well you use the data that you have and are able to take that and turn it into, like growth and media and, I don't know, content decisions, essentially.
- [10:09]
Dylan
I've got one more question just about on the subject of monetization. I know we were going to touch on this a little bit later, Chanel, but I'm really curious, because you are so focused on paid subscriptions, you also do run ads, correct, in your newsletter?
- [10:22]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, so interestingly enough, I basically have three sort of business lines. I have the paid subscriptions on the newsletter, so those people, they're never going to see any ads. Then I have the free newsletter, which whenever advertisers want to come around and make paid content free for the free subscribers, they can. So that's basically the main ad in the free newsletter is this idea of kind of buying out the paywall so everybody can enjoy all of the content. And then I have ads in my podcast. So that's my main focus and relationship with advertisers.
- [10:57]
Dylan
So is all the free content that you publish, or let's call it free, quote, unquote, free content, is that all then, like sponsored content in general?
- [11:05]
Akash Gupta
To actually convert these people, you have to send a lot of paywall to content. I don't know anybody who's actually gotten to like a high conversion rate without regularly sending emails to your free list. And what I try to do, I try to read a lot of other product and growth newsletters and I look at what the quality level about, how many insights do they have? And I try to put that much always free. But for those people, which again, now I'm narrowing my audience quite a bit, who like even deeper content, even longer content than I have content posts that.
- [11:35]
Chanel
Pay well, I read in one of your posts, I can't Remember where it was at this point, but that you have about 2,500 words free and then potentially 2,500 plus more words after the paywall. Is that right?
- [11:46]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, that was exactly what I was doing right around March of 2024 when you wrote that. And then since then, I launched the podcast in, like, August or something like that. And with the launch of the podcast, I realized that, like, my volume of content going out into the world is so high that I actually have reduced the size of those posts. So now it's some more like 1200 words before the paywall. 1200 words after the paywall.
- [12:11]
Chanel
But even so, I think if someone reads that much of your content, they're probably way more interested and likely to want to pay eventually. Because, like, if they get to the end of the article, they're probably, like, interested in that concept or the topic that you're referring to. And I could see that being a high conversion rate for sure.
- [12:27]
Akash Gupta
Depends on the topic. Depends on the article. I feel like sometimes I put the paywall too low, you know what I mean? Like, I just give away too much of the article. Then I'm like, I wrote this banger article and then I look at the conversions and I'm like, ah, that was disappointing. So it's one of those things that. That's the metric that really matters for me is like acquiring new subscribers and preventing unsubscribes. So those are what I'm looking at after an email send.
- [12:50]
Chanel
Interesting. And then I guess going over to some other growth stuff, like the collaborations that you were and are still doing. I. I found this. I forget who I was researching, but I found Maya Voye and I was like, oh, interesting. She had like 3,000 subscribers on her substack at the time. And then all of a sudden in her, like, feed on substack, I saw your name and her name collaborating, and I was like, wow, okay, this is super interesting because you had over a hundred thousand at the time. And I was like, this is going to be really big for her, potentially, like, to be able to get her name as a byline on your newsletter with all of those same. I mean, you guys are talking to a similar audience. Like, it might be a different angle, but I think that that's so fascinating. Like, how do those, how do these collaborations come about? I know you said you were, you know, you're potentially friends with these people at a certain point beforehand, but is there, like, are you always looking for collaborations? Like, how does. I'm curious.
- [13:47]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, literally it was the friendship angle, I think. So I started by seeing her on my LinkedIn feed. Then eventually I commented on one of her posts because she had a bunch of good posts. She sent me a connection request with some question or something like that, which I answered, turned into a dialogue. At some point we were like, we should write a newsletter collab together. And so that came about. I think probably Maya suggested it, as you said. I think, like, the subscriber difference was a little high, but I was more than thrilled to. I'd been reading her content. Her content, super high quality. So for me, I definitely am keeping my eye out for smaller creators who are really good in my niche because if I can showcase them early, if it can be like, oh, Akasha's newsletter is where I saw them, then, you know, I'm showing that taste, that curation, and that's my goal.
- [14:34]
Chanel
Do you strive to do like a certain number of those every quarter or anything?
