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- [00:00]
Sam Vanderweelen
And so they're not even having to leave Instagram because once I got them to stop leaving Instagram, we got so many more email subscribers. And this has led to, like, thousands of people signing up. I was shocked.
- [00:10]
Eddie Schlaner
They've certainly done a lot for me. It's just this instant credibility that people see. So I give it a lot of credit.
- [00:16]
Ollie Richards
You could 10x your ad spend, get 10x more leads in, but can you 10x the time that you're available for coaching? Probably not. The approach instead is to say, well, so now you're able to pay for all of your ads or even making a bit of a profit. You can raise the prices of your coaching, and everything that you do in your coaching is now profit.
- [00:34]
Nathan May
I think you are being financially irresponsible if you do not have a newsletter. Every time I hit publish, I have a chance to potentially get on a sales call with somebody and I write one thing and it reaches every single person that I would potentially want to work with.
- [00:47]
Caitlin Burgoyne
It makes it easier for us to promote our own products. And because we send them to this thank you page after they complete their poll, we can promote something else. Our own stuff, a continuation of our sponsor stuff. So it gives us a second ad spot that isn't directly in the newsletter.
- [01:01]
Justin Moore
I did this thread a long time ago where it was like, here's how it got to 3,000 subscribers on my newsletter. And that this was one of the tactics that most people commented on was like, oh, wow, this is a good idea. I'm going to try this. I honestly can't even remember the other nine, but that one is the one that I remember because it led to a lot of great conversations.
- [01:22]
Dylan
Welcome to another edition of the Growth in Reverse podcast. My name is Dylan and I'm Chanel. And we are going to dive into. We thought, hey, you know what? This podcast has been going on for about a year, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to one celebrate. Yay. Clapping sounds. You made it through a year of publishing this podcast. How has it. How has it been one year publishing? Like, what has been a big takeaway or maybe an experience you want to share?
- [01:48]
Chanel
Coming up with podcast topics is hard. That's my experience.
- [01:52]
Nathan May
Yeah.
- [01:54]
Dylan
So planning is key.
- [01:55]
Chanel
Planning is key. I love having people on the show. I think it's always interesting to, like, pull insights out of other people's stories, but people also enjoy when it's just us, and that's challenging to figure out. Like, what are we going to talk about today? So, yeah. But overall, the Podcast has been super interesting, insightful, a breadth of content that we can repurpose and share. So I like it, it's been fun.
- [02:16]
Dylan
I've really enjoyed it. And I thought to celebrate what we could do is we've had over a dozen guests on the podcast. I think it was closer to 6, 16ish podcast guests. I might be a little bit off on that, but I thought we would go through and review some of the best newsletter tips that we heard or that that guests shared on on our podcasts throughout the year. So I've got, I've picked about six clips and what we're going to do is we are going to go, we're going to play the clips so you guys can hear them. We'll obviously include links in the show notes to each of these clips so you can go check them out if you want to watch the whole, the whole episode or just that clip. And then we're going to react to them. We're going to give our thoughts and feedback on the advices that was shared. How does that sound to you?
- [02:58]
Caitlin Burgoyne
Good.
- [02:58]
Chanel
And fun fact, I have not listened to any of these again, so this is going to be new for me.
- [03:04]
Nathan May
Excellent.
- [03:04]
Dylan
Okay, so let's dive into the first clip. This is from our very first guest and his name is Eddie Schlaner and he writes the newsletter and the website. Very good copy. So let's dive into Eddie's advice that, that we, that we heard him share very profoundly.
- [03:22]
Chanel
I'm wondering, like, so for just the testimonials on the newsletter, are you like, reaching out to people specifically or is there like an automated, like after they've been on your email list for two months, you ask them for a testimonial or something, or you just get those inbound.
- [03:35]
Eddie Schlaner
In the very beginning, the first year that I was sending out the newsletter, that was like the focus of the newsletter was to collect testimonials. So I would, I think there was a link in there that said leave a, leave a review, get a backlink. And that was kind of my offer to folks because I would say, hey, you know, I'll link back to your LinkedIn or your, or your website if you, if you leave a testimonial about the, about the blog. Well, it definitely worked for subscribers. Definitely work for subscribers. And then, you know, anybody else on the, on the homepage, like this quote unquote, like featured like testimonials. And those are, those are folks that I've worked with in the past that maybe have garnered audiences of their Own or, you know, they just, they just have a presence in the industry. And so I just ask them very directly. Sometimes more than once. Probably gotta ask. You gotta ask.
- [04:33]
Dylan
How much do you think those testimonials have played a part in your growth and in growing the newsletter and even getting clients too?
- [04:39]
Eddie Schlaner
Sure, yeah. I mean, it's hard to quantify it, but I think they've certainly done a lot for me. I mean, it's just this instant credibility that people see. And then, you know, I'm sure most subscribers will read something that I've written before subscribing to the newsletter. But with this kind of testimonial wall, so to speak, there's this abundant, you know, credibility associated with the newsletter, I guess. So, yeah, it's kind of like going. It's like going to Amazon, seeing a product that has, you know, hundreds of five star reviews. It's just this kind of like, length implies strength, heuristic at work. So I give it a lot of credit.
