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- [00:01]
Nick Loper
It's time for some list building tactics that actually work. With all the upheaval in the search results and the fickle nature of social media, you know you need to build your email list, but how do you actually do it? Today we're taking the guesswork out of it and breaking down some tried and true tactics with a longtime side Hustle show listener who's been studying the biggest newsletters and creators in the world to figure out what's working today from growthinreverse.com and the growth in Reverse podcast. Chanel Basilio, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
- [00:30]
Chanel Basilio
Thanks for having me, Nick. I'm excited to be here.
- [00:32]
Nick Loper
Well, me as well. We got lots of tactics to get into, and the first one is a really cool one that you shared. It was called the One Click Unlock. Tell us about this.
- [00:41]
Chanel Basilio
Sure. So this comes from Justin Moore, who runs a newsletter called Creator Wizard. It's got an interesting name. His whole ethos is helping creators and influencers get more sponsorships. So he helps them make more money through their brand deals and that kind of thing. His whole newsletter, the entire thing, everything he sends each week is about sponsorship opportunities. So he's essentially giving you free money, money, if you will. So he'll give you the brand name.
- [01:05]
Nick Loper
We could plug Justin, his, like, little sponsor audit tool, like, is really cool. We can, we can plug that, we can link that up in the show notes too.
- [01:12]
Chanel Basilio
That's really good. Yeah, he's got a great business, but he essentially gives you away free sponsorship opportunities. But this one click unlock is essentially his referral program. But it's a little bit deeper than that because in each email you'll see this, like, box and it's grayed out and it has like a lock on it and it says refer one person to get the secret sponsorship research. And so if you refer one person every week in that email, you won't see that box anymore. You'll see the contact info for those brands, you'll see the person's name, some recent brand deals they might have done. So he's essentially giving you just extra information on top of it, but at the same time he's getting more referrals. So someone is just sharing his newsletter with other people. And he said he's gotten about 5,000 subscribers just from this one thing. And that's kind of a lot when you're thinking it's just like one extra referral per person.
- [02:01]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's 5,000 incremental subscribers for, you know, a low barrier to, like, high value, low Barrier to entry. Oh, sure. I got, I know somebody else who, who might benefit from this.
- [02:12]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah.
- [02:12]
Nick Loper
Do you know how he like mechanically how he's getting that done with some conditional content or like it sounds technical.
- [02:19]
Chanel Basilio
He uses kit for email and he sets it up. There's like a liquid code I think he can do. So you can set up a tag essentially and if this person has referred one person, they get tagged and then every email it'll show a box. So. So I think you can actually do this with kits, like snippets too. Not sure on that one, but I know you can do it with Liquid and ChatGPT can help you write that anymore. You don't even have to know how to code or anything.
- [02:41]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [02:41]
Chanel Basilio
But it essentially says like if they referred one person, show this extra piece of content. So it's kind of interesting to set up in the beginning, but I think it's well worth it if you're gonna end up with 5,000 extra subscribers.
- [02:54]
Nick Loper
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, we set it up once and then it just kind of runs and it's, it sounds like it's kind of a constant reminder. Like if it's in every message or every week you kind of see it. Okay, I should probably, I should probably do this. Does he have multiple tiers or that's just like tier one?
- [03:08]
Chanel Basilio
He does have multiple tiers, but that's the tier one. The other ones are like a 30 minute coaching call with someone on his team and then you can go all the way up to like getting his thousand dollars course for free once you get like a hundred or so subscribers. So that's a lot. Okay, but yeah, but this is just like constant fomo. Like every week you're seeing this and you're like, well, he gave me this one piece. All I have to do is refer one person and I get the contact info for this people and like how to reach out to them and. Makes sense.
- [03:34]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah. Versus having it as paid newsletter tier. We see some people kind of, oh, that's going to be behind the paywall. The free sample is here, but then if you want the rest of the goods, you got to pay. But that's a really unique way to do it. Like low lift, make it so stupid, simple, easy, where it's like, yeah, okay, I can find one person. I don't know if ConvertKit. Well, they bought Sparkloop, so they may have this built in at some point or like on the, you know, the pro pricing tier. Our buddy Pete McPherson has built a new tool called List Gadget that's on my to do list to start messing around with because he's got this kind of referral mechanism built in where you could and you build a leaderboard and do polls, like do all sorts of cool stuff with list gadgets. So that's on my list to play around with.
- [04:21]
Chanel Basilio
I don't know that one. I'll have to check it out. He's a good guy though, so I'll check it out.
- [04:24]
Nick Loper
Yeah, he's partnered with Liz from Liz Wilcox from Survivor fame. But to help get that out into the world. Okay, that is a really cool one where just about anybody could add to your list and it kind of answers the question, well, how can I turn one subscriber into two? How can I make it easy and beneficial for everybody to do that? And hopefully the people you subscribe or people you refer, they refer the next person and it kind of becomes this virtuous cycle there.
- [04:50]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, totally. I think it's pretty simple. Like anyone, if you're creating some piece of content, like just think about what that next step that somebody would need or like the next piece of advice or content that they would be looking for and just give it to them.
- [05:02]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Obviously the famous examples would be, you know, the morning brews and the hustles of the world with like the subscriber referral program. But how do you take a page out of that playbook and make it applicable to your, to your niche and to your subscribers and make it a win for them? That's a really cool one.
- [05:16]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah.
- [05:17]
Nick Loper
What's next?
- [05:18]
Chanel Basilio
The next one I think we should talk about is just recommendations. So a lot of people are using recommendations at this point. Kit, Substack, Beehive, those platforms all have their own built in referral recommendation platform. So essentially we can recommend each other through kit. So if someone signs up, they get a box afterwards, it says like, hey, thanks for joining. Here are three other newsletters I really recommend you check out. Now people can like or not like those and some I've heard from a lot of smaller creators that they're like, well, you know, I just don't have the big list that people want to partner with and that kind of thing. But I think if you can almost build relationships with those people and not just look at it like a checkbox. Like the one guy that I followed and wrote a deep dive on, his name was CJ Gustafson and he would actually just ask these creators to get on a phone call, like not expecting them to recommend him afterwards, but he would Talk to them for 20, 30 minutes. You know, just talk about, like, the industry and, like, newsletters and stuff. And then at the end, he'd be like, hey, do you want to, like, recommend each other on substack? Like, I'll just go add you right now. And he said the conversion rate was practically a hundred percent. Because you've just. You just built this relationship with people.