- [14:38]
Akash Gupta
I have no goals. I actually create my entire content calendar and everything like that just based purely on myself doing everything. And then if collaborations come in, that's totally fine. Like, the cool thing about collaborations and by not having like a clear publishing schedule, like your average newsletter, like every Tuesday, they send like, you know, X piece of content. For me, like, I can just send any time of day, any day of week if a collaboration piece comes in, usually the amount of time I'm putting into a collaboration piece is around half. And so it means that I can actually put out another piece coming up more quickly. And so one of the areas I've tried to differentiate where I've been a very crowded niche for paid newsletters on product management and growth is like just having more content where most of these guys, they'll do 52 deep dives while I do 88. So I've just managed to squeeze in some more. So hopefully I've added some value for you.
- [15:29]
Chanel
I like that. I think more creators need to do collaborations, and I've talked about this quite a bit recently, but it's just, I don't know, it's such a underrated thing. I think YouTubers know it, like you said, Twitch streamers know it, but I think the newsletter space writers, they can really grow faster using collaborations and it's just building those relationships, like you said.
- [15:50]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, I think that realistically, like, my metrics are not that different when I do a collaboration in the short term, but I think in the long term, what it's building for me is I'm being able to tap into, like, other people's areas of expertise. Usually if we collaborate, that's like something they're like deeply an expert in. So in the long term, it's raising like the quality bar of the content that I can talk about because I'm not just tapping my own expertise, being able to tap others. So I really like that.
- [16:20]
Dylan
You mentioned starting the podcast last year. Talk to us about how that has, I mean, obviously it's adding that much more work to your plate. So how has that benefited the newsletter as a whole? Like, has it been a positive thing? Talk to us about a little bit about that.
- [16:34]
Akash Gupta
I would think about it in three ways and I think Chanel wrote about like my funnel. So I was thinking about it in terms of the top, the middle and the bottom funnel, right? So in the top funnel, if you think about LinkedIn, LinkedIn's favorite format to promote is video right now. So like one of the easiest ways to tell how much LinkedIn likes a particular type of content is to look at your likes to impressions ratio. So for on an image post, my likes to impressions ratios almost always around 100. On video it's like 3, 400. So they're, they're just pushing out these videos that people don't like compared to the other content three to four times more heavily. So you get a good sense like how much priority they're putting on that in the algorithm. So certainly what I've noticed is that as soon as I started posting like shorts, like, I don't know if you noticed, but in about a two weeks ago, LinkedIn updated the way they pursue present shorts. So before they used to present shorts with these ugly gray boxes on the sides. Now they just present it full screen, which means it's even taller. It like literally takes up your whole home feed to see one of those TikTok short videos. So I've noticed that the creators growing fastest on LinkedIn were posting a lot of shorts. I was like, how is this person growing faster than me? And then I'm, I analyze very carefully, like, okay, first of all, they're putting up more content than me instead of just a daily text or picture post. They're also added in these shorts three to four times a week. So I did that myself and instantly starting to see much better follower growth on LinkedIn. You mentioned my follower growth on LinkedIn slowed down. It's sad, right? But this is one of the things that has sped it up. So that's the top of the funnel. The middle of the funnel for me is like how many free newsletter subscribers I Have. And the podcast is probably a negative to free subscribers because every podcast episode, two a week, I'm sending to my email list. And so I get a ton of unsubscribes on those. But to grow my podcast at the beginning, I just view it as a necessary investment. So I've told myself, like, yes, probably for the next year, I'm gonna have to email my newsletter, my podcast, and it's gonna cost me a lot of free subscribers, but I'm just gonna have to bite the bullet on that one to bootstrap and start this podcast. And then there's bottom of funnel paid subscribers. Before, I used to spend my entire time, my entire life for these paid subscribers creating the best content for them. Now I have a second job, a podcast. So it's probably been a net negative there as well in terms of, like, the quality and quantity of posts that I can create for paid subscribers. And so where I need to win it back then is kind of that advertising revenue that I'm getting in the podcast. So I'm slowly doing that.
- [19:14]
Chanel
So you started the podcast in August? September, yeah.
- [19:19]
Akash Gupta
So I think August, middle of August.
- [19:20]
Chanel
Last year, because I was getting ready to ask you on Substack, you went from posting like 8 or 9 posts a month to now 10, 15, 20 posts a month. And I was like, whoa, this is a lot. So that's mostly the podcast then, you.
