Slow To Build, Slow To Kill

Yesterday, I sent the ninth issue of my local newsletter – the one I plan to grow into a 6-figure business – and as of right now, that list is sitting at 96 subscribers.

Sound low? It probably is a little bit, but based on what I’m seeing so far, I’m optimistic this is going to work. It just needs time.

Without going too deep into it, the quick reason is that I’m building a high-value audience, engagement is strong, and I can feel growth getting easier. But still, it’s a big difference from the other big newsletters I’ve written for in the past.

So today, I wanted to talk about the early stages of growth, and how I stay both sane and motivated while getting the ball rolling on a small list.

We’ll dig into…

• Real talk on growth charts

• What a good growth rate is

• How to think about the value of your audience

• Why shortcuts can be a mistake

• Getting through the early days

Oh, and this is going to be relevant if your audience is big too. Growth is relative. Even when the list is big, it can feel like a slog sometimes. I formed a lot of these views while working at The Hustle, and while studying newsletters of all sizes across the industry.

Let’s dive in…

Real Talk On Growth Charts

I’ve been working on newsletters professionally, and studying them closely for almost half a decade. I’ve seen a lot of growth charts.

At this point, I can look at a chart and pretty reliably guess how someone is growing.

Organic growth looks different than paid growth. Paid ads look different than SparkLoop. Etc. There are still surprises every now and then, but for the most part, these things grow in somewhat predictable ways:

• Organic growth tends to be fairly linear – unless you’re riding a hype cycle like crypto or AI – with random jumps when a piece goes viral or gets attention from bigger publications

• If you see growth that’s both sustained and super-linear, they’re typically paying for that

It’s crucial to know this so that you can set realistic expectations for your list, and avoid comparing yourself to people who are playing a different game.

A great resource to check out is Chenell Basilio’s newsletter, Growth In Reverse. She charts the growth of dozens of different email lists, and writes about the tactics they used. Combined, those two offer a good sense of what you can expect from your list over time.

So What’s A Good Growth Rate For You?

Obviously, it varies. But there are some benchmarks that you can use as a baseline to set expectations as you get started.

In his recent interview on the Newsletter Operator podcast, Adam Ryan, former president of The Hustle and co-founder of Workweek, said that the two big milestones for a new newsletter are…

• speed to 1,000 subscribers, and…

• speed to 10,000 subscribers

If you can get to 10k inside a year organically, you’ve got a real firecracker on your hands, and the newsletter is probably going to reach escape velocity.

That’s the industry rule of thumb. But there’s two other things to remember if you’re early on:

1. You’re going to get more efficient at growing throughout your first year (so the first few months will be much different than the 10th-12th)

2. The benchmark for success is gonna vary based on the type of audience you’re going after

If you write a newsletter for CEOs of 9-figure companies, that’s going to grow a lot differently than others, and you may never break 1,000 readers. But that doesn’t mean the email is worthless.

It’s important to understand the nuance of audience value…

How To Think About The Value of Your Audience

It is both easy and tempting, when thinking about the value of your audience, to focus on size over everything else.

But as the old saying goes… “size is just one of several important factors that should be considered when you’re deciding the value of a thing, and it shouldn’t be over-weighted in your decision criteria or else… you know… you might walk away from something that’s actually really great.”

…Or something like that.

Here’s the deal – if you run a newsletter, there are basically two ways you’re going to make money from that:

• By selling your products to that audience, or…

• By selling someone else’s products to them

This can take many forms: paid subscriptions, services, paid events, ads, affiliate deals, etc.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to those two things – the value of your audience is determined by their ability to buy either your products or someone else’s. And that, in turn, comes down to three things…

1. The size of your audience

2. How much money they have to spend

3. How willing they are to buy things you recommend (the technical term for this is “trust”)

It’s great to have all three of these. But if you have two, you’re good to go. And if there’s one that’s more important than the others, I’d say it’s purchasing power of the readers, not the size of the list.

The amount of money your readers have to spend dictates a lot of other things, like the price you can eventually charge for paid products, or the caliber of advertiser you can work with.

