← Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
Growth In Reverse: Newsletter & Email Growth
This Newsletter Sold For $150m (And Why It Matters)
00:27:15
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. I'm Chanel.
- [00:03]
B
And I'm Dylan.
- [00:04]
A
We're going to just talk through some things we've been seeing in the space today because we've found some interesting ones, whether it's someone doing something cool with their newsletter or different news about the newsletter space. So we thought it'd be fun to jump on and talk through some of the top of mind things that we've been seeing.
- [00:21]
B
Yeah. If nothing more, this episode hopefully will serve as inspiration or open your eyes to some new opportunities for what newsletter creators are doing. We'll talk about one story that is very lucrative that you could just write a newsletter and the next thing you know, become the editor in chief at a major global media company and stuff like that. So, yeah, super simple stuff. So I'm excited to talk about some of these ideas because I think there's been some, some really interesting happenings in the newsletter space that, that we talk a lot about newsletters in this podcast. We don't talk about a lot of like day to day stuff that's happening. So, yeah, I think this will be fun.
- [00:55]
A
It will be fun. I'm excited about it. Do you want to start with the $150,000 one?
- [01:01]
B
You mean $150 million?
- [01:03]
A
$150 million, couple zeros missing.
- [01:06]
B
It's a little different. 150,000 would still be solid for the average newsletter operator, but no, this is different.
- [01:12]
A
Yeah. So Barry Weiss, who writes the Free Press newsletter, actually got acquired by Paramount Skydance, which is like CBS News. Essentially, they're the same organization, parent company of CBS News. And so not only did this turn into an aqua hire of sorts where she's coming in to fill a role, but she's also going to be the editor in chief of CBS News just from writing a newsletter, a very good newsletter. And she's been doing this a while. Very accomplished journalists, but clearly they see an opportunity here. And I think it's fascinating that a substack newsletter got acquired for $150 million.
- [01:49]
B
Yes. Do you hear that, substack people? You should be writing newsletters because you could be acquired by, uh, cbs. No, I, I'm joking. But Barry Weiss, like you said, she's had a good career in journalism, a very successful career. She was at New York Times for a while. She left, you were telling me. She left in 2020 to go out on her own and start. She started a substack, a newsletter, writing for herself there and then now she's been roped back in when CBS decided to throw $150 million check and maybe even more the opportunity to become their editor in chief of their news desk.
- [02:24]
A
Wild. That's just crazy amounts of money.
- [02:27]
B
It is, it is.
- [02:28]
A
Wow. Especially considering Substack is a free platform for the most part. Unless you're. Obviously you have paid. I don't even know if she had paid subscriptions. This is. I probably should have looked this up before we started.
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B
I would assume she did.
- [02:40]
A
Yeah. So pretty crazy that you can create something of so much value based on just newsletter. And obviously she has a. She's in the political news space, which makes sense getting acquired by CBS News. But yeah, it's pretty, pretty wild.
- [02:58]
B
So what's the implication for Substack as a business? Because Barry Weiss could have potentially been one of their biggest revenue drivers for them since they take 10% of subscriptions. So I'd be curious to see how this works. My guess is CBS is not going to go ahead and keep paying substack 10% revenue when they could just host the this. If she keeps writing the newsletter. Host the newsletter on their own platform.
- [03:22]
A
Yeah. I'm not sure. This is pretty crazy actually.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah. And see the fallout.
- [03:29]
A
I look, she has. She's already switched off of Substack.
- [03:32]
B
Yeah. There you go. So bye bye. Substack. You win some, you lose some.
- [03:37]
A
That is pretty crazy though, to think about. And it has to be one of those things that Substack has hopefully built into their business plan of, okay, so have these large creators. What happens when they bounce? You gotta keep filling that leaky bucket in a way.
- [03:52]
B
Yep. There's nothing. Nothing's guaranteed.
- [03:54]
A
It's interesting, like over time she's had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers through her newsletter. So I'm sure those people have now seen Substack subscribe to other ones. So they probably are sticky in a way. Most of them or a good chunk of them are, I'm sure. But this is just. I'm just. It's $150 million for a newsletter is pretty wild.