- [19:35]
Akash Gupta
Think it is the podcast entirely, yeah. Well, I've also been trying different strategies with my content calendar. I figure my content calendar is ultimately my product, like the topics that you write about, that's so important, at least in business, that I'm operating. So I've just started treating that as a product. So in, like, I would say something like, I don't know the exact timeline, but for basically like two or three months last year, I did a test where I did, like, very high quality. So I did like one a week deep dives. And then for two or three months, I actually went more for quantity, where I did two a week deep dives. And so I've been trying sort of different tests with my content calendar to understand what is the trade off on open rates versus free unsubscribes versus paid subscribes, because each time you send a paywall to email, you have more opportunity for those paid subscribes. So trading everything off and trying to figure out the right mix, that's a lot of content.
- [20:27]
Dylan
Yeah, it is. So when you said trading off quantity for quality, so were the two a week, were you doing like Just not shallow, but like just less of a deep dive, like less content, less research. Or how, like, how did you decide how much to scale back those for two a week?
- [20:43]
Akash Gupta
Basically what I did is I hired a team to help me. So hire. So basically about half my time for a typical piece was allocated to infographics. So just creating, you know, social, shareable graphics that are going to work. And so hiring a designer immediately freed up a lot of my time. Although they aren't exactly me. So there is. It's not like I get all of the time back. I have to write. It works best when I write a really good spec for them for the infographics. So that takes, I don't know, almost half the time probably, but so I save like a quarter of my time. There's. Because you do a lot of thinking on your canvas when you're designing a graphic and you're the content creator, getting the designer, that's one element. And then what I decided is like, I love this model, this hub and spoke model. I think Matt Gray talks a lot about it. For me, it's like, you know, your hub is your newsletter. And so if I want to keep like a really, really high content quality bar, I'm going to always be the one writing the newsletter, researching the newsletter. But what if somebody else is creating, for instance, my promotional pieces about it? What if somebody else is optimizing the SEO for it? So that is what I did next, is hired people to work on the SEO element, which is like an optimization you just have to do at the end of every post, right, for two to three hours. Now I don't have to do that. And the option, basically, you know, the way I do my LinkedIn posts is those infographics that I create. I create a. I'll create three infographics per newsletter. And we mostly draw from the newsletter for those LinkedIn posts. Whereas before, it might take me like an hour to create each one of those LinkedIn posts, now somebody else does that and I can just edit. So all in all, you know, able to shave off places of time here and there. But I look at the pieces and I do say, okay, there's no real way to replace just thinking about something deeply for seven days. If you think about it deeply for three and a half days, that's going to be the level of marination and bakedness of your insights.
- [22:44]
Chanel
I feel that for sure. Yeah, the deep dives are definitely much more challenging to get out at a faster clip. It just doesn't work in my case. Anyway, that's a lot of content. So three infographics per article.
- [22:59]
Akash Gupta
Yes, that's what I've been doing for a long time now. I would say maybe like a year and a half or so.
- [23:04]
Chanel
And so those turn into your LinkedIn content as well as the podcast clips. I'm just like scrolling through your LinkedIn now, looking at this. I'm like, oh, yep, I see it. Okay, yeah, this makes sense. So, okay, so infographics, do you have someone helping with the podcast, like editor?
- [23:19]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, of course. The podcast is crazy amount of work. So I have two sort of or three roles on the podcast. One editor, two packaging. So creating the substack post, creating the YouTube description, creating the episode show notes, creating the infographics, all of the myriad things that go out of that. And then shorts.
- [23:39]
Chanel
You have quite the team now, unfortunately.
- [23:42]
Akash Gupta
I really wanted to just be me, but then I launched the podcast, so. And then I was. Yeah. So I had to hire a team.
- [23:49]
Dylan
And you wanted to sleep as well, right? Sleep is. Yeah.
- [23:52]
Chanel
Yes.
- [23:53]
Akash Gupta
I have two kids, so I just. I also have like a limit on the amount of time I work. I used to my entire career, I think, until I had kids. Thankfully to my wife, who's been my partner this whole time. I used to just work more than other people. That was like one of the key ways I got ahead. Now I can't do that.
- [24:08]
Dylan
Yeah, I can feel that you touched on SEO. I think that'd be good, a good direction to go. Because in a post that you, you wrote, I guess towards the end of 2024, kind of a year in review style post, you had mentioned that things that had worked for you in the past, like Twitter, like LinkedIn, had really slowed in the past year for growth. And you're focusing more on SEO and substack. You called out as kind of the two places you're focusing more. So we talked a little bit about what you're doing with Substack, but what, what are you doing with SEO and how have you seen that impact your growth?