- [06:23]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Nobody wants to tell you no to your face. Yeah.
- [06:27]
Chanel Basilio
But if it makes sense for your audience and, like, I don't know, as long as they have the people that you would want on your email list, I think it makes total sense.
- [06:34]
Nick Loper
So I have a couple questions for this. Cause I saw this. You. You were implementing this on the Growth in Reverse, and it was. You're recommending Jay Clouse and somebody else. And I was like, okay, this is kind of a natural. If you like this, you might also like this. It's like almost like, would you like fries with that? It's like a kind of a natural thing. But a couple questions. One is, does it interrupt the kind of logical flow, like you have somebody who is, you know, hot to take action? They just entered in their email. They're feeling excited about that decision. And instead of taking them immediately to the thank you page or the confirmation page or the logical next step, there's like this intermediate thing that hits them in the face and like, well, who's this Jay Clouse guy? Or like, almost. What is it? It's like, checked by default. Have you seen any data on that? Or the impact on kind of what the next step you want subscribers to take is?
- [07:27]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, and that's a great call out because it's not perfect for every situation. And I have it turned off on some forms. Like, I don't have it on every single one. Okay. And that's the beauty of it is. Well, at least with Kit, you can turn it off on specific forms. Like, it doesn't show up every single time someone subscribes.
- [07:41]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [07:41]
Chanel Basilio
But, yeah, I only recommend people I know. The content's great because it is. It's like taking a piece of the trust you've just built and giving it to someone else. But on the same token, you're getting that back when they're recommending you.
- [07:53]
Nick Loper
Sure.
- [07:53]
Chanel Basilio
So a couple of pointers. If someone subscribes through recommendations, you want to make sure that you have them getting a separate message in your welcome email. So if Jay sends me a subscriber, I want to make sure people have a different welcome email than just the typical one. So I'll say, hey, you might not realize who I am. Jay Clouse recommended me. If you want to unsubscribe, go ahead and do that right here and put it like towards the top.
- [08:15]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [08:15]
Chanel Basilio
So that. Because naturally some of those people are going to be lower quality. Maybe they didn't recognize what they were doing by subscribing to the rest of those. So yeah, you do want to be careful with those. But I think it's a good way to kind of, I don't know, get a couple more people on your list. I've seen good success and have had some really good ones come.
- [08:31]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that was, that was the second question. Like, what's the subscriber quality? Like if they didn't opt in specifically for you, it was just kind of like an all, you know, an afterthought. And then you start showing up in their inbox every, every day or every week. Like, why am I getting this again? But yeah, calling that out. So I said, because I started noticing some of these. It was like, you know, from the Work at Home Woman or something. Like there was some other recommendations that started coming through and it was like, oh yeah, if I'm just dumping these into some generic onboarding, like I think the default was like nothing. Like no welcome sequence at all. I was like, well, let me, let me fix that. But then is there a way to customize that based. I couldn't figure out how to individualize it based on the source. It was just like, hey, I'm so flattered. Another creator recommended me. That's why you're getting this message. You know, here's a little bit about side Hustle Nation.
- [09:17]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, you definitely want to make sure you're setting this up. In the beginning it was trickier with Kit as they like initially launched it. It was like, what's happening? But now they've kind of like refined the process and you can set up a separate welcome sequence. I think it's a different tag or form that they're subscribed to and you can send them down a different path with automations and that kind of thing. So again, something to set up. But once you do, it's kind of like plug and play. Yes, these are lower quality subscribers because some people don't understand what they're doing. However, I have seen a lot of really good subscribers come from this, so I think it's worth it. I know for myself I've added probably 10,000 or so subscribers from recommendations. So yeah, it's worked out really well now all of Those haven't stuck around.
- [09:57]
Nick Loper
But yes, that's great. I remember joking with Nathan Barry when they announced this. It was like, everything old is new again. You see these co registration forms from 20 years ago on the Internet. That was the first part. The second part was like, how genius is this for a company that charges you based on the number of subscribers you have? Oh, if we could lift everybody up. Oh sure, you know, we're doing great by the creator, you know, the creator economy we're supporting. Oh, but meanwhile, like, oh, there's a little ulterior motive here.
- [10:23]
Chanel Basilio
Totally.
- [10:23]
Nick Loper
It's a, it's a cool tool and it's, it's good for them too.
- [10:26]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, that's a fun one to crack jokes on. But yeah, it's a, it's good and bad on either side.
- [10:33]
Nick Loper
More with Chanel in just a moment. Including how One creator earned $1.2 million from a simple Google Doc and a genius strategy for getting paid to write content for other companies coming up right after this.
- [10:46]
Darina Coolia
For such an important channel like phone, the software powering this important channel was super outdated and clunky. We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for businesses to connect with their customers through voice and text.
- [11:00]
Nick Loper
That's Drina Coolia, co founder of our sponsor OpenPhone. Trusted by more than 60,000 customers, this is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. I like to think of it like a centralized hub to receive and respond to calls and texts in your business. And I asked Darina about who's typically signing up for this kind of service.
- [11:21]
Darina Coolia
We definitely have a lot of folks who come to us and their personal cell phone has become their company phone number and they've hired a team or they're starting to scale their business and they just find themselves as a business owner, as a founder, being the bottleneck. So we see that all the time. And then we also see folks much further along where they're using some legacy complicated tools that are just not really made for how communication happens these days. We also just recently launched Sona, which is our voice AI agent that can handle any missed calls. If you have clients calling outside of business hours, instead of them going to voicemail, it can go into Sona, which is capable to handle any replies and can also take a message. So you are capturing that lead information.
- [12:12]
Nick Loper
And it's like, and it's a robot like it responds on the fly with some pre programmed responses.
- [12:18]
Darina Coolia
It does such a great job. This way they can handle questions 24.
- [12:22]
Nick Loper
7 Now, here's a scenario for you. So let's say I've committed to a certain business phone number and I've distributed flyers. It's printed on my business cards. It is on my local business listings, on directories throughout the Internet. Like, what's the process to now have that ring Open phone system versus the current system?