- [05:14]
Dylan
Okay, so Eddie's advice, what do you, what do you think of that?
- [05:17]
Chanel
Yeah, I mean, this is essentially his wall of testimonials. Right. And this is, he says that this was a big, important piece of getting people to subscribe. And he really credits the testimonials to growing his newsletter faster and even bringing in more clients and that kind of thing. So it's just a social proof really helps.
- [05:35]
Dylan
Yeah, you called this, you did the 30 days of growth earlier this year and you called this one the social proof avalanche, which, which was really clever because as you're just basically scrolling through his website, you will just see, you know, cascading social proof as you scroll down.
- [05:51]
Chanel
And if, if you want to see what we're talking about, just go to very good copy.com and just start scrolling. And it like never ends. And you can load more. It's so long, he needs a load more button. So if that gives you any indication into how much social proof he has.
- [06:06]
Dylan
On there, it's great. And in. I can't remember in the clip if he says it or not, but he's almost kind of like embarrassed or ashamed at the amount of social proof he has. But I really think it's been a real huge credibility boost. And one thing we say when we talk about onboarding flow and like landing pages, you want your landing page or your signup page, which in this case, this would be like Eddie's homepage. You want it to be clear, compelling and credible. Right. And one way to make it way more credible is to have actually people saying good things about you and good things about your newsletter. So I thought this was a really smart way to do it. And he also. One thing he did that I like, that I thought was smart is he incentivized people to leave a testimonial. And not in like a, I'll pay you basically for this, but like, hey, if you say something nice about the newsletter, if you genuinely enjoy it, leave a review and I will backlink to your website or your newsletter or your channel, whatever it might be, your social media platform. So I thought that was a really interesting way that he used some incentive to get people to actually say nice things. And even if it's not a massive incentive, it's a lot more. It's a lot more than just saying, hey, leave a nice review for me. Thanks.
- [07:09]
Chanel
The other thing I'm realizing as we're talking through this is having this much social proof on your homepage is just like a reminder to yourself of the cool things you do.
- [07:19]
Dylan
Yeah.
- [07:19]
Chanel
So every time he goes to his homepage, he can probably just scroll down and be like, oh, yeah, people think I do good work.
- [07:24]
Nathan May
And.
- [07:24]
Chanel
And like, it's just a little boost on one of those days where you kind of need a little extra pushing.
- [07:29]
Dylan
When the imposter syndrome, you haven't had your. Your meds yet and your imposter syndrome is like, you go to your homepage, that's your medication. Oh, yeah, maybe I'm. Maybe I'm actually good at what I do or people actually enjoy what I'm creating. So, yeah, that's exactly very important. Okay, why don't we dive into the next one then? This one is from a more recent guest, really smart creator named Sam Vanderweelen. And I had the pleasure of meeting her at Crafting Commerce for the first time this past June. You've met her before, correct? Oh, no, you hadn't.
- [07:59]
Chanel
I had not met her before. That was my first time too.
- [08:02]
Dylan
Okay, so.
- [08:02]
Chanel
But we're both from the Philly area, so we have commonalities, but no, we had never met in person.
- [08:07]
Dylan
Right. That's what it was. So let's go check out what Sam has to say. So you said before when we were talking about all signs pointing to your email list. So how does that work with social media? Because it's notoriously hard to drive newsletter subscribers from. From places like Instagram. So how do you. How does that flow work for you?
- [08:24]
Sam Vanderweelen
Yeah, so the way this started was that people would post reels about their podcast, like, just showing a Little audio clip or, you know, whatever. And then they would just say, like, comment here to get the episode. And that's kind of what we did, all for, like, a long time. And people would just send a link to the episode. So I thought, again, all roads lead to the email list. And I was like, but this is a free episode that they can get on Apple, Spotify, wherever they go, listen to podcasts. But how am I going to get this person on my email list? So we started doing something where we use many chat on Instagram and we started saying like, comment. We made it a funny word. First of all, this was the biggest thing that changed and drove so much more traffic to my podcast. Instead of me saying like, comment 258 for episode 258, we started saying, like, if the episode was about, like, if I was related, I'd be like, comment peach, you know, and they would comment. We made it a funny word or a funny emoji. And this has worked much better. And then it DMS the person the link to the episode, and then immediately follows up and says, hey, by the way, did you know that I have a weekly free newsletter called SAM sidebar that 50,000 creators get every single week to learn how to blah, blah, blah. If you want in, click here. They click. It says, great, what's your name? You say, Dylan. Great, Dylan, what's your email? You put that in. And because it's synced with Kit, it just automatically is inputting them into Kit. And so they're not even having to leave Instagram, because once I got them to stop leaving Instagram, we got so many more email subscribers. And then the second strategy I'm doing with podcasts is that I've grouped them into little, like, playlists around a topic. And so, like, I had a bunch of episodes about money and taxes. So I created like, a CEO's guide to money playlist. And I say, like, do you want this playlist? Comment money. They comment money. It's like, great. What's your name? What's your email? Great, here's the link. So we're only actually giving them the link to the playlist after they've signed up for my email address. And this has led to, like, thousands of people signing up. Was shocked.