- [24:41]
Akash Gupta
Yeah. So just so people know, like, Substack has the recommendations network. This is like how like Lenny and Gurgley, I probably mispronounce his name, have grown so far.
- [24:50]
Chanel
They do the same thing all the time.
- [24:51]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, yeah.
- [24:52]
Dylan
Or us.
- [24:52]
Akash Gupta
They have, like, they're number one in business and tech and everybody just recommends them. So they're just going like, crazy. Right. So I don't have like nearly the flywheel. Like, I think Lenny, like every month or two, he's like, here's another hundred thousand. Like I'm not like I don't have that many recommendations, but I do have like for like recommendations with some of my friends who write good newsletters. So they do help. And in particular between LinkedIn and X, you mentioned you know LinkedIn interestingly enough from like a trackable site visits, yes, way down. But like from my own like impressions plus like what I can see in terms of like free and paid subscribers, probably not really down much. So if anything what LinkedIn has done is they've instead of showing my content to people who are just tangentially interested, it's only showing it to people who would be super, which for me is fine. So LinkedIn hasn't really slowed down my business, but X has where like X before it was a platform you could actually grow on. Like there are very few people nowadays growing on X who aren't like building in public or aren't entrepreneurs or like have a political content. So I'm neither building in public or have political content. So. And the thing I noticed was to improve my retention rate amongst paid subscribers, I needed to only talk about stuff that I had expertise in. And so I really cut out a lot of the top of the funnel content that Chanel mentions in that piece actually. So like all my viral Twitter threads, I don't even write those anymore. So first of all, mostly pre kids so had time to write those from like 11pm to 1am now don't even have that time. But second of all, just like, yeah, it doesn't help my retention rates to be talking about stuff I'm not an expert in. And so I don't have much top of the funnel content. So X is evaporated. Like literally used to be like hundreds of paid subscribers a month, thousands of free subscribers a month to like almost like 0ish numbers when you encounter especially they're not liking links either. So it's like there's no trackable traffic that's any value of me. So X is the real one that I need to make up. So substack recommendations, that's one component. And then SEO is the one that I've really started to tap into now. You know, we all think search must be dead. Like personally for me I do very little searching. Everything's done through perplexity and chatgpt, but other people are still searching. And so just optimizing for Google like the very basic stuff like having a target keyword, putting that keyword in your title of your post, in your subtitle in the first Paragraph in a couple headings. Refreshing your content. So your best performing SEO pages, they'll degrade over time if you don't refresh them. So refreshing your content, adding in internal links to key things, looking at the other people, like 2 through 10, or even 1 through 10 if you're not number one, like, what do they have on there? And adding more of that type of content into your post. So all of those things are my main SEO strategies. And then surprisingly, the podcast is really good for SEO. So basically, once people are guests on the podcast, they often link to it from their newsletter. And so you get really good backlink. So those are the main things I'm doing on SEO.
- [27:59]
Chanel
You're definitely growing on SEO. I'm looking at like, AA drafts just to see. I can see the intentionality behind it. It like, really starts to pick up recently. Beginning of last year, essentially. That's. That's fascinating. And you're just continuing to do, like, the best practices. It doesn't sound like you're doing anything, like, extraordinary.
- [28:18]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, I don't think there's any magic to SEO besides just actually doing the basics. I mean, if you're already a good writer, if you're not a good writer, you're kind of screwed.
- [28:27]
Chanel
Yeah, it's fair. So the podcast is helping just because people are linking to the episode from their newsletter. I can see that.
- [28:36]
Dylan
Especially if it's somebody with some, you know, reputable, where the backlinks are much more valuable. Yeah.
- [28:41]
Chanel
Are you doing anything with Substack Notes?
