← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
The Wildest Newsletter Growth Strategies From 3,000 Hours of Research (Greatest Hits)
00:26:14
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, it's Chanel. This week's growth and reverse podcast episode is a replay of our most popular podcast episode to date and just so happens to be the very first episode we published almost exactly a year ago. It's crazy to think, but We've spent over 500 hours putting this podcast together over the last year. So if you've gotten even a small bit of value from this, we would love it if you took a minute to click into the podcast app you're listening on. Could be Spotify, Apple. Whatever it is, give the show a rating and review and let us know what you think. In this episode, we talk about six of the wildest growth strategies we've seen creators use to get huge results. Our next episode will be the last for the year while we take a short hiatus to plan and celebrate during the holidays and have some downtime with family and friends. I hope you have an incredible holiday season, and we'll see you again in the new year. These people do not want this information getting leaked, and he was out there just, like, sharing everything. Most people would probably not talk about that in public.
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B
He had 5,000 subscribers signed up to a newsletter that had yet to be published.
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A
She is just on another level with that man.
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B
I don't hear anybody talking about this or doing this.
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A
So at this point, I've written around 70 deep dives, and at 2 to 4,000 words each, that's a lot of content. Each one has four to sometimes six plus different growth levers that these people have used to grow their email list. So we thought it would be fun to walk through some of the wildest growth tactics that I discovered in my research and share those with you today.
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B
And, Chanel, how many hours do you think you spent total doing these deep dives?
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A
Yeah, I mean, each one takes about 20 hours. Some of them, like Sahil Bloom, took about 40 to 50 hours. So quite a bit.
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B
Quite a bit. Quite a bit. That's probably in the thousands of hours. If my. I don't do public math, but if my. If my math checks out, I think.
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A
It'S about, like, 1700 hours or so of just research. Wow. Yeah. Lots of podcasts.
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B
No kidding. All right, let's. Let's dive into these. These growth tactics. I'm really excited to. To check these out.
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A
Yeah, me too. So this first one comes from Cody Sanchez of Contrarianthinking. Co. Is actually where the newsletter lives. At the time I wrote that deep dive, In February of 2023, she had over 250,000 subscribers, and she'd grown that in just three years, which by itself is insane. But at this point, I have to guess she's pushing a million subscribers, she has a massive YouTube channel and she's just grown even more. But one of the things I found she early days was something I actually didn't even share in the deep dive. But I think about this one a lot because it's just so on brand for her. So Cody Sanchez, she does Main street businesses, so she'll buy businesses and grow them instead of starting businesses from scratch, which is super smart. But this is so on brand for her because she actually bought newsletters to grow her subscriber base in the early days. Now most people, when you buy a newsletter, you transfer the list into your account and call it a day. Right. You might send an email or two and say, hey, you know, my name's Cody. I'm taking over this email list. Hope you enjoy it. Right. Kind of not the best way to do it. But instead, Kody, she bought the newsletter, positioned hers like contrarian thinking in there as a sponsor or as a guest writer, she would write guest posts. So she would do that and not tell anybody that she actually bought the newsletter. So she would almost like, for lack of a better word, siphon these people over to contrarian thinking. And at the same time she'd continue to grow that newsletter. And then once she felt like she got the subscribers she was going to get from it, she ended up selling the newsletter back to someone else. So she bought it for let's say $1,000, bought like grew the thing and then sold it back for more money, but also was able to take subscribers with her.
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B
And so she grew the whole thing under the guise of it still being, you know, X, Y, Z newsletter, not contrarian thinking.
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A
Correct. Yes.
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B
And then, and then she'd sell it back to the person or to somebody else with that same name.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And just had totally increase the value. Kind of like you do with a business, right?
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A
Yes, exactly. She said. This was one of the quotes that I took from that.
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C
She said it's just like a private equity play. You get into the business, you optimize it, grow the subscribers, then I transition those subscribers over to contrary thinking. Hopefully the newsletter is still growing at that time, turn around and sell it to somebody else.
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A
And I was like, wow, she is just on another level with that.
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B
That's amazing. And that's not surprising to me, you know, in, in a lot of ways given like her background with, you know, buying businesses, like really high cash flowing businesses and, and reselling them and all that sort of stuff. So very impressive. But she's, I think, the only person I've seen publicly at least admit to, to do it using this strategy.
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A
Yes, for sure. Most people would probably not talk about that in public and I think that.
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B
Probably actually has helped her with growth just by like sharing those kind of intimate behind the scenes details too.
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A
Do you have one you wanted to share?