- [10:19]
Chanel
Oh, I love this.
- [10:20]
Dylan
And this is free, organic content too, right?
- [10:22]
Sam Vanderweelen
Yeah, because literally for years it was just like, comment 2:58 to listen. And then that was it. We just, like, drop it off. And I was like, why aren't we following up with people? And so like, now about Anything. Anything. I do now there's. I build it into the many chat sequence that if we give them something right away, we immediately follow up with like a. By the way, you should sign up for this thing or put it behind something like, like the playlist, for example. The thing is to like give the person the thing right away in the DMs. Don't, don't make them go to their email. So I'm still delivering the value right there. And they like, they immediately get the link to the episode or the link to the playlist, but now they've automatically, you know, through tech magic, they've gone onto my email list. So it's just so much better.
- [11:04]
Dylan
Okay, so what do you think about Sam's advice here about using Instagram and manychat and all that?
- [11:09]
Chanel
Oh, man, it gets me so fired up. I want to use Instagram again. I like forgot she said this. And then I was like, ah, yeah.
- [11:16]
Dylan
You said right at the end of that clip you're like, oh, I gotta use this for my deep dives.
- [11:19]
Chanel
I totally did. And then here I am and here we are.
- [11:22]
Dylan
Have you been using it later?
- [11:23]
Chanel
So, yeah, Nope. I know you love this one because you're all excited about manychat and the automations and stuff too.
- [11:28]
Dylan
It's a lot of fun. It's, it's fun just to like build it and figure out how the whole sequence works, including it with kit, building out even mini sequences within kit for each of these. It can be a little bit time intensive, but I think it's worth it. You gotta start pushing that snowball down the hill though. I find you really need some momentum with this because if you're just doing this sporadically, it's probably not gonna work. You need to start showing up in people's Instagram feeds and then continue to show up in their Instagram feed. So I really think this one is where consistency matters and Sam has the capacity to do that because I believe she's got a, A team helping her a little bit. So my point is I love how this can be scaled and really leverages a channel that is typically harder to convert people to subscribing to your newsletter. And it does so by keeping them on that channel. They don't have to like click through, they don't have to go to your landing page and then sign up there. And then, you know, all that stuff, you ask for their email address in the chat and thanks to the integration with ManyChat, it brings it right in. They don't have to leave. So I think it's really, really friction free and really interesting.
- [12:32]
Chanel
Totally. And you can integrate with TikTok too. I just looked. My brain's on TikTok because of talking to Millie recently.
- [12:40]
Dylan
Yeah. Plug that episode right now. Go check out Millie. Or chat with Millie. Is really good.
- [12:46]
Chanel
It was really good. Yeah, No, I love this one. And this actually came. We stopped recording the episode and then she started talking and we were like, wait, we have to record again. Because it was just like gold, like nugget upon nugget. And we're like, okay, wait, record again. Just put this in the middle for those of you who like little behind the scenes things. Yeah, this was actually at the very end and we literally put it in the middle.
- [13:06]
Dylan
We're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to record this. That was so good. It was good. I think it was because we were talking about how we were going to promote this episode. She's like, what are you guys going to do? We're kind of like, I don't know. And she was like, this is what I do. And we're like, oh, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was.
- [13:22]
Chanel
And if you're on Instagram, you should follow us and we'll put our links in the description. I am horrible at Instagram and so my posts typically get like 10 likes. And so when I shared a clip from this episode and tagged Sam in it and she like added it to her. I don't know what it's called.
- [13:39]
Dylan
She collaborated. She was a collaborator with you?
- [13:40]
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yep.
- [13:41]
Chanel
Yeah. So that one episode got way more likes and I'm like, oh, yeah, this works when you actually do it.