- [28:45]
Akash Gupta
I wish I was doing more. Like, Substack Notes doesn't connect into anything. So I use like, Buffer, for instance, to manage, like, my LinkedIn X threads, Instagram, Facebook, all of that. It's just managed through this and it can't. So I would have to manually, like, do it all. Like, I'd have to just take it out of Buffer and put it into Substack Notes. So the podcast, I'm bootstrapping the podcast, growing that thing. And so that's the only thing I go through the extra effort of posting my trailers on Substack Notes, but I know it would work. I think it is a credible growth strategy. There are a lot of people in my niche who are using it, but it's just a kind of a ROI for me focusing on LinkedIn. Like, I almost like this idea of like one ICP one go to market channel. And so if my just had to choose one ICP product manager, one go to market channel, LinkedIn. And so anytime I'm trying To like make a prioritization decision about where to focus. I just think about that.
- [29:45]
Chanel
I tell people that all the time who are just getting started. I'm like, one channel, just one stop trying to be everywhere. And they're like, but it would do so well if I posted it across different places. I'm like, yes, sure you can have it auto post, but like do not spend time anywhere but one channel. So that's. It's exciting to hear you say that. Moving on to just the, the paid newsletter in general. Like, I don't know a ton about this because I have not gone the route of a paid newsletter as much as I wanted to in the beginning. Are you, is there anything you think you would have done differently when you launched the paid side than you did? Like what you know now? Would you go back and change anything?
- [30:22]
Akash Gupta
Oh gosh. So the story of me doing that was like literally somebody, one of my friends are just like, you have to turn it on. And he's like, you have a huge list, it's growing fast. Substack will just automatically paywall your archive and your archive will start to print money for you. And I was like, really? Okay, wow. Won't there like be some sort of trade off somewhere? And so, you know, just turn it on. That person was right. Like, I'm starting to pay. Subscribers are trickling in just based on this idea. And there are some big paid newsletters that still do this that like the free list, they get the full article, but if they want to check it a week or two later, it's paid. I think it's a cool strategy. That's how I started. But then I realized like, oh, there's this way faster way to grow your paid list, which is you send a paywalled article to your free list and then people who are really enjoying the article convert to paid. And so then I started writing these multi part newsletters where I'd have like four topics and so two of the topics would be free and then two would be paid. But that didn't work as well as one time I wrote a one topic newsletter where half was free and half was paid. And I was like, oh, boom, like finally figured it out. Like, this is how you actually grow your paid list. And so I slowly walked into product market fit around understanding how to grow a paid list. And then I've really just tripled down on what works, which is send a lot of that type of content, but somehow keep your free user still reading. So we talked about buyouts, for instance, the Podcast, there's no paywalls on the podcast. Different things like that. So that your free list is still getting a lot of value. And I try to always compare it to, like, other free lists. Like, you want to give more value than those other free lists, if possible. And so subjective value to you. Like, I also believe that it's really easy if you just create for yourself and you have some, like, judgments about on what is good and what is bad. Because if you're trying to be super politically correct, it's just. It's gonna be very hard to write good content. So in my own mind at least, like, I have this judgment, like, okay, this is good content, this is bad content, and I'll try to wr better than that content. So that has been my overall strategy. If I had to go back, I think, like, a couple things I would do. Like, number one, try to avoid predetermining, like, everything in advance that I'm gonna send this article on Tuesday, this article on Thursday. Like, really keep it open for experimentation, because, as you heard in my story, like, the things I thought were gonna work before I started versus the day I started versus a month later were completely different. And so not having the calendar, I think, really helps. And I was probably still overly predetermined in that it took me a long time to actually notice those shifts, even though I told the story relatively quickly in terms of evolution. So that's one area I would fix. The second area I would fix is for a paid newsletter, try to add something new to each piece. So only recently, about the last year or so, I realized this, which is, like, I try to always interview some new people, or I try to create a new framework, or I try to collect some new data. For a paid newsletter, you don't want it just to be like, what's behind the paywall is my opinion. There are some paid newsletters that do well like that, but that doesn't work for me.
- [33:31]
Chanel
That's interesting. So I think one of the more recent episodes, Dylan and I were talking about exclusive content, and this is what's making me think of this, is you're essentially creating content that doesn't live anywhere else, whether you're, you know, curating a different data set and then adding that into the paywall, um, or vice versa. And it's. It's actually interesting because now I'm realizing, like, you're putting that behind the paywall, and then people will share that, but the people they share it with can't read it unless they buy so well.