- [04:16]
B
Yeah. So what's the big takeaway here for our listeners? For people we're sharing a news item because this is definitely newsletter related and media related. But what should be a takeaway here for somebody who's writing a newsletter?
- [04:26]
A
You never know who's reading. That's my biggest takeaway is you never know who's on the other side and watching what you're doing. And if you put in the work day in, day out for 5, 10, 15 plus years of however long her career has been, but with Substack specifically, it's been five years. It's just pretty, pretty insane that you just don't know what could come from putting yourself out there, enhancing your skills, getting better at this kind of craft. And obviously 99.999% of us will never get acquired, nor do we want to necessarily. However, it's pretty interesting that this is an opportunity for some folks.
- [05:04]
B
Yeah, I think what my takeaway is that this is a real good opportunity basically where you can create your own portfolio. If you want some kind of future opportunity like this. You can work backwards to if I wanted to be acquired by X Company or if I wanted to be Aqua hired like Barry Weiss was. I think you said, like she was basically Aqua hired. They bought her newsletter, but also brought her on to run their. To become the editor in chief. You could potentially look at that model and be like, okay, if I wanted to work at X Company, then maybe I should write a newsletter. That is something they would be interested in. That, that would show that I am capable of running a certain role or having experience in a certain industry and kind of work backwards from there. So I think that's. This is just proof that like you can. I know Barry Weiss was very well known before she started even her substack and very few if any of us have that kind of cache, which with our name. However, like I said, if you're good at what you do and you publish and you stick with this consistency, there is opportunity to build create your own portfolio and create your own opportunities with something free like Substack.
- [06:10]
A
I've saw this even in my own career. Like I got hired at an agency because they saw that I was trying to blog and learn SEO on my own without having a job necessarily around it. So even on a super small scale like this could absolutely help you get a job or some role that you're looking to walk into in a future part of your career.
- [06:31]
B
Absolutely. I'm on a podcast talking about newsletters and I only. I think we are chatting because I started writing a newsletter and then you started writing newsletter as well. And then here we are years later. Whereas I used to be in the kind of the corporate marketing space and this is more fun and like I like this a lot more. So just another example of how you can back into these sorts of things when you. When you write and you stick in. I know it sounds cliche, but you stay consistent, keep showing up publicly and putting some experience behind your name.
- [07:03]
A
Totally. All right, let's get into a more fun one. I found this actually this morning, but the assist, which is a newsletter helping like women in career, like just business. Women in business, I guess you could say they've built a decent sized newsletter. I think they're over a hundred thousand subscribers at this point. But they actually launched something that they call Werkle, which is like a spin on wordle. It's like the same game but with a different name and you have to like go to their website to play. And I just, I think this is fun. This is a cool, interesting way to get people hooked on your brand and your newsletter. We see like, obviously New York Times has been doing this kind of thing for a while and we were talking about how they have a whole Apple just on the game side of things. Side of things. It's pretty interesting to see another smaller newsletter do the same thing.
- [07:54]
B
Yes. And I think I'm loading Workle right now, which is like slowing down my computer.
- [07:58]
A
It's pretty slow.
- [07:59]
B
Yeah, Everything's glitching out. So I'm going to leave it now on my space. So they might need to work on that aspect of it. But. But no, I love games and we've talked about this a little bit before subscribing to the New York Times most. Yeah, sure, the news articles are great, but really mostly for the crossword puzzles and wordle and all the other games that they have. And I think there is a huge opportunity to leverage this. Yes, Games aren't easy to necessarily create, but I Even think of LinkedIn and LinkedIn started doing games a year and a bit ago and at first I rolled my eyes at it. Even you didn't know this?
- [08:33]
A
No.