- [13:48]
Dylan
Well, I was so inspired that I tried this with a few of our episodes. So if you want to follow me on Instagram, go to. I'm just at Growth Currency. So the name of my newsletter and then you can see one of my pin clips is, I think, Sam's episode. So it's like full meta inception. Like, I use Sam's episode where she's talking about the strategy to. And use the strategy so you can see how it works. If you want to go in there and reply, I think I used the word peach just because that's what she used in the clip. I thought that was clever. It replied with the word peach and you can see how the whole thing works, at least from a user's perspective. Love it, Love it. Shall we move on to our next clip? Clip number three? Yes. Okay, so clip number three is from Ollie Richards, who has. He's hung out with us inside of GIR Pro, our private community. He's expounded his his knowledge there and shared that with us. And then he also we invited him on the podcast. So he came on the podcast and shared more of his knowledge. He had already reached over $10 million with his main business called StoryLearning, which was an online learning platform. But he wanted to build on that with a creator style business. And so he created this 118 page Google Doc that again Chanel, you've written about, we've discussed it ad nauseum, probably on this podcast that people might be sick of hearing, but it was still a really fascinating case study. So we had him on the podcast to talk about that and we kind of get into talking about some other flywheels here. So why don't we take a look and watch the clip now and reconvene. So something that you mentioned that I haven't forgotten since you spoke to us in the pro community and that was about what you called I think a self liquidating flywheel with your seven figure marketing stack. It just like kind of blew my mind a little bit. So could you maybe talk about a little bit how you're using some of this, the funds from this, the seven figure marketing stack to help fund your paid growth.
- [15:33]
Ollie Richards
That particular marketing course, that was the first course I made. So this is, this is a fairly standard model in the coaching industry. And the way it works is you go out and you buy ads and you mostly run lead gen ads. You could have a cheap product but you know, lead gen ads are fairly common. Now obviously you've then paid for those leads, right? You might be paying 2, 5, $10. So the question, well, how do I add costs? I can't just don't just lose that money. Make that money back so I can go and then buy more ads and increase my audience even more. So the kind of the really simple model to say, well okay, I'm going to get, I'm getting these, I'm going out and I'm advertising, I'm offering a lead magnet. I'm getting leads to come in and then I could just sell my coaching and that way I'll make the money back. And if you're selling high ticket stuff that's super easy to do with paid ads, right? You might, you might spend five on a lead, $250 on a customer, but then you make 5,000 back on the back end, for example, just plucking numbers out of thin air. But the problem with that is that you are now to continue to spend on advertising. Your personal time is now being used, right? So you can you pay to get leads in. You're sending coaching to those leads. So the growth of the business is dependent on your time. So you could 10x your ad spend. Even if you're really profitable, you could 10x your ad spend, get 10x more leads in. But can you 10x the time that you're available for coaching? Probably not. And so the approach instead is to say, well, let's use digital products to recoup that ad spend. So you go and you spend $5 on a lead. That lead comes in, you then offer a $50 workshop or $100 workshop. And what you're aiming for is to get to a point where the digital products that you sell cover all of your ad costs. So now you're able to pay for all of your ads. You're at break even or even making a bit of a profit. The advantage of that is now you've got a lot more leads coming in. You can raise the prices of your coaching because you have more demand. And everything that you do in your coaching is now profit, and you don't have to spend any of that to cover the ad. And so that's the model that I use in my business brand.
- [17:32]
Dylan
So what do you think? Ollie's self liquidating flywheel?
- [17:34]
Chanel
Yeah, I mean, it's just smart business. I mean, being able to recoup your ad costs right away without having to wait months or whatever is just smart. And if you can do that with a digital product, like he said, it's scalable and the flywheel just keeps spinning.
- [17:50]
Dylan
Yeah, I really love this because it seems obvious. And to him, he's like, oh, yeah, this is a common thing in the coaching industry. But like, I'd probably seen it and just didn't know that that's what people were doing. And so to have him, you know, kind of like basically pull back the curtain of what all of these digital marketing experts have been doing or are doing, I thought, hey, if this is like, I've been in this world for a while, but I hadn't really seen anybody explain it this clearly. So if I didn't know about it, I thought this would be an interesting one that maybe a lot of other people hadn't heard about either. So I thought it was really smart because I love how you essentially can scale this up, not exponentially, but I mean, really to the point where I love how he says you're getting more leads and so you can now the demand increases, your supply stays the same. So you can just increase your price. Right. Of course you have to deliver on that. But that being said, you don't have to give away your, your time for, you know, pennies, pennies on the dollar. You can really scale up to where it's worthwhile for you to take those clients and take those calls or offer the service that you're offering.
- [18:52]
Chanel
Yeah, you have mentioned this one multiple times in the last couple months. So I knew this would be on the list.
- [18:57]
Dylan
I'm kind of obsessed with it.
- [19:00]
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yes.
- [19:01]
Dylan
It's so good. Okay, why don't we go to our next clip here. This is with Nathan May, who I think in the. He's fairly well known in the newsletter industry, but he's probably not very well known outside of the newsletter industry in the creator realm and that sort of thing. So we had Nathan on the podcast a few months ago. He basically makes a. Well, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna say. The very first thing that we talk about in this episode or in this clip kind of gives it away. So let's just dive in.
- [19:30]
Chanel
Let's do it.
- [19:32]
Dylan
Did you say you're running 1 million ARR with a thousand person list?
- [19:37]
Nathan May
Yeah. So we went from 0 to ARR. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was cool. So we went from zero to a million ar in about ten and a half months. Close to eleven months last year. So we hit it in, I don't know, November of 2024. And basically I had a bunch of stuff I had to figure out when I entered this market because like everybody else who does newsletter ads, like, they either came from the industry or they had like a huge following. And so I was like, like what.