- [33:59]
Akash Gupta
You can always forward an email. So that's the cool thing, right? And is that's I think a good feature functionality of the design is like they can see if their friends forwarding it to them and we do hear lots of cases of like yeah, my entire product team is on your newsletter. I'm like really? Because we have one email address from your domain. It's like, yeah, that's set to auto forward to the whole product team. So you know, there's easy hacks around it. But in general, you know, for the good hearted Samaritan who wants to support the work of an independent creator, they can do that.
- [34:30]
Chanel
That's interesting. Okay, so you have date like different data sets that you're pulling in different interviews. Is there any other types of content that you try and put into that new area?
- [34:39]
Akash Gupta
So that's for me like it's interviews are the best source. So for instance, recently if you Google on Google actually there's a lot of search for this Google Product management interview and you look at the first three results and they, well, the first result will say they have five interviews. The second result will say they have seven interviews. The third result will say they have 10. Well, what is the actual truth? Right? And so that's something I can go talk to people who recently interviewed at Google and I can put it behind the paywall and I can say, oh, there's actually X number of interviews. These are the interviews that you're likely to see. These are the exact questions that people I talk to were asked.
- [35:13]
Dylan
That's valuable.
- [35:14]
Chanel
That is, that is valuable. Yeah. Huh. Okay, I can see that this is, it's just bringing me back to like so I was, I did some SEO work like years ago and it's just like it's all coming full circle because this is the stuff you used to do back then. And I'm like, oh, okay, it still works.
- [35:29]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, it does. It's what academics do. If you think about it like they're not going to publish in a journal unless they have something new to contribute.
- [35:38]
Chanel
That's interesting. Um, this one got me. So on the topic of the paid, paid newsletter, I saw that you have a, a subscription guarantee that I had. I've never seen this before with a newsletter and maybe that's just me missing it. But you say that. I promise this paid newsletter essentially will have a more than 10x ROI on your career where you get your money back. I love.
- [35:57]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, I'm happy to, happy to refund anybody. Like almost nobody has ever told me like, like hey, your content, it wasn't good. Like give me a refund. Like I have to deal with all the customer support requests. I get plenty of people who like the day they subscribe. They're like, oh, I didn't mean to subscribe or something like that. I have to deal with all those refunds. I've never had a refund like this. So yeah, it's a really easy guarantee to make. It's really just copywriting if you think about it just for that sales page. Like there's no way for you to measure 10x ROI or for me to measure it. But if you think about it, $150 a year average product management salary in the world is something like a hundred thousand. Most of my readers are in the US or Europe. Their average product management salary is something like $200,000. $150 to have an impact on you, that's 10x I need to increase your pay from 200,000 to 201,000. I'm pretty confident I can do that. It's a very small percentage increase on your salary. And every PM who works they get like between like a 3 to 10% yearly increase. And so for them to attribute, you know, I got five this year because I was reading Akash's newsletter. I think is pretty easy.
- [37:04]
Chanel
No, I like the framing. I had just never seen it before and I was like, oh wow, it's fascinating.
- [37:08]
Dylan
It's like added, added peace of mind. Right. Like at the very worst if this has brings me zero value, I can ask for a refund. That's it's like it's just a deal closer.
- [37:18]
Akash Gupta
Exactly. And unless people start using it, I'll just keep that.
- [37:22]
Chanel
Yeah, why not? It's just giving them a. Yeah, like you said, the peace of mind. So that they're probably. I have to wonder what you're like. I'm sure there's no way to measure this but like what the conversion increase was or like the speed to conversion, you know, like how much faster are people subscribing to the paid side of things? Because they're like, well it's a no brainer, like I can get my money back.
- [37:41]
Akash Gupta
I should test that.
- [37:43]
Chanel
Yeah, I don't know if you'd be able to but it's interesting if you, if you're able to let us know.
- [37:49]
Akash Gupta
I could just remove it from that page or alternatively I could just tell people like hey, I'm telling you right now, if you don't get any value after this, just email me and I'll refund you at the top of the next email or something.
- [37:59]
Dylan
Yeah, I was going to say do you ever mention it actually in a. Just before a locked part of the article, a gated part of the article where it's like if you're worried about giving me all your money, never getting it back for like I have a guarantee essentially mentioning that. Have you ever tried that?
- [38:12]
Akash Gupta
I should. Maybe I'll do that on Saturday's piece. The thing I do offer and I've tested this is whether I should have a free seven day trial. And so I do have a free seven day trial out there. And I think, I mean you can read the whole newsletter if you want over seven days.