- [12:41]
Darina Coolia
Totally. So we, we see this all the time. This process called phone number porting. We port numbers from all kinds of carriers. So basically, no matter what provider you're using, we can take that number and move it over to openphone. It is free. We handle the whole thing. And if you want to try out OpenPhone, we have a free trial. You can try it out, see how you like it, and if you like it, you can then decide to port your existing number over and we handle the whole process.
- [13:09]
Nick Loper
Now, OpenPhone has automatic AI call summaries, so you don't have to worry about taking notes while you're on the call. But another cool feature is what Darena called AI call tagging. Basically allowing you to quickly filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a discount so you can review those and see what worked, what didn't, and train team members on the most effective tactics and language in those cases. And it's all in the name of building a better, faster and friendlier customer experience.
- [13:39]
Darina Coolia
I want all OpenPhone customers to have five stars only.
- [13:42]
Nick Loper
Right now, OpenPhone is offering Side Hustle show listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com SideHustle that's O P E N P H O N E dot com SideHustle and like we talked about, if you've got an existing phone number with another service, OpenPhone will port it over at no extra charge. OpenPhone. No missed calls, no missed customers. Let me know if this sounds familiar. You've got more ideas than you've got hours in the day. And that to do list is never quite done. That's why finding the right tool to stay on top of everything and simplify things is such a game changer for millions of businesses, including dozens of side Hustle show guests. That tool is Shopify. One thing I love about our partner, Shopify is you don't have to start from scratch. They've got hundreds of ready to use templates that help you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. Plus, Shopify makes it easy to create email and social media campaigns to capture customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling and they're not sleeping. On AI either. I'm talking tools to write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com sidehustle go to shopify.com sidehustled shopify.com sidehustleen I've got one that I'll add to the mix that has added probably 5 to 7,000 subscribers over the course of the last several years. And that is a Facebook group to email list in integration. And I'm using a tool called Group leads for it. It's like this really low cost browser extension that you can ask people questions when they join your group. I think I ask questions like, what's your biggest side hustle struggle? Or what side hustles are you working on right now? Or have you started anything yet? Some kind of those types of generic fact finding questions that can help guide future content. And then also, hey, if you want our best side hustle tips, you know, enter your email here. And a lot of people do that. And then Group leads sends it directly into kit and it gets again a specific welcome sequence. Some people are already on the email list and so it sends them a different message. Hey, great to see you again. Thanks for joining the Facebook group. For other people it's like, hey, you know, welcome to side Hustle nation. Hey, the Facebook group is just the tip of the iceberg. Here's all the other stuff we got. And so that's been a really, really powerful kind of incremental addition because what we found, you know, early on, the Facebook group was very much like podcast listeners, like, you know, the core of the audience. But over time it started, you know, Facebook started recommending that group to people it thought were interested in side hustles and started to grow a lot organically. It's like, oh, I need to do a better job of capturing those people.
- [16:29]
Chanel Basilio
I love this one. It's like, it's so obvious. And I have been the person to go, not recently, but over years ago to go to Facebook, search for a specific topic and then join a group or find other people there. So I think that's, it's awesome. It's such a good one.
- [16:44]
Nick Loper
This has been like top of the funnel. We had Abby Ashley on the show with her virtual assistant training business. She runs one of the biggest virtual assistant groups on Facebook and that was a top of the funnel entry. Point. Enter your email and we'll send you the free masterclass on how to get started, how to find your first clients, and really, really effective. And I think we've seen people do it in microgreens farming. And there was another one. Some guy was doing a pet waste removal training type of, you know, no matter your niche, there's a group about it. And if there's not a group, you should start one because it's. It's a powerful, powerful place where a lot of people are still spending some time.
- [17:22]
Chanel Basilio
Oh, amazing. I love that one. I wish I could figure out a way to make that happen for me. Maybe I will. Newsletters?
- [17:28]
Nick Loper
Yeah, the email growth hacker newsletter. Email. Yeah, there's gotta be something like that.
- [17:31]
Chanel Basilio
It's gotta be. I love it.
- [17:33]
Nick Loper
All right, what else you got?
- [17:34]
Chanel Basilio
All right, I think the next one. So Ali Richards has been somebody I just keep being excited about because he does all these cool things. But he started a business called Storylearning, and he was helping people learn different languages. Like, moving abroad, you're going to teach English as a second language, that kind of thing. He turned that into a $10 million business. And he now is like, I want to do something different and I want to start a personal brand. So he was like, okay, how can I get people on my email list for this personal brand? He couldn't just, like promote it to his language learning list. It's not the same audience. So he decided he was going to put everything he learned from building that business into a Google Doc. And it ended up being 118 pages long. And so he's like, okay, cool, Google Doc. 118 pages. He's just giving it all away. So anyone looking to create like an online course business or anything like that, they would be super interested in this. And so he shared that and he just started promoting it in other newsletters. So he would buy sponsorship placements and that kind of thing. But from my end in the newsletter space, I saw every. Every person who wrote a newsletter about newsletters was sharing this thing like wildfire. Like, every day I'd open an email and be like, check out the Google Doc from Ollie Richards. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. And the part was like, yeah, he asked for email if you went to his website to sign up and get it. But most people were just sharing this Google Doc around. And he's like, that's awesome. Like, I don't need to capture every single email.
- [18:57]
Nick Loper
Yeah, like, no opt in required.
- [18:59]
Chanel Basilio
Totally.
- [19:00]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [19:00]
Chanel Basilio
And so he ended up getting like 18,000 subscribers from this thing and they're high quality, like super high quality, even.
- [19:08]
Nick Loper
Though it wasn't a requirement and people just consumed it and they were like, well if he's given this much away for free, if he's giving me 118 pages for free, what's he sending out? An email.
- [19:17]
Chanel Basilio
Right. And so throughout the Google Doc of course there were like ways to opt into the email list if you hadn't been on there already. But in the last 2ish years from starting this Google Doc, he's earned $1.2 million from he work runs like these pretty cheap workshops, like a hundred to 400. And then on the back end of that he'll have like coaching as well. But I just thought this was fascinating. Like 18,000 subscribers from a Google Doc just sharing your information and your, your expertise.