- [20:07]
Dylan
What do I do?
- [20:08]
Nathan May
Like, that's a lot to, to go up against. I think two or three things worked really well. One of them was, was this newsletter. I didn't know it was going to be a good idea, but now I think it's a very good idea. So I think like any founder, if you run a B2B company, so you sell, you sell a service, right? That could be an agency, that could be. You could be a lawyer, you could be whatever, mortgage guy, any kind of like service or B2B SaaS, I think you are being financially irresponsible if you do not have a newsletter. And so what I did, which I didn't know before, is I thought, all right, I want to do a newsletter. And well, who do I really need to work with at each of these newsletter companies? There are maybe, like, two people. I need, like, the CEO or the founder, and I need the head of growth or the VP of marketing.
- [20:48]
Caitlin Burgoyne
That's it.
- [20:49]
Nathan May
And so, like, if maybe there's like, 300 newsletter companies that I want to work. Oh, 300 times two. 600. Okay, can I get 600 people? That's like an Excel list. Like, I can go one by one by one. I can meet those people at conferences. I can email them, I can LinkedIn message them. Like, it takes this giant, like, nebulous world. It's like, oh, my God, like, how do I. Do I run ads? Do I cold email? Like, there's all these people I could reach. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You just need the 600. Can you just get 200 of the 600? I can do that. And so that's what I. I started doing. And I basically, I would go. And I think this also is important. I made it a private newsletter. So you had to be. It's kind of cute. You had to be like, like, invite, you know, like, invite you to the newsletter. And I would LinkedIn message people. And I have a bunch of screenshots of this and stuff. Like, for instance, I LinkedIn message Sean Griffey, who was the one of the three co founders of Industry Dive. Know, big, big deal, big guy. And I just go, hey, I run a private newsletter for newsletter operators who are doing 79 figures. You know, it's generally for CEOs and their heads of growth. A couple people like X and Y and Z read X and Y and Z were mutual connections that we had. Or a lot of times I'll do competitors of the person that I'm messaging. So it's like, oh, they see their peers are reading this newsletter. Okay, now I've now elevated the status of the newsletter. Would you mind if I add you? And then I manually add them, they give me their email, and then I don't put them. Give them some landing page where it's like, oh, here you go. Do it right, White glove. I do it for them and I add them. Yeah, that's been a great tactic.
- [22:17]
Chanel
Well, and then when you send out the newsletter, you actually, at the top, say, welcome to blah, blah, blah. And like, there's four or five really big names that have joined in the last week. And it just, like, solidifies the reason I'm reading this newsletter. I'm like, oh, yeah, so is Tyler Dank and, you know, Nathan Barry or whoever reading this newsletter? And I think that's such a smart Move too.
- [22:35]
Nathan May
Yeah, I, I, I feel, I think I stole that from something I can't remember. Uh, but I, I like that part of song. And, and like, for somebody who's, like, listening to this, like, I don't have, like, my newsletter is like, super ugly. Like, there's no, there's no design. It's like, it's literally just like an email from me. Like, but, but, but I think that's by. I think that's a good thing. Like, like, like, if you, like, sell like, a high ticket or, like, healthy product or service, like, people want to hear from you. And so if you were going to go do this, I think everybody who has an existing company should go do this because. No, nobody does it, by the way. So I actually, so this is important to know.
- [23:10]
Dylan
Okay.
- [23:10]
Nathan May
Why is this better than, like, cold emailing people? Well, number one, Sean Griffey's not going to get on a sales call with me. Like, that's not. Sean doesn't know me. It's like, who's Nathan? I don't, I don't care about this. Right. So the barrier to entry for a newsletter is significantly for people who do get on sales calls with me. Typically if you're a B2B business owner, you, you have like, all right, you get on call with somebody, let's say they don't close, you know, you're not going to have a chance to get on another call with that person for maybe another quarter. So maybe there's like four times per year you could potentially close somebody.
- [23:37]
Sam Vanderweelen
Right.
- [23:38]
Nathan May
For you for your product or your service newsletter. Right. And then so you have this huge list now. And then if I want to reach out to people, I have to individually reach out to all them. Well, so a newsletter kind of solves all that. Right? Like, the, the friction is extremely low. Anybody would join. And now I'm building trust. And I, every time I hit publish, I have a chance to potentially get on a sales call with somebody and I write one thing, and it reaches every single person that I would potentially want to work with. That's like, I think why it's so valuable.
- [24:06]
Chanel
Well, and the content is like case studies of what you've done or like these badass stories from people you're working with. And so you're like, you're showcasing your clients, which is amazing. I'm sure they love that. You're also showcasing the value you provide and, like, what you can do. And then you're just kind of putting it all together in a newsletter and delivering it nicely. To them.
- [24:26]
Nathan May
Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't delegate it.