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B
One of the more interesting deep dives, I think, I mean, a lot of them are interesting, but one of them may be more unique is a better word, deep dives that I think you've done is with Yossi Levi, the car dealership guy. And it's, I think it's unique in a few ways. One being that this guy Yossi built this car dealership guy anonymously or anonymous account essentially to over 450,000 followers, I believe, before actually, you know, revealing himself. And I just thought one, that's like, he's not the first person to do that, of course, but there's, there's not a lot of content creators who are, who are really doing this anonymous play. And part of the reason why he did it was because he was, and why it worked too is because he was giving out all this insider info on a really specific industry that the general public knows about but doesn't know about the inside workings of it. So he talked about car dealerships, the auto industry, and he gave out a lot of, like I said, insider info that he could do because he was anonymous and therefore could kind of do it without getting his hand slapped too much. So he, he was an auto dealer. So he had all those inside numbers around this or he. Correct if I'm wrong. Was he an auto dealer? Was he, did he work for one?
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A
No, I think his, his dad might have owned one and he worked with, in the family business. And so he had all of those insider numbers. And I remember thinking like, because I'm from the northeast, like in, I was born like grew up in New Jersey, right. I kept thinking like, this is like the dealer mafia. Like these people do not want this information getting leaked. And he was out there sharing everything. Like he would talk about if somebody, they thought a business was going to drop, like the stock was going to drop or like they were going to slash prices or interest rates were dropping. It was just fascinating to hear all of these things. And I know that he really angered a lot of dealers around the space.
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B
No kidding. And then so it was pretty risky. When he finally did expose, you know, his, his actual Name and face and everything. Right.
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A
And he did it in an interesting way. He put together this like documentary almost of like his whole story. It was very well done.
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B
Wow. Yeah, maybe we should. We'll probably link that up down in the show notes, I would imagine too, because that's. That could be cool to see.
- [07:23]
A
Yeah, for sure.
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B
I think one of the other reasons that I just touch on the story, the anonymity was very interesting and the information that he was sharing was great too. But one thing that you highlighted in the deep dive is his ABC content strategy. So he was like very basically prolific with his posting like every day, twice a day. And he had certain like, types of posts he would do every day. You need to have a combination of what you dubbed like insanely valuable, insanely valuable content, which was all that insider info for the car dealership. But you also need to like post it on a regular basis and post kind of the right type of content that people would both like and engage with. So I think he did that really well and obviously it worked to the tune of, you know, over 450,000 followers. And I think he's got 65,000 newsletter subscribers as well. So he's, he's doing pretty okay.
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A
Yeah, he's doing well. One of the other ones that I wanted to bring up was actually probably one of the most underrated deep dives. I don't think it got a ton of attention. Um, it was something I published early on, so maybe that's why. But Ali from First 1000, he actually writes about growth strategies of startups and he was just so intentional about his growth. Like he started at zero and he was like, I'm gonna hit a thousand in six months. And he was like, okay, so let me back into this. I need to get six subscribers a day. And he just did everything he could to hit that six number a day. And it's like smaller numbers, but I think the intentionality behind it was so key. I found 39 plus tactics he tried and he actually detailed them in his own posts on the newsletter. So I just went through them and I was like, this is fascinating. And so he. The thing that worked best for him in the early days was a product hunt launch. But he actually, I think he had three product hunt launches before it hit. Like the first one completely flopped. He put no back like time into it to figure out how to properly launch there. Then he did another like smaller launch for a semi related product. But then the third time he. I think he got like over 4,500 subscribers from that product hunt launch. And I was like, whoa. Yeah. So, you know, just, like, constantly hammering at that 6 subscriber goal per day was really interesting. Um, and the fact that he not only tried all this stuff, but had the wherewithal to keep track of all the analytics and the numbers of what worked and what didn't, I thought that was super cool.
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B
Yeah, I really like how he broke that down. Basically taking that big number of a thousand, which feels daunting, especially when you have zero, and be like, well, if I just do six a day, you know, that is. Feels way more doable, way more achievable than, you know, going from zero to 1,000 in six months. So I think that's. That's what more people should kind of aim towards. Even if you have a bigger number, like 10,000 a day. Well, what does that look like? Can you get 60 people a day kind of thing?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so breaking it down that way is really interesting. And the fact that he called. I believe he called his newsletter the first 1000.
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A
I was just gonna say that. It just literally hit me right now that he was aiming for a thousand. And he called his newsletter the first 1000.
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B
Yeah. And then he built the whole newsletter model on that. Right. He talked about getting first thousand newsletters and then I think first thousand users for products and stuff like that.