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B
Have you not played any of the LinkedIn games? Oh, I need to nudge you. You have like a. They've got like a feature to nudge people. So I am in. You can only play them in the LinkedIn app on your. Or you can play them on online as well on your desktop browser. But I've been playing several of these games for over a year and they've got the streak built into it. So they've incentivized you to keep playing every day and now they've built in a leaderboard, which is actually probably the most interesting thing they've done because before you could see, oh, you're the top 50% fastest to finish this puzzle of your followers or of people in your connection of your connections. It is. I was like, oh, that's cool. But who's first though? Who am I? How high up am I. And just this week, they launched the leaderboard where you can actually see other people's times and how fast they completed these puzzles. So that's. To me, that's made it that much more interesting. Competitive. And I'm a competitive person, so I'm like, oh, man, I gotta beat. I gotta be Terry. Terry in our community. She's on these puzzles all the time as well. I'm like, I gotta be Terry and I gotta beat. So I just think there's. I don't know how you could necessarily do that with newsletters, but there's probably a way that you could incorporate some kind of fun in entertainment and competition, even with your readers getting them to always check your newsletter, if not for the great content, but also for something.
- [09:51]
A
Fun like this, especially with all the AI tools out now. I'm sure there's a way to build, like a basic geeky.
- [09:58]
B
Absolutely.
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A
You could just throw up and see what happens. And I love that the assist just. Yes, it's a little slow, but it's. It's an exercise in, like, just get the thing out and see what happens, perfect it later. And so I love that they're doing that in action. So good on the team there.
- [10:12]
B
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Keep it simple. To start, wordle is like the most basic, simple idea for a game ever. And the guy who built it sold it to New York Times for what, one and a half million or four million or something like that? You never know what can happen with things like this.
- [10:27]
A
Probably kicking himself now.
- [10:29]
B
Probably a little bit. I'm just kidding. Barry Weiss got 150 million. I only got four.
- [10:33]
A
No, but, like, the amount of money that New York Times has made off wordle alone is probably close. Not close to a billion, if not more, I'm sure.
- [10:41]
B
Not insignificant.
- [10:43]
A
Yes, we'll say that.
- [10:44]
B
Yes.
- [10:45]
A
Yeah, I thought that was fun. Especially considering our podcast episode recently about getting more engagement on your newsletter. I think that's an interesting addition to that.
- [10:54]
B
Yeah. And it doesn't have to be like a puzzle either. It could be. Like, we mentioned Toby Howell, who had the button in his newsletter where you had to guess how many times someone was going to click the button and encourage people to click a button, reply to his newsletter, and open the next week's newsletter to see if they were one of the winners. So there's other ways you can do this, too. Doesn't just have to be some somewhat fancy game. Just be creative, use AI as maybe like an idea brainstorming partner with you and see where it takes you on.
- [11:22]
A
The engagement side of things. I was actually scrolling through. I'm subscribed to, like, probably over a thousand newsletters at this point, and my. I have a separate email address for it, but so I. Yeah, it's pretty wild. So I just go through there sometimes, and I'm like, let's see what's going on. And the Dink, which is a pickleball newsletter, I actually wrote a deep dive on them in the past. We'll link to that in the show notes, too, if you want to check that out. But they. They used to have this referral program that I loved, and I wrote this deep dive. I think it was in 2023. So it's been a couple years now since that. Happy to see they're still using the same referral program. I will share a screenshot of that here. But the Dink essentially partners with some big brands in the pickleball space. So there are paddle brands or people that put out specific types of shoes for pickleballers, or you have a shirt company or something. Pickleball balls. So let me just pull up the actual link. So, of course, the first one's a sticker. If you refer 25 people, I think you get, like, a gift card to Selkirk, which is like a big name in that sport. 50. If you hit 50, you get the shoes. 75 is like the actual paddle. And so what they do is if you hit the certain milestone, they're gonna have to share your information with that company so that the company can send you the thing. Right. So that company is then getting customers that are engaged and obviously like pickleball. And so I think that's how they're navigating these partnerships. It's like the Dink isn't necessarily paying for these gifts. Maybe they are splitting the costs. I'm not sure how that works on the back end, but they are actually partnering with these brands to give them customers, which I think is super cool.
- [13:02]
B
Yeah, I like that. That it's really smart. I always thought this was a great. This was a great referral program, a great referral strategy. And there are a lot of really not so great referral programs and strategies, but this one really stands out as something that you can replicate, especially if you're working in a space that has a lot of physical merch, swag, or just, like, gear that you could. If you were in, like, I don't know, the hiking space or the outdoor space or the gardening space, like, you could you think of just about anything Any kind of hobby. If you run a newsletter in that kind of space, I'm sure you could find partners who would be willing to either share the cost or. Or work out some kind of deal where you're promoting your referral program that includes their products.
