👋 Hi friends -
Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. I run The Feed, the largest newsletter growth agency - 2x a month I share short reflections with my clients and other operators.
Zero formality or ads - just a guy sharing learnings from running paid ads & launching digital products for operators doing $50k-$5M / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Chris, Head of Growth @ Substack | Austin, Partner @ Flywheel Publishing | Brian, Founder @ Airline Observer
Your offer & your market are the most important decision you’ll ever make in your life.
Picking the right game matters more than playing the wrong game well.
These folks are great founders who pivoted and instantly felt the “oh sh*t, this is going to change everything” pull into a market:
Rowan Cheung was making crypto games in the bear market, pivoted to AI, and scaled a $10M+ AI newsletter, The Rundown
My buddy Jake quit his $100k/yr consulting job in January, joined my office, and quietly infiltrated sororities across the country to film rushtok videos for brands. Last week he did a launch with Nike covered by Morning Brew. $1M+ run-rate biz.
My buddy Matt pivoted from Ecomm ads to Twitter tech launches and scaled from $150k/month to $1.1M/month the past 6 months at 24 years old.
And, foreshadowing… newsletters can be used to scale the heck out of most great offers.
Alex knows!
My point is this:
I know a paid subscription newsletter with 400,000 subscribers doing somewhere around $6M/yr while one of my clients with 200,000 subscribers did $2.75M in August.
Everyone obsesses over craft. Subject lines. Send times. Design. Which ESP they're on.
If you just spend more time selling a really f*ing hot offer, you could mess up a lot and still build an insane business.
And so after working with 100+ newsletters doing anywhere between $100k-$6M/month, I wanted to:
Stack rank the most common newsletter offers from best to worst (best = least difficult to scale to $100k+ per month with a small audience)
Share the typical revenue per subscriber numbers I see so you can back into the audience size you need to yield meaningful revenue
Give you some of the hottest niches within each offer type
Here we go.
1. Services ($100-1,000/subscriber)
You need <100 people on your list to start monetizing this.
If you send people valuable emails and sell a $2k-$10k+/month service, people will book calls with you. It simply will happen.
Every launched an AI consulting arm in February 2025. In 14 months they hit $215,000/month. Their core paid subscription product took 6.5 years to hit $250k.
My buddy Max Sturtevant does ~$700,000 a month in ecommerce email marketing and makes over $300 per subscriber on his list of 20k (he’s 23).
I quite literally was working out of a barely furnished apartment in Ohio with a laptop and a white board and hit $1M ARR in 10.5 months with 920 email subscribers and no personal brand between Feb 2024 and November 2024.
The hottest offers right now:
Email marketing. Write emails for SaaS, info, or Ecomm. Charge $4-6k/month. Max Sturtevant’s entire playbook is literally right here.
LinkedIn ghostwriting. Founder-led content is in such crazy demand right now. Write posts on LinkedIn, charge $3-5k/month. My buddy Shamus makes $200k/month doing this. He’s 20.
Cold email lead generation. Unglamorous, priced per outcome, permanently in demand. Matt Lucero does $150k/month and he’s 24.
AI implementation and consulting. Tenex is the enterprise version, but it is quite literally insane how many people I know doing $1M+ with this for SMB.
Paid ads and media buying. This is my offer - we’ve become the #1 growth agency running the ads behind brands like MarketBeat, The Rundown, The Points Guy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and more. Pick a different niche though! We’ve got this one covered.
P.S. To prove to you this is the #1 newsletter offer, I’m partnering up with Tyler Denk (founder of beehiiv) and Zain Khan (SMB Deal Hunter, $2M/month newsletter) on a 2-week bootcamp. We’re going to show you how to use a newsletter to land $2k-$10k/month customers. It starts in <20 days, join the waitlist here.
2. Mid & High-ticket digital products ($10-$100/subscriber)
Look, $350-700 self-paced courses are rapidly declining.
AI & YouTube make information a commodity. People want live experiences, accountability, and community.
That lends itself to two things:
Cohort-based courses. These work because they're live.
You can charge $1,000 to $2,000 for a 4-week “achieve X in Y weeks” program because there's a real person on the other end at a real time, and you're promising a very clear dream outcome.
Group coaching programs. More accountability, longer, more done-with-you.
This is how you sell your time to a lot of people at once. Depending on the niche and the offer, $5,000 to $30,000 a seat.
A lot of my examples below are B2B but it’s worth noting there are plenty of B2C offers like Jay Shetty’s certification school and Warriorbabe crushing it.
The hottest offers right now:
AI implementation. Cameron England is 20 years old. He hit his first $1M month in August. Crazy.