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A
Yeah, I think the whole impetus behind it was getting your first 1000 users. But he totally transitioned that into Getting your first 1,000 newsletter users, if you will. So we're talking a lot about growth and getting more people to check out your work. But do you know what one of the best ways to turn people into email subscribers and even paying customers is? Social proof. I'm talking about testimonials from readers and people on social media just mentioning how much they love your work. And today's sponsor, Senja is my favorite tool for collecting these kinds of testimonials. And not just collecting them, but they also make it super easy to showcase them on your website and share them on social media. You can even embed them in your emails. It adds so much more credibility to see someone other than yourself raving about your work. Sencha is a tool I've personally been using for the past 18 months. So it's super exciting to have them support this new show. You can get started completely free@growthinreverse.com Senja. That's growthinreverse.com S, E N J A. And you can start using the tool right now to collect all those nice things people are saying about your work. And when you're ready to upgrade, you can use the code reverse to get your first month for just a dollar. Thanks again to Senja for sponsoring the podcast. And now back to the show.
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B
Okay, so one of your more recent deep dives was with Tom Alder. So Tom Alder writes Strategy Breakdowns newsletter. He is very prolific and on, on LinkedIn, he's trying to be more prolific on Twitter as well. And, but, but it all started to me, the interesting thing was this all started back about three years ago in 2021, when he was still working, I believe he was working at Atlassian at the time. Atlassian is a company, huge company for those of you don't know who, who bought Trello and bought Loom and have just a suite of tech SaaS products, right. And so Tom was working on their product strategy team and so he kind of knew how things worked and how to, you know, get products in front of people and get people to use them. And so he started creating content sort of on that topic and breaking down, you know, business strategies and that sort of thing too. And so he started with a 30 day challenge on LinkedIn. I'm just going to post, you know, one post a day, which again, going back to that Ali Abiletta thing where it's just like, instead of thinking like I have to do 30 posts, it's just like, no, just do one a day. That's a little bit more, it's a smaller piece to chew off than obviously a ton. So he did that just a year ago. He started basically promoting his yet to be released newsletter. And before he had launched his newsletter eventually Strategy breakdowns, he had 5,000 subscribers signed up to a newsletter that had yet to be published. So it just shows the power of, you know, we, everybody hears about consistency, but it's like the power of consistency with also like, you know, doubling down on your niche, like with this business strategy and breaking them down and posting about that and then building up this audience that's really interested in that topic and then being like, I'm going to be sharing this all in newsletter in a newsletter format. Subscribe. And Tom did way more than just, you know, I'm simplifying it here, he did way more than that. But I really think the way he went about it was so smart and super impressive. I mean, I have like 5,000 subscribers to my newsletter and I've been for like three years. And he had that before he even published. So it was a really, it was a really Cool story to read about. And he's very analytical and tactical with the way he does things. So definitely a deep dive to check out, especially if you're really into posting on LinkedIn and trying to grow an audience there.
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A
Yeah. And I definitely, this is something I recommend. Actually had a friend recently who has like 300,000 plus followers on LinkedIn but no newsletter. And I was like, okay, we gotta change that. Um, and I told him, I was like, just follow the Tom Alder playbook. Because if you have an audience that size and you don't have a newsletter yet, you can like simply set up a landing page with just an easy opt in form. You don't even have to start writing the newsletter, just start a wait list, like start telling people what's coming and like hype this thing up. Because a launch is like. I think Jay Clouse talks about this a lot. He says a launch is the one moment where you have so much, like people are so excited for you, they're gonna share it and do all the things. Like once you launch, that excitement kind of dies down a little bit. So if you can capitalize on that ahead of time and when you have a large audience like that, it just makes so much sense.
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B
No, absolutely.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And, and that's. He executed that like to a T. And now he's got, I think he has over a hundred thousand LinkedIn followers. He's got 55,000 plus subscribers for strategy breakdowns. And again, I believe he only launched strategy breakdowns within about the last year or so. Just over a year, maybe summer of 2023 if I'm not mistaken. So he's done it all very strategically. And 80% of that growth has all been organic too. I think he's paid, he's done some paid growth as well, which was 20, 21% or so of his growth that you, you laid out in your deep dive. But, um, I mean, to get to 55,000 subs basically on the back of organic content is pretty impressive.