- [13:47]
A
So I'm actually thinking they. They probably don't. They probably don't actually split the cost, I bet, because every email that the Dink sends out then has these brands in it. So they probably are just like, here's free promotion. So every time someone opens this email, they're seeing Franklin Paddle, Selkirk pickleball stickers from the Dank, which is like, they actually have to pay for those pickleball shoes. So I think it's just interesting to. It's a good brand. Play Onyx is another one. So it's just like one of those things that if you're in the pickleball space, you probably know these brands already, but you're seeing them promoted every time you open an issue of the Dink. And so I think the brands probably just love that exposure.
- [14:29]
B
Do we mention this is a pickleball newsletter? Yeah.
- [14:32]
A
How fast can you say pickleball?
- [14:34]
B
Yeah. I wonder how many. When you did the deep dive, how many subscribers was.
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A
We are reaching here?
- [14:41]
B
What is Thomas at? From the dink.
- [14:43]
A
Okay, so 50ish. They had a newsletter of 150,000 subscribers in the fall of. Oh, wait, yeah. They started it in the fall of 2020. They had 150, 000 subscribers. And that was in 2023, July of 2023.
- [15:04]
B
It's over two years ago.
- [15:05]
A
And they had. So they now have podcasts, they have YouTube channels. They actually have a full van that goes to pickleball events to like record. Yeah, it's awesome. And this guy, Thomas Shields, who actually started the newsletter, the just started it and he's. I'm gonna figure this out. Let me try this cool little journey and see what happens.
- [15:24]
B
And he was a pickleball enthusiast. He was out of passion. Yeah.
- [15:28]
A
He was like, hey, pickleball is growing. I think there needs to be a media company around this. The ones that are doing it now are like old school. And they're just like very, I don't know, ESPN style, where at the time it's more boring. And now he was like, I want to bring a new, fresh, like flare to this sport.
- [15:45]
B
Says join hundreds of thousands of pickle bowlers who read. So he's probably over 200, I would imagine over 200,000 subscribers now. So that's an Easier sell to partners. In terms of an audience size, it'd be a little bit harder if you're a smaller newsletter, but if you have some proof, if you have proof of concept or if you're growing quickly, there is definitely an opportunity to reach out.
- [16:04]
A
So I don't think it would be that much harder because the brand only has to pay if people actually are referring folks. And I don't know, I feel like if you have a smaller newsletter, you're not going to have as many people reaching that milestone. So would it really cost them more? They're still getting in front of a bunch of folks. As you grow the newsletter, obviously you're going to have more people, but they're also getting more eyeballs. So, yeah, it's like a win win.
- [16:30]
B
On both ends, I guess if you're trying to get X amount of dollars for this, for, from an ad perspective or a sponsorship.
- [16:37]
A
Oh, totally.
- [16:38]
B
That's where it could be. That's where I'm like, oh yeah. Thomas could be like, okay, like, you're going to be permanently in every edition of our newsletter. It's going to be X amount of dollars per quarter or per year, whatever that might be. They'd be more likely to agree to it because of the size of his newsletter.
- [16:53]
A
Yeah, but if you're just doing it for free and you're like, hey, I just want to have a really badass referral program. Yeah, I don't think they're going to be upset about it at all.
- [17:00]
B
No, exactly. Exactly. Cool. Okay, where should we go next?
- [17:05]
A
What's next?
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B
Should we talk about Matt McGarry's recent edition of his newsletter?
- [17:10]
A
Yeah, go for it. I haven't really seen this one yet, so go for it.
- [17:13]
B
Okay. I'm sure a lot of people listening are very familiar with Matt McGarry and may have already read this from him, but maybe not. So he just released an edition of his newsletter and he calls the future media is the big three media strategy. And he says YouTube is the new TV, podcasts are the new radio, and newsletters are the new magazines and newspapers. And so essentially he says that's the. Those are the big three platforms that basically any media type business should be focusing on. And everything else is either a distraction or a way to drive audiences to the big three.