This is part of the reason I decided to build a local business newsletter, rather than a general audience. Business owners are a higher-value audience, and in something like a local newsletter, where the total addressable market is much more capped than something like Morning Brew, it’s important to focus on high-value readers.

There are other more important reasons I chose that audience – the biggest one being that I love learning and writing about business, and interacting with business owners.

So I wouldn’t encourage someone to pick an audience just because the readers have more money (you’ll be miserable if you don’t like what you write about). But it’s part of the equation to factor in.

Why Shortcuts Can Be A Mistake

In the same interview I mentioned earlier, Adam Ryan lamented the fact that so many newsletters are using paid recommendation platforms like SparkLoop or Beehiiv Boosts to grow so early in their journey.

Historically, newsletter operators pushed to get to ~10k subscribers organically before paying for ads.

There were a few reasons for that, but one of the big ones is that in the beginning, you’re trying to find content-market fit. You’re learning how to talk to your audience, what they need, what they see as your key value-prop, and how to communicate that to others.

When you find that, you unlock organic growth, and that in turn adds an important tailwind to paid marketing you do in the future.

One of Adam’s points was that it’s much harder to judge whether a newsletter has actually found content-market fit if they pay for growth out of the gate, especially with recommendation platforms where some portion of readers aren’t even aware they’re signing up for your list.

I’ll take that one step further…

Shortcutting that early growth doesn’t just muddy your understanding of how you’re doing. It can actually be a huge waste of time and money.

The most impressive and surprising growth chart I’ve seen came from a company that went from 0 to 10k+ subscribers in their first month by shoveling money into SparkLoop.

The founder called it the fastest-growing newsletter of its kind in the world.

Only problem was that the list was worthless. The employee who built it found a way to use FB ads to get very cheap emails for his personal newsletter, then set himself as a SparkLoop referrer for his employer’s newsletter, and profited for months sending low quality leads to his boss.

After they got rid of him, they had to get rid of the entire list too, which had ballooned to 100k+ unengaged subscribers. Six figures in ad spend down the drain because of a bad faith actor, and a little too much focus on list-size.

Dealing With The Slow Growth Days

Okay, so you know the risks of over-indexing on list size. You also know the other components you need to focus on (trust and audience quality). But how do you actually get excited about writing for a small group of people?

Here are a few tips…

1. Talk to a bunch of them

You have unique advantages when you’re small that you’ll miss when you’re bigger. For example, you can know almost everyone on your list, and get crucial insight about who they (and your future readers) are.

Talk to a bunch in-person or on the phone, and ask about why they signed up, and pay attention to the words they use when they answer your questions – you’ll start to hear patterns that you can mirror back in your landing page copy or social media posts.

2. Focus on other engagement metrics

Sure, growth’s important to keep track of. But early on, when you’re trying for content-market fit, you’ll get a lot more signal from things like…

• Conversion rate on your landing page

• Open and click rates

• Qualitative feedback and spontaneous sharing from readers

When I say I’m optimistic that my local newsletter will work (given enough time), it’s because early feedback on these things has been strong, and to me, that’s more important than growth velocity right now. It also feels like growth is getting easier, but that’s a story for a different week.

3. Finally, pretend you’re speaking in front of them…

Every week, when I sit down to write for the audience of my local newsletter, I pretend like they’re all sitting in a room, and they’ve come to hear me speak. It keeps me accountable. I can’t be boring, or phone it in just because the list is small.

96 people may not sound like a big list. But 96 people in a room is substantial.

This is a trick I got from Jacob Cohen back when we both worked at The Hustle. He used to get everyone hyped up by comparing how many football stadiums worth of people we were talking too that morning, and I find it works just as well when working with small or large audiences.

Wrapping Up

Last year, I wrote about one of my favorite companies, Lost Art Press, which makes 7-figures in top-line revenue selling wonderful woodworking books.

During the research for that case study, I came across a line from the founder that I think about all the time…

It sounds trite, but the early days really are something you’re going to want back later. Don’t rush to get through them.