- [19:47]
Nick Loper
Do you think it worked just because of the novelty factor where it's like, who does that? Nobody.
- [19:52]
Chanel Basilio
It's like totally. He said the only money he spent on it was $10 on Fiverr to get a cover for it made.
- [19:58]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [19:59]
Chanel Basilio
And arguably like if you look at the COVID you'd be like, you probably could have done that yourself. But okay.
- [20:04]
Nick Loper
And then getting the flywheel spinning by buying some placements or buying some swaps or newsletter ads in other newsletters.
- [20:10]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. And so he had these workshops on the back end. So if somebody bought through the workshop, he threw all that money back into buying more ads. So he used Sparkloop, which is kind of like a paid recommendations as well as newsletter ads just in a typical email issue. So he created like this little flywheel, like if any money he made, he went back into ads and it just kept growing the email list.
- [20:31]
Nick Loper
Okay, I've got another one that kind of piggybacks on that and I call it the Perma Free on Amazon Strategy or Permafree on Kindle Strategy where there's I've got a book, it's Sidehustlenation.com book perma free I think. Might have to be United States only. But this was last updated 2019, so it's due for a refresh. But this is three different side hustle frameworks. Right. You could sell a product business, you have to start a service business or have like a content type of business. Right. And this gives a bunch of examples of that. And it's kind of like if somebody's searching on Amazon for side Hustle, the goal would be hey, you go find this book. And in the book, as I have in probably all my books, is some sort of lead magnet. I forget what it is specifically for this one, but over the course of 10 plus years publishing on Amazon, it's thousands of subscribers who either buy the book and then get the upgrade, which you see in almost any nonfiction book. It's like, hey, you want the toolkit, the resources? Go over here and download that. Or get the free video companion series. Like super, super common strategy. What poured fuel on the fire was reducing the friction and just making it perma free. And I don't know if this is still the case on Amazon, but you had to list it on another marketplace and then email them to request a price match. And so you had to upload somewhere else for free because it's like 0.00 was like not a. Not a price that was allowed in their system, but through customer support they would allow you to do it. And that's been a powerful lead gen for me.
- [21:57]
Chanel Basilio
Wow. So the other platforms, you uploaded it for free, like everand.com or whatever that's called.
- [22:04]
Nick Loper
Yeah, maybe Smashwords or Ibooks or someplace else. Or maybe it was like the Google Play Store. There was some. And then you just like screenshot that or you know, save the URL and then say, hey, could you price match? It's free over here. And then as long as you don't touch it. And that's like one of the hesitations in updating it. I would love to keep all of the reviews for the book and just push a new version out underneath that same listing. But then you have to go through that repricing process again and there's no guarantee they'll do it, but for the first few iterations.
- [22:39]
Chanel Basilio
Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. I like that one.
- [22:41]
Nick Loper
I pulled it from the fiction world where it's like the first book in the series is free. Hopefully it's good enough to get you hooked and then you go on and buy the rest of the series. Series. Or you opt in for a special bonus or get notified when the next book of the series comes out. And taking a page out of the fiction author playbook.
- [22:58]
Chanel Basilio
Oh, I love that. I might have to try something like that.
- [23:00]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Especially if you've got years and years of content that could be repackaged into 118 page Google document or it could be repackaged into a Kindle book with probably a similar strategy.
- [23:11]
Chanel Basilio
I like it. That's a good one.
- [23:13]
Nick Loper
All right.
- [23:13]
Chanel Basilio
All right, let's go to CJ Gustafson. This is my favorite one recently of the last like four months. I Can't stop thinking about it. So he writes a newsletter called Mostly Metrics. He's a cfo, like financial nerdy guy. His content is awesome though. He includes like gifs and just like a ton of personality. But what he did was he was trying to look for sponsorships. But he started out he would go to these software companies in the financial space, so like a bricks or that kind of thing. And he was like, hey, do you guys like, you don't have any content around this one topic? Like would love to share a piece with your audience. And so it started off free, but he got again guest post on Brex.com, which, I mean the traffic from that alone is probably amazing. The backlink for SEO purposes, which R I P. But anyway, so it lives there in perpetuity. But it also gets. They started sharing these out to their email list. So these companies are like dying for content. They want someone else who's not their content person to share some exciting news about their organization or why the product's so good. And so C.J. coming in as an outsider sharing about their product was just like a no brainer. So now he gets paid like 6 to 12k for a package of like 3 to 4 of these posts.
- [24:24]
Nick Loper
Okay, she's getting paid to write them.
- [24:25]
Chanel Basilio
Getting paid now? Yeah.
- [24:27]
Nick Loper
Wow. Is most commonly is, is you see the inbound. How much is it gonna cost for a link? That's great.
- [24:32]
Chanel Basilio
Okay, totally. So he's getting paid for these. He doesn't have to write an extra word because they're actually just taking a piece he's already written and sent to his email list. So it's just like an aggregation play. He's getting paid, he doesn't have to write a word. And he's getting subscribers from this because at the bottom of the email or the piece it says this originally appeared on mostlymetrics.com and so people click through, they subscribe. And then the best part of this whole thing is he has a paid newsletter and some of those people subscribe and become paying clients. So he's like getting paid twice for some of these.
- [25:06]
Nick Loper
Okay, so it is kind of like a customer use case scenario that you're pitching to that, that company. Did I hear that right?
- [25:14]
Chanel Basilio
I think that's how it started out. But now he's just writing content for CFOs and he talks about bre sometimes. Like he'll link to it like, hey, you can use Brex for this one thing. But it's not, it's no longer just like A review of the company. Like, it's just him, a random CFO talking about this company or certain topics that their readers are interested in. I don't know, he's just like, killing it with this. It's almost like creating a separate blog for these organizations.
- [25:38]
Nick Loper
Okay, so they have some hunger for content that wasn't produced by their internal team. Or maybe it saves them money. It's like, sure, we'll pay you 500 bucks. It's cheaper than paying somebody in house to create this. And they get the content that was already repurposed. So he reaches a new audience, and then a certain percentage of those people, you know, are in, are in his world now. And they come back to the email list. They come back to the paid subscriber tier.