- [24:28]
Chanel
Man, this is like firing me up.
- [24:30]
Dylan
The private newsletter strategy.
- [24:32]
Chanel
So many good things in here.
- [24:34]
Dylan
Um, this is a long. I wanted to double click on. I didn't know where to like end it. Cause he just kept kind of going with like great advice.
- [24:40]
Chanel
Yeah, I, I want to double click on this thing that he said in the beginning, which was when he came into the scene. Everyone else in the space that was doing the same kind of work was either had extreme experience, like working at the Hustle of maybe Matt McGarry or they had an audience already and he's like, I don't have either of those, like you know, notable experience or this audience. So he's like, how can I stand out? And I think that piece right there, even if you're not running an agency, even if you're not running a newsletter, it's like, how can you stand out? How can you differentiate yourself from everyone else in the space? And so I think that was a big piece of this too.
- [25:16]
Dylan
And how did he do it?
- [25:17]
Chanel
He decided that he was going to go hyper specific and find the people he needed to talk to and put them in his email list and say, hey, do you want to join my newsletter? It's you know, invite only. And then he was just sharing these incredible case studies. Like as he was working with customer, with clients, he would share those, but they didn't have to have like notable names or anything. He could just be like, hey, I help this one brand, you know, 1800% increase in sales or whatever.
- [25:41]
Dylan
Yeah, so you do need, you do need something, right? To, to showcase. Right. It's a kind of a chicken and egg thing. But once you have that thing, that's when you can really start taking off and showing what you're doing for other people and building it up. We had a, I won't give away any names, but there was a member of the growth Reverse Pro community who had a, was on a call with last week and they're targeting a very specific sort of similar to Nathan, similar avatar, higher up business person. You know, they're, they're struggling like should we do paid ads? Should we do this and that? And I said, well, have you heard of this private newsletter strategy might be worth exploring. I mentioned this episode to him and so he was going to check it out because it was. I basically said, you know, they're trying to sell a certain service. And I said, if you are needing to get X amount of clients, then why don't you Just make this like, almost like a cold call list. But do what Nathan did and just reach out to these people individually and say, why don't. Do you want to join our newsletter? We help people like you. I just thought it was like, it's reverse engineering sort of what the end result. The people you want to contact. You're basically cold calling them. Like Nathan said, without like this cold call that is really kind of salesy and that people will ignore.
- [26:47]
Chanel
Yeah, 100%. I think we all just inherently try to overcomplicate the end result. Like, if you need three clients, you shouldn't be trying to grow on Instagram. Like, no, go find your people on LinkedIn or wherever they are DM them. You don't even have to post content and just like start a conversation.
- [27:03]
Nathan May
Yep.
- [27:03]
Chanel
So I think we always overcomplicate this and this is a good example of making it more simple.
- [27:09]
Eddie Schlaner
Yeah.
- [27:09]
Dylan
If you have a business and you're trying to get clients and you have a newsletter, the name of the game is not grow to 150,000 subscribers. The name of the game is to get 150 subscribers of your key, your ideal client. Right. And you can make a lot of money on a very small list. I think we've got somebody else in our community who does the same thing. Uh, she has like under a thousand, maybe people on her list and makes over six figures. So I think the. The point of this was to just really highlight the focused effort in getting the right people reading your stuff.
- [27:45]
Justin Moore
Yeah.
- [27:46]
Chanel
Love it.
- [27:47]
Dylan
All right, let's move on to our fifth and penultimate tip. Do you know penultimate means second last?
- [27:54]
Chanel
I did not know that I was going to Google it. Figured it was like a Canadian term, which is funny.
- [28:01]
Dylan
I think it's pretty global. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. So this is.
- [28:05]
Chanel
That word sounds like a. It's like the ultimate, like, top best. That's what I hear. When I hear.
- [28:11]
Dylan
I know that clearly that it's not. I used to think that, but I'm like, no, that would be the ultimate by definition. So I was like, what is the pen? And I googled it one day and I'm like, oh, been using it wrong. Uh, so this is with Caitlin Burgoyne. We will let you. We'll let Caitlin take it away about how she's driving awareness to more products.
- [28:30]
Caitlin Burgoyne
So, like, what I was thinking about wrote 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. The idea is it's the only newsletter that rewards you for getting smarter. It's super short. Each issue is little quick tactical biopsychology based lesson with an example. But then it doesn't give away everything. Like our current issues is like we're going to talk to you about scarcity or we're going to talk 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 psychology technique is? And then you give them three options and they click on it. And when they submit their answer, they're actually entering a contest to win a prize. Sometimes it's going to be a cash prize, sometimes it might be something from our sponsor. So it's like, you know, an annual subscription 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. 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 sponsor stuff. So it gives us a second ad spot so 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. We're going to run our next one next week. 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.