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A
Very impressive.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Uh, the next one I wanted to talk about, this was the one that I found the most compelling, but I wasn't sure how it was going to be received when I published it. And this was about tldr. That's the name of the newsletter. It's written by a guy named Dan Nee or Dan Nye. The title of this deep dive ended up being the multimillion dollar newsletter run by one guy. And so it was super compelling because who doesn't want that, right? But he spends like 30 minutes a day creating content, like just 30 minutes a day with the content. And at the time I wrote that, I think it was in like January. He, January of 2023, his rate cards, like his sponsorship slot for that primary ad spot was 15 grand. And this is a daily newsletter. So it's just like what now? He started it in the middle of 2018, I believe it was, but he just grew it with like, he just optimized everything. He optimized every part of the newsletter. He made sure the page loaded like instantly. He also went as far as making sure that as soon as that page loaded, your cursor was in the subscribe box. So you didn't even have to click. You just typed your email and hit enter and you were subscribed.
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B
Wow.
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A
Like those are the kinds of optimizations he was making. And I, I'm like, I nerd out about this stuff. So I thought this was super funny. Um, he even tested out like letting you subscribe with this thing called OAuth, which means you can, I'm sure you've seen this on a site before where you can sign up with like your Gmail account so you don't even have to enter your, your email. Um, so he tried that for a while. He doesn't do that anymore. So I have to wonder if that wasn't converting the way he wanted to. He earns millions from this newsletter and at this point, I look this morning, there are 10 other newsletters. So this was TLDR Tech. So it was all about tech and that kind of thing. He now has one for like AI Crypto it and then they have like six other ones coming. So they're just essentially taking the same model and showcasing it across different industries. And I was like, so fascinating. He could probably sell that thing for lots of millions.
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B
Lots of millions, yes. Well, I mean you just look at like the Milk Road and the Hustle who sold for you know, 10ish to 30ish million dollars. And that was just one newsletter each. I mean there's obviously some value in those. But yeah, if he's got, he's kind of doing like the morning brew strategy, right? Like you know, they had marketing brew and deck brew and like all these different sort of verticals for with the same style. So it's kind of like franchising out almost this newsletter model to just different verticals and industries and growing them and then creating this like cash flowing asset that you can then sell off. So it's very smart.
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A
Yes, very, very smart.
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B
That's awesome.
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A
And I Think about it often at that point I was like, should I start a daily newsletter? Like, can I just like follow his path?
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B
And you decided not to?
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A
I decided not to. And now I'm looking at this ten newsletter thing and I'm like, oh man, where did I go wrong?
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B
Is he still. Is Dan still a one? He can't be a one person team anymore.
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A
I doubt it. I'm sure he has some people helping him at least with sponsorship sales or something. We gotta get him on here.
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B
I think so. I think so. Pick his brain a little bit more. That's awesome. Yeah, I got one more if, if we got time.
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A
Yeah, let's do it.
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B
Okay. So I've read this deep dive before and I totally missed this. It's. I think it's one of the potentially, I don't know, underrated or unknown organic growth strategies I think that you've written, and that's with Alex Garcia. What he did. I don't know if he still does it. So maybe it's not that underrated because maybe it didn't work great after he tried it. But what he published about it was this what you called the highly unit cross promotion strategy. So everybody's familiar with newsletter to newsletter cross promotions. But Alex decided, well, let's do something a little bit different. And I'm going to find people who have like captive audiences on places like TikTok and YouTube and anywhere there's like video content. And so one of the people he reached out to, I assume probably a friend of his, Pat Walls from Starter Story, who you've also written about, he reached out to these people and was basically like, I'll do a newsletter to video swap. So you promote me in or my newsletter marketing examined in your video and I will promote your channel. You or your channel or a video, whatever it might be in my newsletter. Alex Garcia, a kid from Austin, Texas who makes $800,000 a year writing for five different email newsletters. And so he did this with Pat Walls and he, he wrote about it and that swap got him. He wrote between 5 and 10,000 subscribers. So it doesn't look like he necessarily tracked it super closely, but he probably saw a bump in subscribers after his video cross promotion went live on Pat's page. But still I thought, you know, they got my wheel string. I was like, man, I don't hear anybody talking about this or doing this. Basically having like a video ad or partnering up with somebody who has a, you know, a decent sized captive audience on video and promoting a newsletter that way. So I just thought that was like, wow, nobody talks about this. I wonder if it's, like, something that should be done more or maybe it's just too much work. I don't know. But I think even the amount of work that it might take, if you find the right partner, could have, like, huge reward. So it could be worth that little extra effort. Especially if you don't have, like, a huge budget to spend on, like, paid growth and you want to, you know, expedite your growth relatively quickly.