- [38:28]
Chanel
Yeah, yeah, I saw that. I subscribed to your newsletter when I was doing the deep dive. So I think now me going back, I don't have that option anymore because you can't give it an extra time. Yeah.
- [38:38]
Akash Gupta
Interesting. I do have a lot of people who I. Who when they churn I try to like I email people like oh you can meet with me if you want and I can just do like a normal coaching session. And like all this has to do a couple things and so people do take me up on that and a lot of times they will say yeah, I do plan to resubscribe. And I don't know how many of those people actually have. Only probably one or two have. But people often aspire to.
- [39:03]
Chanel
That's interesting. I found certain people will unsubscribe from my newsletter and I find that you know, they might see it through a recommendation from someone else and then they resubscribe and then they're like more active than ever and I'm like okay, that's interesting. I kind of like that. It's a good use case for recommendations for sure.
- [39:19]
Dylan
I'm curious what like 2025 is. Is upon us now. So what, what do you see as like a huge opportunity for you in 2025 for the newsletter?
- [39:29]
Akash Gupta
Great question. I think that one of the most important things I'm trying to do is continue to grow that B2B segment. So like recently just had like 50 seat purchase. Like love to see a 50 seat purchase. Also like an annual purchase. Right. And like that's like the best. So driving more of those purchases where like you know, we have a head of product and they're trying to uplevel their product organization so they just buy everybody one of these. There's a lot of people who do stuff like that. If you think about it, a lot of times they'll pay even more. So one of the competitors in my space is called Reforge. Their courses are often like a thousand dollars for a course or like two to three thousand dollars a year for an unlimited seat, which a lot of tech companies currently have memberships up if they're willing to pay 2 to $3,000 for access to course material. If I can try to kind of elevate my content quality, maybe even I package some of it as courses. So that's one of the tests I'm planning on running in 2025. Packaging more of my work into like unique courses and then maybe even hosting those, like, as standalone courses that you could potentially purchase too. And so thinking about courses and education and competing in kind of this B2B segment of career content is one area that I think is a pretty interesting growth area. The second one for me is really tripling down. Like, my podcast is so young. Like, if you think about my newsletter, when I went full time on the newsletter, I had probably spent like three or four years on it. I'm just like five or six months into the podcast. I'm. I want to set it up for, you know, three or four years from now. It is like a huge business as well. And so thinking about accelerating my learning loop there. So what I have now, I mentioned to you guys, like, we have people on shorts, packaging, editing with them. Just like I've approached my entire newsletter, always coming up with really good tests, tests that we have really high conviction in, tests that we can somehow measure, that we can have articulate a hypothesis and then look at over several podcast episodes. Okay, did having for instance the trailer at the beginning of the YouTube episode like, interestingly, we just looked at that test this afternoon. So we looked at like the last 10 videos, five with trailer at the beginning and five without the average view. Duration was quite a bit higher without the trailer, but the average views was quite a bit lower. So if you actually look at total time watched, it was a little bit higher with the trailer. So then you're kind of like confused. You know, you like, you don't have full clarity and signal. So we haven't like kind of made a conclusive decision on that and we'll just continue to test into it. But continuing to look at things like that, continuing to make smart decisions and up level the technology really around the newsletter, around how we're doing. SEO is the other big opportunity.
- [42:07]
Chanel
I like that. Are you, do you have plans to expand? I know like SEO is SEO, but you know, perplexity coming in and like, chatgpt, like, I'm even seeing subscribers come from those places and I'm not really focused on SEO like that. So I'm wondering if there's anything different you're doing, thinking about those channels versus typical Google or.
- [42:24]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, I see some traffic from there, but it's like, much less than Google and none of them turn into free or paid subscribers, really, for me. So it hasn't been a good source of quality traffic. I think it's part of the AI Armageddon, really. I think it's like a very sad fact, though, that they're just going to start to eat up a lot of traffic that independent sites like ours used to actually get, because they just summarize the information and yeah, they're not really good vehicles for subscribers. So it's pretty sad. I think I want to, like, clarify my thought process on how to take advantage of it in light of that. And I don't know that I have a good answer, but I do know that, like, a lot of my content that ranks for Google search also for the same queries. And ChatGPT and perplexity does really well. And I'm sure you probably see that too. Right? Like, I think if you search my newsletter growth, like, your article is like, first or second. Right. So you're getting all that traffic. And I think it's kind of the same thing for ChatGPT's mind. They're probably like, look at your article if you ask them about my growth. So I think that right now I'm just optimizing the same as Google until I learn more.