- [30:12]
Chanel
This one's smart. I mean there's no if and or but around it. She's just a insanely deep thinker and strategist about this stuff. So I don't know, I just, I love the idea that it's like a win, win, win. Like the sponsor gets a better placement, the reader is learning something and you're getting data and helping them. So I think it's like more of a shareable kind of newsletter now instead of just like a. Here's this thing, you know. Yeah, it adds another layer to it.
- [30:39]
Dylan
Totally. The second newsletter. Yes. I love the idea that it's kind of like a synthesized version of kind of their weekly and I just think it's so smart that you're. When you're incentivizing people with something that's costing you $0 essentially. In this case, she did a cash prize, so, you know, buy rights. That would cost her actually the money the first time they did the poll. But really you're incentivizing people to enter to win a digital product that you've made once and now to give that away cost you nothing. Right. So it's costing you nothing to incentivize the clicks people are clicking through and they're landing on learning about this product, learning about the product because they land on basically a sale. Like this sales page is like a thank you page, but it's really a sales page that showcases the product that like, oh, man, even if I don't win this, I'm really interested in it. And maybe the next time I click on this poll and don't win, I will be. I'll be even more curious to buy it. So I think this is, this is one of the favorite, one of my favorite tips, at least from the last year. I thought it was really clever.
- [31:36]
Chanel
Yeah, I like it.
- [31:37]
Dylan
All right, let's go to the ultimate and final clip.
- [31:42]
Chanel
Not the penultimate. Not the penultimate.
- [31:43]
Dylan
No, the ultimate and final clip. And this was one of our. One of our first episodes as well, with a guest at least. So now we're going with Justin Moore, who some of you may know as creator wizard, sponsorship coach, very smart guy when it comes to all things, you know, brand partner sponsorships. So for video and newsletter content. So let's take a look and see what Justin has to say.
- [32:05]
Chanel
You were doing some, what I call the unscalable things in the deep dive. I wrote like one on one dms, like every time someone followed you on social. Did that work really well or was.
- [32:14]
Justin Moore
That just like the one. The one on ones worked super well, like the DMing people, because I would. Did it not only on. It was Twitter back then, but on X that worked really well. But also Instagram and TikTok. I did it everywhere. Anytime anyone followed me anywhere, I would DM them and well, first I had a criteria. So I would look at their profile to see does it say like youtuber in their bio or creator or. I look at their content and it seems like they're like an aspiring creator. And I would say maybe about 50% of the people that followed me fit that criteria. And so every day I would, I would spend, you know, 30 minutes an hour basically, like just going through and DMing people and the Success rate was super high of people opting into the newsletter. And so in the early days, that was a really effective tactic.
- [32:57]
Chanel
Do you still talk to any of those people that you DM'd?
- [32:59]
Justin Moore
Yeah, I mean that the other thing about that is that it opens up conversations. Because the other thing too is I was personalizing the messages. I had like a template, of course, but like, I would, I would insert the person's name. This. So this would be really funny is that a lot of times people wouldn't have their first name in their bio. And so I would click through to their YouTube channel and I would just like scrub through like 15 seconds of it and they'd be like, hey, it's, you know, Jonathan or whatever. Hey, it's Christy or whatever. And I would like get their name from watching a little bit of their content. And I would say that in the message and people have been like, oh, wow, how do you know my name? I like don't have it on my profile anywhere. And so people, I think would be genuinely surprised that I like took the effort to just like find out what their name was.
- [33:38]
Chanel
That's fascinating.
- [33:39]
Justin Moore
Yeah.
- [33:40]
Dylan
What do you think had the most impact of the, of the methods you tried?
- [33:43]
Justin Moore
I really do think that one on one outreach was super effective. Not. And yeah, actually some people screenshotted it and talked about it actually on X, which was interesting, which led to a little bit of like conversation around that tactic. So if I had to look back on, I did this thread a long time ago where it was like, here's how it got into 3,000 subscribers on my newsletter, which felt like a lot at the time. And that this was one of the tactics that most, most people commented on was like, oh, wow, this is a good idea, I'm going to try this. And so like, I honestly can't even remember the other nine, but that one is the one that I remember because it led to a lot of great conversations.
- [34:18]
Dylan
All right, Justin Moore.
- [34:20]
Chanel
Yeah, I mean, this is just one of those small things that you can't see other people doing because it's literally in the DMs which are not public, but it's can be so impactful. And I love that he even highlighted like, yeah, I was building relationships, like, this is opening a conversation for us to work together more or just like be friends in the creator space. So I thought, I like this one.