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A
Yeah, for sure. And he's really big into, like, the short content game, like the short video content. I know he has a. A course or a class called cut 30. Um, but I'm wondering if he's done this, like, recently. I was trying to pull it up, but I don't think he has, but. Which is kind of fascinating. I feel like there's an opportunity here for him to do this with short form content too. Just kind of do it that way. But, I mean, he's got all kinds of growth stuff on the back end. His sponsorship strategy is really fascinating. We can get into that in another episode. But definitely a very, very smart operator.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And it might be one of those things where he's like, well, you know, he's got 200,000 subscribers as it is, and maybe he doesn't necessarily need that to go through all that work to get that growth now anymore. But I know in the beginning that probably really helped. Helped surge growth for him.
- [21:46]
A
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Uh, I have one more. This was probably one of the more popular deep dives I wrote, of course. Justin Welsh, super smart guy. Also the goat. The right. I was fascinated by this. His. This story. Because this one growth lover is. It almost seems like not a growth lever, but if you think about it, it is definitely one. His system on the back end is fascinating. And I remember watching this YouTube video where Dicky Bush and Nicholas Cole actually interviewed him. You could tell, like, they were 20 minutes in and they were like, this was an okay interview. But then Justin did something that made their eyes light up and ended up launching a $2 million product. Wild Justin was like.
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D
And I think that most people assume that I wake up in the morning and, like, think of what to write and then write it and publish it and, like, it just goes viral. And that is. Couldn't be further from the truth. Like, this is a job and I treat it like one. And so I have systems, just like I had systems when I was leading sales teams. That allows me to create content. Would you be Opposed to me sharing my screen. If I would that be.
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B
Let's do it. I think. I think people would love it. Here, let me.
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D
Yeah, make me the co host.
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B
Yeah, yeah, no, let's get. Let's get tactical.
- [22:59]
A
And he shows his notion screen and it's just like all of these templates and different ways and angles. You can take on one single piece of content. Like the Contrarian post, the X versus Y. And so he has one idea and he can essentially collate that into like 10 different types of posts. And you can see Nicholas and Dickie were just like, minds blown. It was wild.
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B
It was literally like that meme of that guy going, yes, absolutely. Like 100. Yeah, it was. It was awesome. The reaction.
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A
Yeah. And so he showed that whole process. And I mean, that's the process. He used to let him Write Daily on LinkedIn for like four plus years. But he took that. He was like, wait a second. A lot of people really enjoyed that part of the video. So he turned around, he created this course called the Content OS, which has now had at least 11,000 students, probably more, if I'm guessing right. I think he's put. He's probably made at least one and a half to $2 million just from that one course alone. This wasn't on his radar to create this course. He got the IDEA from that YouTube interview he did with them. And I was just like, that is so cool. Like, way to capitalize on that, Justin.
- [24:06]
B
Oh, absolutely. I think probably just the reaction there from guys who know what they're doing when it comes to writing online and creating content. Like, you know, Dicky and Cole, they're probably. He was probably like, oh, I definitely need to. There's an opportunity I can take advantage of if I'm blowing their minds. Like, and these guys know what they're talking about, know what they're doing, and have been in this for a while, then I'm sure I can help out a lot of people. So I think it's also goes back to that. I'm not sure who coined the term, but I've heard Jay Klaus talk about it, like, basically like selling your sawdust. Maybe it was Justin Welsh, but essentially he's like taking your processes, things that help you do things more systematically, and essentially like selling those processes. So that's really what he did here. He took his, like, process for creating really popular content that performs well, and he's like, I turned into a template and sold it. And, you know, you know, a million dollars later, here we are. So it was it was brilliant. It was brilliant.
- [25:03]
A
Well, this was fun. I enjoyed doing this. We'll have to do this more. Pick out some good growth levers and talk through them.
- [25:09]
B
Absolutely. I think there's a few here on the list that, that we have that are really interesting. A few more recent ones too. We'll tease them. Now, we're not going to say what they are, but you'll have to listen to an upcoming episode where we dive into those ones a little bit more. So, yeah, I think there's. We could go on for hours about this stuff, but we'll see that for another episode for sure.
- [25:29]
A
So I actually went ahead and created a page with all these deep dives. So if you're interested in learning more about what we just talked about, you can go to growth in reverse.com wild W I L D and check out these, these ones that we just mentioned. Um, other than that, you can find me just at growth in reverse.com or on Twitter and LinkedIn @chanelco. Where can they find you at?
- [25:48]
B
Dylan, if you're interested in what I'm writing about as well, you can go to growthcurrency.net subscribe to newsletter there. Check out some of my articles on newsletter growth monetization and then you can also follow me on basically all the socials at Growth Currency and just my full name on LinkedIn.
- [26:03]
A
Awesome. This is fun.
- [26:04]
B
This is a lot of fun. Can't wait to do the next one.