- [17:47]
A
This kind of reminds me of J Class's discovery platforms versus owned audiences. Where like, discovery is like LinkedIn and YouTube is included in this too. Twitter, Instagram, all of those. And then your owned audiences are like podcasts, newsletters. Actually Podcasts, newsletters are like the main one communities as well, and podcasts are lumped in there as well. But yeah, this kind of reminds me of that.
- [18:12]
B
He goes on to share a few points, and I'll just sum them up really quickly. If you're not exceptional, at least one of these channels, so, you know, the key is to get really good at one of them especially. But if you're not exceptional at at least one of these channels, it's impossible to build a content business. So you have to really become very good at publishing newsletters and writing content that people want to read. He says everything else is a distraction or a way to drive audiences to the big three, which I already mentioned. And he's basically saying, specialize in one of the three to start. And then he says also this, I think is important. If you specialize in newsletters or podcasts, you need a Discovery channel, and that's what you were just talking about. So that's where you talk about video platforms or social media platforms that can help people discover you, but then also when they discover you, you want to drive them to your newsletter or your podcast.
- [19:02]
A
Yeah, I think if we all had our choice, none of us would be on social media. But podcasts and newsletters are inherently hard to grow, and so you need something like that. YouTube is a great platform, I think, for this, especially nowadays with like video podcasts and that kind of thing. But you have to be on camera or you have to be able to create a video necessarily. Whereas with LinkedIn and Twitter and those, it's more written, which newsletter folks and authors and writers love, because that's their native output from their brain is written content. So that makes sense. But I think, I think there is a big wedge here for YouTube to become like the bigger platform. And you can even see that, like, Matt McGarry stopped doing well, quote, unquote, stopped doing his podcast and now he's doing more YouTube content. But there's still some stuff going up on the podcast feed. So it's TBD of what's happening there.
- [19:50]
B
But yeah, semantics, in my opinion. Like, you're doing a podcast, doing YouTube channel, you're publishing the audio. Like, to me, that's a bit semantics. But the point is, like, he's going away from audio only, I think content and sticking with video first content. And that actually brings your point. Brings to the. Brings up his fifth point, which is fear of video is stunting your growth. And essentially he's saying, like, everybody's going to eventually need to be able to do video, you don't have to do it. But if you don't expect to grow slowly or not at all. Um, and he says this probably isn't what you want to hear, but he talks to great writers all the time who are too scared at making videos. And you basically have to get over it because it's going to be. If you want to take your content to the next level and get in front of more people, that's the way you are going to have to go.
- [20:39]
A
I would say probably for 75% of people. Yeah, that's probably accurate. I think if you have brand recognition, you have a. A type of content that you could put out that is so good that people will share it without needing video. I think that's a wedge in the market, too. You don't have to do it. But for most people, I think he's right. Yeah. I think video is a. And even for those folks who don't need to do it, they would probably grow faster if they did it. However, there is also something to be said about spending 90% of your time on just the one thing until you.
- [21:09]
B
Get very good at it.
- [21:11]
A
Yeah. 1440 is also launching a podcast, too. Now, 1440 is a daily news newsletter and they have four plus million subscribers. But, yeah, they're also launching a podcast. So that's like a. Another point of proof for this strategy.
- [21:26]
B
Yeah, totally. People are thinking about this, not just a newsletter. Morning Brew. They did the same thing. They started off as just Morning Brew and then they branched off to Marketing Brew and Tech Brew. And then they're like, okay, we're going to have podcasts as well for these. And then now they're like, now they got the Morning Brew Daily, which is like a TV show sort of thing. And they got purchased by Business Insider. So all this stuff can compound and grow into something bigger and bigger. And it usually. It doesn't just stick with written content, it grows into other things.
- [21:52]
A
It's interesting though. I think. I feel like we should talk more about. This is like video podcasts versus YouTube native channels. It's. I don't know, it's. It's such a different medium. I don't know.
- [22:07]
B
Yeah, because a YouTube podcast is not a Mr. Beast channel. Do you know?
- [22:12]
A
Right.
- [22:13]
B
Like, yeah, there's. There's pure entertainment. YouTube. Pure entertainment. There's YouTube that's like more infotainment. Then there's YouTube that's like educational. There's all sorts of things. Right. So there's different types of YouTube content that you can create. And I'm not an expert on it. I don't probably know enough about this to really go in depth on it right now. But yeah, there's definitely a, a difference between a YouTube podcast. A podcast, and like a you successful YouTube channel.