- [26:03]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, I mean, you think of even like Kit, they have creator series where a lot of their content is just like pulled from these stories about different creators. Because, I mean, people who reading their email list don't want to hear from their. Their creator person just like, hey, Kit's great. This is awesome. It's more like, hey, Jay Clouse has this newsletter and here's how he grew it on Kit. And it like, shares valuable information. So I don't know. I've seen other people do something similar. Caitlin Burgoyne does like webinars. So she'll do a training for companies. And so that software company has an audience. They're showcasing her as like an expert on this thing and their audience is getting value from her. So it's like making them look like an awesome company.
- [26:45]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's a whole, whole nother strategy that we could probably talk about. Is this virtual workshops targeting the companies that you have a good feeling, like your, your avatar, your target customer, your target client is already paying attention to doing business with and doesn't even have to, like, webinars have been maybe given a bad taste in people's mout. Well, I know there's a pitch coming. There doesn't even have to be a pitch here if the goal is just to grow your audience, grow your email list. We had Dustin Lean on the show, and this was like one of my favorite strategies of all time. He was targeted. He was like, had such a niche service like email copywriting for direct to consumer brands or something like that. And so he would go to Shopify, go to Klaviyo, or go to companies that, you know, his target customers were already doing business with and kind of like, hey, I'd love to host this free educational workshop on how to rewrite Your cart abandonment sequence, like something really, really specific and niche. And it's like, I'm going to teach you the DIY version. But a lot of the attendees are busy CEOs or marketing directors. Like, can we just pay you to do this? There was no specific pitch or ask or sign up here to book a consultation call just by virtue of skipping the line. They've kind of vouched for you as the expert. It was a really cool shortcut strategy to get in front of large groups of your target customer in a hurry.
- [28:03]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. And all right, let's give people like a normal example because these are all business ones. So I'm just thinking you were mentioning the microgreens farmer guy, right? So he could go to a company like Bootstrap Farmer. They sell these seed trays that you actually can grow microgreens in. He can go to them and say like, hey, I want to share my 10 biggest mistakes of growing microgreens or something for beginners. And like at the bottom they sign up for his email list. And so it doesn't have to be like a business oriented thing. It could be, I don't know, growing microgreens. Like how much more B2C does that get?
- [28:35]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's great. But like kind of that same question, well, who are my target customers already doing business with? Like who would benefit from my newsletter and where can I get in front of, you know, big chunks of them all at once. And it's a really interesting one. Both the virtual workshops and the paid guest post, getting paid to create content for other, other companies, I'm just like, my mind is spinning on, well, who else could I go and, and pitch this to? One that is in a similar vein, this is from, from years ago would be like the virtual summit strategy, which full caveat, like this is a ton of work to put together. Pre record a bunch of videos and I'm gonna drip em out over this like live three day virtual event. And the goal is everybody you recorded videos with promotes it to their audience. It's the three day brand building summit. It's the three day build your freelance business summit. And super, super effective if you can get this where I mean we talked to Chandler Bolt, like booked. Some have seen like probably a million dollars in sales like from, you know, the, the self publishing summit back in the day. But one thing that you can do is, is reach out to companies that might also want to reach this audience. Somebody had the example of like the freelancer summit, like grow your freelancing business. Hey, freshbooks Would you mind sponsoring our event? You can be the title sponsor. I don't even know if they charged for it. Maybe they could have, but the price of admission was invite your email list, invite your own customer base to it, and all of a sudden, boom, 20. I was like, oh, this is great. So trying to sell sponsorships or even free sponsorships to the virtual summit, so done right can be absolutely effective, but you're going to be dedicating some time to pulling this off.
- [30:12]
Chanel Basilio
This reminds me of what I just went through with the 30 days of growth. It was like not a summit, but similar. It's still coordinating with 30 different people, but you didn't have to do like a live video or anything. So that was interesting. That was a, that was a good one. I think that's actually something that can be replicated for quite a few people and netted out like 1700, 150 new subscribers for me in the last 30 days. So I'll take that. Yeah.
- [30:34]
Nick Loper
And you called it like a, you called it like a pop up newsletter.
- [30:37]
Chanel Basilio
Pop up newsletter, yeah. It's similar to a summit in certain ways. But essentially I went out, found 30 different creators, including Nick, and I was like, hey, you want to share one growth tactic you've used to grow your email list? A lot of them I already knew ahead of time. Like I had figured out like what they had done and I was like, do you want to share this one tactic? And then so everybody got one of those tips every day for 30 days and now it's over. So it's not like I have to keep writing this daily newsletter every day, but it's a heck of a lead magnet I have now of like, here's 30, 30 tips to grow your newsletter.
- [31:07]
Nick Loper
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And everybody who is featured shares it with their audience as a little snippet, as a little blurb. Hey, make sure you go check out the 30 days of growth. Okay?
- [31:16]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. And I did have some software tools giving away free licenses, but I did not do the smart thing of being like, can you share this with your email list? I should have done that. That was the missed opportunity there.
- [31:27]
Nick Loper
It's taking the, you know, the old vertical roundup style post and just making it horizontal. We're going to drip this out instead of say 30 creators on their number one marketing tip. Okay. We can have that same content and that same amount of outreach and back and forth, but just structured in a different way and kind of have a similar promotion engine where everybody kind of bands together to share it.
- [31:49]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, I like that totally. That vertical thing used to work really well, but I think it's a little tired now.
- [31:55]
Nick Loper
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- [34:25]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, I like the one. It's a little more simple instead of like 30 days of content. So Tom Orbach, who runs MarketingIdeas.com, marketing Ideas Newsletter, but he knows his marketing stuff. So on LinkedIn he just wrote, drop your website URL below. I'll reply with a specific growth hack for your company. First come, first serve, serve. And then within this. So he's giving people like custom like ideas for growth for their companies. And then underneath each one that he replies to, he'll give them the idea and then he'll say, if you enjoyed this, I share a bunch of tips like this. Over@marketingideas.com he said that LinkedIn post got him 250 new subscribers. And when he did it on Substack, it got him 400 subscribers.
- [35:04]
Nick Loper
Wow.
- [35:04]
Chanel Basilio
So yeah, 650. Just from two posts and sharing some time. The brilliance of this though is like he can take some of these ideas and expand on them in his newsletter. So it's like not even just a one time use case.