- [43:24]
Chanel
That's fair. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I just wasn't sure if you had any, like, insider knowledge on these new platforms that you're looking at.
- [43:31]
Akash Gupta
I wish.
- [43:32]
Chanel
Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. The podcast, I think, is going to be one of the ways that you kind of stand out a little bit more as well. Because, you know, like I said, that's also exclusive content, if you will. Nobody else is interviewing the same people at the same time with the same questions. So that's going to be a good way for you to stand out moving forward too.
- [43:50]
Akash Gupta
Yes. Although the more I study podcasts, the more I'm learning that, like, the same podcast and guests appear on every single podcast, especially guests that drive views. So it's interesting.
- [44:03]
Chanel
Yeah, but it's your personality, I think that will stand out above more, above the other ones.
- [44:08]
Akash Gupta
So I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. I need to continue to improve my craft there.
- [44:12]
Chanel
I feel like yes, us too.
- [44:14]
Dylan
So yeah, ongoing process, learning process. Do you have any plans on any kind of new channels or new types of content? Because you just launched the podcast in 2025, in 2024. Do you have any, anything else that you're thinking of doing in 2025 that you'd see as being either fun or experimental or anything like that?
- [44:33]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, it's like kind of like every six months or so I want to try to launch something new. So I'm not at like the Mark Lou, like monthly level new startup. I think that's amazing. But for me probably every six months, months or so. So before the podcast I actually self published a book on Amazon for instance. So that was like a. Oh yeah, fun sort of experimental process to do that. As I mentioned with my biggest opportunity around course, I think that's kind of the next big sort of experimental opportunity for me is some sort of self paced course with heavy discount for newsletter subscribers type of package product. And so that is on my mind like figuring out we have like basically with the team, we're thinking about like between three different ideas, which idea is going to like be the best topic to cover and then making sure we have the right content behind it and making sure that you know, if we're going to charge like a hundred times more than the newsletter, how we can actually deliver 100 times the value in this course. So that's like my probably my highest conviction hypothesis of a new product or new direction. But really I feel like I have the right two main business lines. So whenever like a prioritization decision comes up, if the course is going to take something away from the newsletter or podcast, I'd rather not do it because I feel very high conviction on both of those two and want to just. All the returns to these types of businesses happen way down the line. Like the work you're doing now, it pays off like four years down the line. So I want to make sure to kind of put in that grunt work now.
- [46:03]
Dylan
Yeah, plant that tree now instead of, you know, 20 years from now. Right. As D.C. saying goes, amazing.
- [46:07]
Chanel
That sounds great. Um, I think a course would do well for you. You already have the content, you already have the interviews that you could pull in even. I think that would do quite well. Excited to see that come to life on your end. Other than that, I mean, wrapping up like where can people find you? Where can they find your work? What's the best channel? It sounds like LinkedIn substack podcast.
- [46:28]
Akash Gupta
Yeah, exactly. Anywhere. Anywhere. Akashgupta, the website like, I have this. I haven't fixed my, like, website. I'm stuck on substack. And once you choose one domain redirect, they're like, oh, you can't have more than one. We're not going to write the 301 redirects for you. So I'm just like stuck on www.news.akashg.com. or you could just do product-growth.com one day. Maybe I'll have to buy some better domain. I don't know. But that's where I'm at right now. And all the social media I have.
- [46:58]
Chanel
To imagine at this point with your subscribers and the people on the platform, they'd probably make an exception, no?
- [47:04]
Akash Gupta
Maybe they would. If they would, I would buy like a better custom domain like today.
- [47:10]
Dylan
Worth reaching out. Worth reaching out to them.
- [47:12]
Chanel
Well, thanks for coming on the podcast, Akash. Really appreciate it.
- [47:15]
Akash Gupta
Thank you so much for having me. I was really excited when I got your email.
- [47:20]
Chanel
I thought you'd be a great guest. I think there's a lot for people to learn based on, you know, the paid side of things with your paid content and just you're putting out a ton of content. So I think it's the prolific nature of it is. Is interesting. So appreciate you coming on.
- [47:34]
Akash Gupta
My pleasure.