- [22:42]
A
I think YouTube's going to be so big. It already is. But I think it's more and more important and culturally relevant over the next three years.
- [22:51]
B
If you think about it like the old way, the only way you could be in front of these huge audiences was if you were able to get onto like a TV show or a pitch pitcher, you know, be the next ob, the next Oprah, or it was. There were so many barriers to entry. Right now everything has basically, like, content is democratized, access to audiences is democratized. It's all, it's all accessible. You just need to be really good at it to stand out. And so anybody can up. I keep telling my kids are like, oh, you're on YouTube, dad, that's crazy. And I'm like, you could be like, I'm not gonna let you, but you could be on YouTube. Like, you just have to literally record a video and hit upload and you're on YouTube. But it's. The difference is obviously the people who are winning, quote unquote, at YouTube are doing it really well, and they have figured out the secret sauce, the recipe of what people want to watch. And it's not always the same thing. Different audiences want different things, but they figured it out. And you don't have to. You don't have to pitch your show or your pilot to a network and try to get a season. Like that used to be the old way of doing things, and now the barriers to entry have become a lot lower, at least for getting there.
- [24:01]
A
Yeah, it's. It's actually bringing this full circle back to the Bari Weiss thing of like, she. It's almost flipping like you used to think of, like CBS News as. Or just the typical big five, big three news channels was like the place to go to find out what's happening. And now I'd say more people are actually looking at YouTube creators, newsletters, those kinds of things as more trustworthy. And so the biggest news organizations are seeing that, taking notice and being like, we need to pull in these top creators so that we get that mind share back and that market share. And so it's kind of like coming full circle.
- [24:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, you're right. Now we could go on and give examples of various different political voices on both sides of the political or the United States political spectrum. But I think the point is that I think the access to these audiences, like I said, has been democratized, but it's still very hard to build a large audience. And it helps when you worked for New York Times and then went on your own to write your own substack.
- [25:04]
A
So you got the job there because you wrote insanely valuable content. Like had a framework and a research process that was like pretty wild. So.
- [25:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not. It all comes back to insanely valuable content. Yeah, I'm not discrediting Barry Weiss being good at what she does for sure.
- [25:21]
A
No. But I hear that all the time. People always say that. They're like, they had this leg up because of. And I'm like, okay, but no, stop. Because go back to the beginning. She was probably working 15, 16 hour days figuring this out in the beginning. Got her leg in the door somewhere and went from there. And so you don't see all those hard nights and the late nights, the hard work that she did. But it's there, I guarantee it's there. And she's still putting out insanely valuable content that people are eating up. Obviously I was looking, I think 1,5 million subscribers.
- [25:52]
B
Yeah, that ain't nothing.
- [25:54]
A
Ain't nothing. I don't want 1.5 million subscribers, but some people do.
- [25:59]
B
No, 1.5 million subscribers means like a percentage of 1.5 million subscribers as like haters and trolls. So. No, thanks.
- [26:09]
A
Can you imagine all the replies they get?
- [26:12]
B
No, I don't want to. You gotta ignore that stuff.
- [26:14]
A
That's it for this episode. Thanks for listening to the Growth in Reverse podcast and hanging out with us. Make sure you check out the Growth Vault. We talk about things like the, the Dinks referral program, some other fun tactics that we're finding through just being on the Internet all the time, all day, every day. And you can find some more growth and optimization tactics that some of the top creators are using. I update that thing pretty regularly, so I'm excited to have you in there. You can actually use the code GIRPOD for a 15 discount on your first year of the Growth Vault. So get a little bonus there for you. And we'll keep updating that as we find more fun tips and tactics people are using.
- [26:54]
B
Yeah, and hang out with us online as well. We're very online as. As the kids say. Check us out on LinkedIn. Chanel and I have both been a little bit more active on Substack, I guess you could say, in the last 30 days or so. And yeah, we'd love to hear your comments and chat with you about all things newsletters there too.
- [27:11]
A
Yes. Awesome. Cool.
- [27:13]
B
Till next.