- [35:18]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it feels like I'm giving my time, but I'm also getting future content out of this deal.
- [35:22]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, and he said a lot of the people who joined the newsletter actually weren't even commenting. They just saw all of the value he was providing and were like, okay, I'm gonna sign up for this guy's newsletter because he's clearly knows what he's talking about. About.
- [35:33]
Nick Loper
What do you think? Like, if you don't have much of a following on LinkedIn, if you don't have much of a following on Substack or X and you post the stuff, hey, you know, first 10 people, it's like crickets. You're like, well now this is awkward because now nobody, nobody even commented.
- [35:47]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, well, you can always delete it if you don't get comments within the first 30 minutes or something. But I mean, you could also like seed it with a friend. I could be like, hey Nick, can you go comment on this thing so I can at least start sharing? And then as people see the comments, they'll probably share their own URL.
- [36:01]
Nick Loper
Okay, so what would you call this one? Kind of like, like almost a social proof giveaw type of thing? Like, oh, you know, office hours type of thing.
- [36:08]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, you could do it as an ask me anything too. And this works for practically any industry. So if we continue with the microgreens examples, like give me your biggest issue with microgreens, or what's a recent issue you've encountered, like, maybe they were over watered or something. It might not work on LinkedIn, but somewhere else, like a forum or something.
- [36:26]
Nick Loper
Yeah. And if the first one doesn't work, don't get discouraged. I remember this was from talking with Dicky Bush years ago when he was first getting started on Twitter and he put something out. It was like, I wrote a thread. I forget his cadence. It was either every day or every week. And nine of those over the course of the year, nine of those ended up going viral and getting him and his 100,000 subscribers or whatever his number was that turned into ship 30 for 30. Like, this whole business built on the back of building that following. But it was like most of them didn't do anything. Most of them didn't hit. And his line was like, it's the ultimate idea, proving ground. It's like if it doesn't resonate in the first little bit, the algorithm is just going to bury it. You're like, well, back to the drawing board. That wasn't the right hook. That wasn't the right idea. And you kind of refine this process. I don't know if the hit rate improved over time, but it's almost this numbers game of don't get discouraged if your first two posts don't deliver the results you want. It's kind of a game of iteration and trying to find the right thing that does hit and that does take off.
- [37:29]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. I think he posted online every day for nine months. He got to to like 2000 followers after nine months. Like most people would have quit.
- [37:37]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's kind of discouraging.
- [37:38]
Chanel Basilio
But then you see his trajectory now and you're like, whoa, it's so cool that he didn't quit.
- [37:42]
Nick Loper
Yeah. It's hard to stick with it in those early, early days. Sometimes early years. You're like one of the. It's hard when the, you know, step one, create. Create good content, step two, you know, hopefully go viral. It's like that wild card of it is. Is a little bit challenging, but maybe you can seed it. If you have a handful of connections, maybe they. You ask them to be the first commenters or to. To reshare it and hopefully give the algorithm a little bit of a nudge.
- [38:10]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. Like, even Sam Parr from the Hustle, he had the Trends community on Facebook. He actually Said that in the beginning he was seeding posts so he would write up a whole piece for people and share it to them in their DMs. And so, like, even if someone like Sam Parr had to do that in the beginning, it's okay if you do that.
- [38:27]
Nick Loper
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For, for Growth in Reverse. Anything else that you found, like in the early days to try and get, you know, get those first, a thousand or ten thousand subscribers, it was a.
- [38:37]
Chanel Basilio
Lot of Twitter threads. And also I think the content was just so unique that people were like, I'm going to share this with other people. Okay, that's a huge unlock. And it's, it's probably the underlying piece of all of these is like, if you have really good stuff, it's just going to make everything we just talked about work so much better. Because people are going to want to recommend you, they're going to want to share your content, they're going to want to pay you to promote it.
- [38:58]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What you've become known for, what Growth in Reverse has become known for, is like these really in depth, deep dive case studies that say, okay, look at Sahil Bloom now and then let's rewind, let's go back five years and see what that trajectory looked like and the specific tactics that worked and didn't work. And you're right, it's unique content. It's something you won't find anywhere else, and it was effective. So the question is, could I reverse engineer something similar for my own niche? If you're listening in and, and I don't know if there's any shortcuts here, but doing that kind of analysis that people aren't going to find anywhere else makes it compelling.
- [39:38]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. Or like you just go out and find the most unique stories about side hustles and share them like you're not the one actually doing the side hustle necessarily, but you're sharing all of those tips and things that you've learned from doing your own. Again, it's just like a different way to do unique content.
- [39:53]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's a good, that's a good point. And those are the episodes where you hang up, you're like, and I gotta go tell the neighbors. You're not going to believe who I talked to today. You know, could you believe she makes money organizing people's photos in their attic? Oh, that's a $100 an hour job. Cool. I didn't know that.
- [40:06]
Chanel Basilio
So good.
- [40:06]
Nick Loper
I have another one that has added probably several thousand subscribers over the course of the last three or four years and that is participating in bundle sales. And so this is going to be more of a B, two C or maybe like B to small B type of type of play where a bundle sale organizer like ultimate bundles is one. BCStack is the one that I'm referring to. I've been a participant in many times, but there's a few different companies that put these together. So that may be a side hustle on its own, being the host, the organizer, the aggregator, because you can. There's some benefits to being that central hub as well. But as a contributor, how it works is everybody kind of donates a product to this bundle and say, hey, for a limited time, for one week only, you're going to get access to 30, 40, 50 of these digital products on a specific niche. Maybe it's how to grow your traffic and you get a free for $49. Whatever it is, you know, low price sticker price on all these resources are $5,000. It's like, okay, that might be inflated, but it's still a good deal. And you know, you never know. It only takes one good idea to make back the $49 and then some. So like I'm a fan of these as a consumer and I'm a fan of these as a contributor because how it works is all of these contributors, the 30, 40, 50 people who contributed products plus the bundle sale, has recruited additional affiliates who, their audience might find value in this. They all promote, promote it to their audience. And when people go to go and claim those products, they go register with teachable or they go order the thing through your ThriveCart link or however it is, or they sign up on your email and so they have to enter their email to go and claim the product. And now they're a part of your ecosystem. So it's a way to gather subscribers from a ton of different places all at once. And it's been a really effective one over the last few years.