Career placement and high-ticket closing. Shelby Sapp's She Sells Academy runs between $3-5 million a month.
Finance and trading. MarketBeat is one of the largest sources of net new buyers for portfolios like Agora and Marketwise. $65M/yr with 20 employees. Own the offer yourself or be really good at affiliate, both work.
Buy a business. Acquire Weekly, SMB Deal Hunter, Codie Sanchez, Ben Kelly, Roland Fraiser help folks buy a boring $1M-$5M business with an SBA loan. We work with 3 of the top offers in this space and it is one of the quickest offers to scale to $1M/month on the planet. Ben Kelly shared his playbook here.
Scaling agency/coaching/consulting/info. Client Ascension does $400k/month. Jeremy Haynes does $1M/month. Jordan Lee has done up to $7M in a month.
3. Niche B2B sponsorships ($10-40/subscriber)
This is the sponsorship model with the most opportunity behind it.
So many white collar folks are building expertise in the job/industry their 9-5 is in and could be building a personal media company if they spoke openly about trends/tactics from their day-to-day.
This works the best when you're selling to companies with expensive offers. HubSpot. Ramp. Companies where one or two customers out of a single sponsorship pay for that ad several times over.
When your readers are the actual decision-making audience, the math works for the sponsor at prices that would be absurd anywhere else.
The hottest offers right now:
CFO Secrets and Mostly Metrics are 7-figure businesses with <100,000 subscribers. Reaching 50,000 CFOs by email is a channel that doesn't really exist anywhere else.
Car Dealership Guy is ridiculously powerful in the dealership world. His endorsement is worth millions to the right vendor.
WorkWeek is crushing it (just raised $17M!) on verticals including HR and Fintech
Punchbowl is deeply embedded into Capitol Hill
Morning Brew B2B has launched verticals including Revenue Brew and Founder Brew the past year
4. Community ($5-50/subscriber)
I love paid communities a lot - but they are very hard to scale.
Churn can be brutal. Also, once a community begins to lose momentum, it's very hard to bring back, and growing fast is one of the things that wrecks communities.
You need to vet entrants and produce a ton of content to build inertia such that members begin to self-organize and share value without you being in the room.
Examples:
Founder peer groups: Hampton is great. They’ve raised their prices 50% over the past 8 months and are still growing. I’m a member and love it.
AI consulting / agency communities: Maker School. Nick Saraev is doing $250k/month teaching folks how to land clients with AI.
5. Paid subscriptions ($5-10/subscriber)
To make this work you have to be first or best on content. There's no third option.
The Ankler pulled it off in Hollywood with 133,000 subscribers, 30,000 paid, and a 21% free-to-paid rate. Oliver Darcy's Status hit $1M ARR in less than a year.
This works best in…
Niche hobbies (I know a Rolex newsletter doing $10k/month)
B2B
If you have a huge organic following (Ruben Hassid, independent journalists, etc.)
Great model. Exceptionally hard to get big.
Great examples: The Ankler, The Free Press, Lenny’s Newsletter, The Information, How to AI, Status etc.
6. Broad sponsorships ($3-7/subscriber)
I don't want to be misread as dismissing this as a business model.
It’s just that you need millions of subscribers here to build what a services business builds with 1/100th of the audience size.
1440 has around 4.7 million subscribers. Morning Brew has 4 million. TLDR has 1.25 million. Superhuman is over a million.
If broad sponsorships are your only offer I think that will be hard for anyone who isn’t already a household name.
But the great thing about broad sponsorship newsletters is you can ALSO sell any of the other offers above plus sponsorships.
That combination is golden and it’s what I believe more newsletters should be doing going forward.
Great examples: 1440, Superhuman, The Deep View, Stacked Marketer, 6AM City
That's the letter.
- Nathan
P.S. Reminder that Tyler Denk (beehiiv), Zain Khan (SMB Deal Hunter), and I are hosting a 2-week bootcamp this month on using a newsletter to land $2k-$10k/month clients. If you join the waitlist, you’ll get free, instant access to the beehiiv Starter Kit & Service Offer Black Book:
A step-by-step guide to set up your beehiiv newsletter in 20 minutes
A breakdown of how 27 different service and coaching businesses use email as a key lead & revenue driver
Find me on LinkedIn - I post 3-4 tactics a week on how to scale your newsletter growth and sales
The Feed Media has driven millions of subscribers and sales for MarketBeat, The Points Guy, Workweek, Tyler Denk, Jay Shetty, The Rundown, The Neuron, and 70+ other world-class newsletters and audience-first founders. See if it makes sense to work with us here