- [34:41]
Dylan
Yeah, I wanted to highlight it because we've talked a bit about scalable things that people are doing that people can do. And this one is very. It's very grassroots. This is like when you're starting out and you're trying to get like this, forget your thousand true fans, just trying to get like a hundred true fans even. And so people who are following you, how common is it for you to get an auto DM from somebody that's like this, like zero effort kind of put into this? They're just like auto DMing me or no DM at all. Right. So the fact that Justin was reaching out to people, using, taking the time, if he figured it was worth a worthwhile subscriber, he was taking the time to find out their name, reach out to them and just say, hey, thanks for following. By the way, I've got, you know, this newsletter that might help you. So we, I think this is the reason why I also like training. This is cuz anybody can do this. Like anyone. Yeah, you, if you have a social media account and people are subscript or following you, you can do this. So I think it is something that more people probably could benefit from and you don't have to spend hours and hours and hours every day or every week doing it. But if you, if you take a few minutes every day to reach out to at least one person who's newly followed you, you're going to see return on that and you'll agree to build that relationship and trust as well.
- [35:54]
Chanel
Yeah, I think that this is just, I just want to highlight and underscore the fact like you, you mentioned this, but reiterate because I've had these auto DMs come at me. This is almost the equivalent in my mind of an AI comment because it's, there's no customization, like I might be a horrible follower for you and you don't want me on your newsletter. And so I love that he was just saying like I didn't do this for everyone, but I did it for the people that I knew would be getting value from my email list and would be a good subscriber. So just highlighting that piece of this because I don't want to see a bunch of people start being like, oh, there's this tool that I use because I've seen that done and it's not very good.
- [36:34]
Dylan
No, if you have to use a tool for this, then don't do it. I think that would be, that would be my best advice here. This should be pretty organic. Justin did say yes, he's like copy and pasting part of the message because of course, why would you rewrite the whole thing? Make it somewhat authentic, obviously include the person's name, if you can find it. And maybe a good rule of thumb and he was talking about Twitter where nobody, not everyone had their actual first names. But with LinkedIn, pretty much everyone has their first names. Right. So if you're using LinkedIn and you're sending DMs on LinkedIn, then that's kind of almost like really low hanging fruit to like reach out to people. You can see what they do if they're like an ideal subscriber. So this strategy would be even quicker and easier to do on LinkedIn if you're, if you're growing an audience there.
- [37:20]
Chanel
Nice. I like it.
- [37:21]
Dylan
Sweet. Do you have any favorites, any standouts, or are there any that we didn't discuss here that you remember from the year that you want to just like quickly opine on?
- [37:30]
Chanel
Oh, no pressure. No. I think, honestly I feel like I just need to go back and listen to all of our episodes because there's so much gold in here. And like, I think I forget this on a weekly basis, but I'm like, oh, there's like really good nuggets in here that some of these things I need to like expand on and put in the growth vault. But it's just people are interesting. Everyone does this differently. And the key here is experimenting and trying different things is going to far outweigh just trying to like plug and play somebody else's journey onto your growth story. Right. Like one thing for Caitlin, like the Friday email for Caitlin might work for her, but for you it may not work and maybe it's too much or like you can't execute it well, so don't do that. But like it works for her and that's okay. You don't have to do everything that other people are doing. So I think experimenting with this stuff is really key.
- [38:17]
Dylan
I think also if you can figure out the way you are actually driving business with your newsletter, that will help from these, you know, six clips just as an example that'll help you decide which one of these might be worth your while. Because if you are doing something similar to Nathan, where you're running a high revenue consulting or not consulting but like services business, then you would probably lean more towards that strategy than maybe say, you know, Caitlin's strategy where she's selling digital products and that sort of thing. So if you can kind of reverse engineer how you're driving business, that should help you sort of figure out which one of these strategies might work better for you. Or maybe you can mix and match and do something new and if you do, let us know. We'd love to hear about it.
- [38:57]
Chanel
Yeah, exactly. No, this is good. This was fun. Thanks for putting these clips together.
- [39:02]
Dylan
No problem. And so what are we. We've been doing this for a year now, Chanel. And so what is. What does the beginning of the next year of the Growth in Reverse podcast look like?
- [39:14]
Nathan May
Ooh.
- [39:15]
Chanel
Well, I think. I think we're going to take the month of December off and kind of chill and work on revamping Growth in Reverse Pro and just, like, spend quiet time of stuff, like, instead of trying to, like, do podcasts and all this, this kind of thing. Um, but definitely want to come back and do it. So I think just a little holiday break, and then we'll be back in early 2026 with some more episodes.
- [39:42]
Caitlin Burgoyne
Yeah.
- [39:42]
Dylan
So if you are sitting there religiously every Wednesday morning waiting for our podcast to drop, which I'm sure you all are, especially Elizabeth. Shout out to Elizabeth, who will certainly hear this. Hear this episode when it's live. Yeah, we won't be around for the upcoming few Wednesdays in December. Thanks for hanging out with us over the last year. It's been a lot of fun. Just, you know, personally, I've really enjoyed doing this, and. And it's been great getting to know these guests and doing this with Chanel, so thank you.
- [40:09]
Chanel
I'm excited to come back. Even better with this, so it'll be good.
- [40:13]
Nathan May
Yeah.
- [40:13]
Dylan
All right, well, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. Happy every holiday you can name. And we'll see you on the flip side.
- [40:21]
Chanel
All right, see you.