- [41:52]
Chanel Basilio
Years. That's so interesting. Are those like high quality email subscribers too?
- [41:56]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I was kind of surprised. So the unsubscribe rate, the open rate has been pretty similar to the broader list. And I, I guess I expected it to be a little lower, but people tend to stick around about the same rate as everybody else.
- [42:09]
Chanel Basilio
That's interesting. So you get the entire list even if they don't like download your thing necessarily?
- [42:13]
Nick Loper
No, only if they claim your thing.
- [42:15]
Chanel Basilio
Oh, okay. I was gonna say.
- [42:16]
Nick Loper
Yeah. So it's gotta, you gotta come up with a compelling product.
- [42:18]
Chanel Basilio
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I'VE never done one of those, but I've seen them all over the place.
- [42:22]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's a very interesting one. And kind of financially, how it works, like if anybody is curious, like somebody buys the stack, the individual creators get $0 unless you referred them as affiliate. Then you get your 40% affiliate commission or whatever it is. But the play is access to this broader audience. And hopefully some people come back and claim your product and become a part of your world. And a lot of people will throw on order bumps and upsells and stuff to the back end of their cart to try and recoup some of that. But it's more of a marketing play than a money making play.
- [42:56]
Chanel Basilio
Interesting. Yeah. You've been doing that for years now, right?
- [42:58]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's pretty effective. And it's like, otherwise I'd be very content to just kind of sit and do my normal thing and be in maintenance mode and record some episodes. So it's like, oh, there's this deadline coming up. I got to come up with a product that would hopefully be compelling. Like the podcast growth playbook came out of that. The little Get Gigs mini course came out of that. There was like, like an easy traffic makeover course that, that came out of that where it's like, okay, I got, I gotta come up with something that would be beneficial, that would be on brand, that would be like comfortable with this price tag. And, and here's a, here's a good excuse to launch it.
- [43:33]
Chanel Basilio
Interesting. I like that one. Cool.
- [43:35]
Nick Loper
All right, what else?
- [43:36]
Chanel Basilio
I think a broader category of things that I like to recommend to people are like collaborations. Now this could look like a cross promotion. So like I will shout Nick out in my newsletter. He does the same on his end. But that's like the basic one. There's a guy, Alex Garcia, he runs a newsletter called marketingexamined.com and he did a cross promotion with Pat Walls, who has Starter Story, which is a great one. If you haven't talked to Pat, you probably should. He's got a ton of great case studies as well. But yeah, they did a cross promotion. So pat had this YouTube channel that he was starting to build. I think at the time he probably had like 10 or 15,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube. And Alex was like, okay, well I have 30,000 and email subscribers. Like, let's just swap things. So Pat came out, filmed the video of Alex like talking about his business and his newsletter, and Alex just shouted him out as like a full page cross promotion, essentially, like sharing Pat's stuff and so it looked similar on like the outside. But now Pat's channel has like, I think he has like over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube. And so like that video has gotten shared all over the place about. About three or four months after, I believe Alex shared that he had gotten like 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers from that video. I don't know how many Pat got, but that's a really. That's a lot of subscribers from one collaboration.
- [44:58]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I mean, you see this on YouTube all the time. And just even in the whole channels that my kids watch. Dude, perfect. Is collaborating with Mark Robert to build battle robots. Okay. You know, but it makes sense because it kind of lifts a rising tide, lifts all boats. It gets exposure to a different audience.
- [45:12]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. And so you don't have to have these huge audiences. That's just like an outlier example. Example. But you can write a guest post together. Like go to the writer of a newsletter and like you guys co write a piece. I've seen this happen all over substack. The beauty of substack is like, people can click right through and subscribe very easily. Even if you don't have substack though, you can do something like this and just like co write a guest post or actually write a guest post for their audience that they don't have to write anything for. Summits are kind of a version of collaborations. Even that bundle is probably something similar. But you could do this on social media as well. Well, so it's not like it has to live in one channel or the other.
- [45:50]
Nick Loper
Right. And it's trying to find people of a similar size. Maybe when you're starting out. This was similar strategy on podcast shout outs. I mean, years ago it was, you know, Instagram takeovers, Instagram shoutouts. Like, it's nothing new here. And could you be get. Could you get included in somebody else's newsletter as a recommended resource in exchange for shouting them out? It's like similar idea here. And it can work really, no matter. Matter what scale. If you're starting out, it's like, okay, maybe it's 5 to 10 subscribers instead of 5 to 10,000, but the principles are still the same.
- [46:19]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, there's a woman on substack. Her name's Maya Voye. She's in the product space. So she writes about like product marketing, product strategy. And she went out to some of the other bigger people with substacks and started doing this. Like she would co write pieces with them or she would write a piece for them. And when I found her, she had like 3,000 subscribers. And now at this point, I think she's pushing like 20K. And this was, was like eight months ago maybe. So, like, it happens pretty quick if your content's good and you're able to collaborate with some of these people. And she didn't have an audience at that point and she was partnering with people. One guy, Akash Gupta, had like 140,000 subscribers. So, like, because she was giving him such a valuable piece of content, he was like, yeah, I'll share it.
- [47:01]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Step one, make sure your content is good before you ask anybody to vouch for you to share it. But there's. It's like a diverging path, right? Like, I could focus heads down, just doing my thing and hope somebody notices. It's like you gotta kind of be vocal and be proactive about promoting this stuff or going after these collaborations and promo swaps. Otherwise, like, the odds of somebody just finding it on their own are so low.
- [47:26]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, it's very low. Especially if it's like a new venture or you've never been online before doing something like this.
- [47:32]
Nick Loper
Yeah, you had an interesting one. To move on to the next one from Cody Sanchez, where she was apparently actually buying up newsletters for contrarian thinking early on, it's like, how could I shortcut this even faster? Oh, this Guy already has 13,000 subscribers. I'll just go buy the newsletter. He's like, you don't want to run it anymore? Is this how it happened?
- [47:52]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, this is actually funny. I was doing research and I came across this one podcast episode and I had not heard her talk about this. And I think I had listened to like 25 other podcast episodes. Yes, I go deep. And so I listened to this and she said she bought a newsletter. And so typically when you buy a newsletter, you might send an email and say like, hey, we just acquired blah, blah, blah newsletter. You're now going to be on this list. And you just like import all those people, delete the old list and move on. But what Cody did was she actually positioned contrarian thinking as a guest post author or a sponsor for weeks, if not months. She didn't go too far into detail. And I don't know which newsletter she bought because she has never talked about this again.
- [48:33]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [48:34]
Chanel Basilio
But she did do this. And from her words, and she would build this audience on the same time. So she would just send out these emails, keep writing the content like it nothing ever happened. And then she would turn around when she figured out, like, I probably got all the subscribers, I'm going to get from this. She would turn around and sell that back to someone else. So she nowhere in this actually lost money. She probably made money because she was still growing the newsletter at this point.
- [49:00]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [49:00]
Chanel Basilio
And so talk about, like, like leverage.
- [49:03]
Nick Loper
Yeah, very savvy. Yeah. I'm going to buy this asset, milk it as much as I can, but still continue its founding mission and then, you know, flip it to the next person.
- [49:12]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, she's like, so on brand for her.
- [49:14]
Nick Loper
One thing that she mentioned in our earlier interview was a lot of manual outreach for the first thousand to ten thousand people. Where it was, would you mind shouting this out, you know, to reaching out to friends who already had email lists, doing a ton of guest podcasting. Podcast guesting, rather, where it was sharing this idea about buying businesses versus building businesses. Like, okay, that's a unique angle. And building the newsletter that way by borrowing other people's audiences, either through email promo swaps or email shout outs or through podcast guesting.
- [49:47]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, she's a hustler for sure. I created a visual actually showing all of the podcasts she was on and, like, her growth of her newsletter. And it was like, so in line. It's just amazing. I'll share that with you, with you if you want to put it in the show notes.
- [50:02]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [50:02]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, it was pretty insane.
- [50:03]
Nick Loper
All right. Well, I could say I knew her before she was super, super famous. Only medium famous early on.
- [50:09]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. I remember listening to your episode with her for that research.
- [50:12]
Nick Loper
Yes. You know, millions of followers ago.
- [50:14]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah. What are we doing wrong, Nick?
- [50:16]
Nick Loper
Yeah, who knows? Who knows? This, this was depressing. Like, I remember specifically showing up at Vincon 2021 in Austin. And in my mind, this was like the year of TikTok. So many young creators were there. Oh, I started six months ago. I've got a quarter million followers. And it was just like, huh, this is a different path. Like, this is. This is unique. This is interesting. And one of the episodes that we recorded around that time, or maybe a little bit before, was with Tori Dunlap. And it was one video. She said one video went super viral. And her funnel was like, take your money, money personality quiz. I don't know if it's changed since then. And one video was like, we added a hundred thousand subscribers in a week. So maybe you can't control going viral, but you can control what Tori did was having the ecosystem and like, the lead capture funnel and process in place for when that viral moment happens. And so that was kind of what impressed me from our call.
- [51:15]
Chanel Basilio
Yeah, I Think she still has that quiz? It's actually. She does. I just went to it. 1.16 million people have taken that quiz, and all of them enter their email address. So that's wild.
- [51:25]
Nick Loper
Yeah. So if you're going to play the short form game, make sure you got something to lead people back to. That's my. That's my. That's my takeaway.
- [51:32]
Chanel Basilio
Tori's got an incredible business, too.
- [51:34]
Nick Loper
Well, this has been awesome. I don't know how many we can count these up, but probably 10 or 12 different ideas here. Anything else before we wrap?
- [51:41]
Chanel Basilio
No, I think that's. That's it. I mean, I have a million of them on my site, so if you want more. Yeah, if anybody really wants more than that, you can go find it.
- [51:48]
Nick Loper
Absolutely. Well, yeah, there's growthinreverse.com, there's the growth in Reverse podcast. What's next for you? Where are you taking this thing?
- [51:56]
Chanel Basilio
Gonna put out a course slash vault of these ideas here soon with some videos and step by step of how to do each one, because people are telling me there's too many question marks. So I'm like, okay, fine, I'll help.
- [52:07]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it's almost like a choose your own adventure kind of thing. Or you need. You need the quiz funnel to be like, well, which one works for me?
- [52:12]
Chanel Basilio
Totally. I should put a quiz on there. That's a good idea. So I think that's the next thing, but I'm still just trying to wrap my head around 30 days of growth.
- [52:20]
Nick Loper
Well, stay tuned for the growth in reverse course. We'll be happy to link that up when it is live, reverse.com. in the meantime, Chanel, this has been great. Thank you so much for stopping by. Let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side Hustle Nation.
- [52:33]
Chanel Basilio
Just try stuff, experiment. Start somewhere. We have all had those failed posts like Nick was talking about with Dicky Bush. Some things will get zero views, but some things might get 10 views. And those 10 people might end up becoming raving fans of your newsletter. So don't look at the small numbers and think you're failing. Just keep going.
- [52:51]
Nick Loper
Yeah. I always remember this talk from Cliff Ravenscraft at Podcast Movement. I want to say 2016. 16. And question from the audience comes in. Well, I've been doing this for five months, and I only have 200 subscribers. And he's like, timeout. I want you to remove the word only from your vocabulary. Look around this room. There's not 200 people in this room. But you're still thinking like you have some unique advantages here. You know them by name. You can know their exact pains and problems. Something that a Tim Ferriss can't do. You've got a unique advantage here. Don't say only right. You got 200 people paying attention to you, investing their time and energy, putting you in their earbuds like you're doing something right. If you you got 200 people to pay attention to you. So yeah, don't sweat the small numbers and experiment with some different of these growth tactics along the way. Now I wouldn't be doing my job as a host in an episode about list building if I didn't have a listener bonus a content upgrade for you. So I built a list building cheat sheet with a couple dozen different ways to grow your email list so you can pick and choose the tactics that appeal most to you, along with some tools and additional resources to help you do it. You can grab that for free in the show notes for this episode. Just follow the link in the episode description. I'll get you right over there. Big thanks to Chanel for sharing her insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. The latest offers and deals from those sponsors are@side hustlenation.com deals thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. So fire off that text message for somebody who needs a little kickstart in their list building efforts. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on the.