👋 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, CEO @ Snopes | Carly, Founder @ Carly Agar | Paul, Founder & CEO @ Pickleball Union | Adam, Co-founder @ The Princeton Review
I've been spending as much time humanly possible with people using AI to write awesome content and drive more sales:
A private event in Sioux Falls at MarketBeat's headquarters, where the top financial publishers doing $3M-$100M/yr opened their books on how they're using AI.
Conversations with a dozen AI transformation consultancies that have sprung up to install this stuff inside companies
My own team, which has been shipping dashboards, creative workflows, and internal tools all year.
There’s a gigantic gap between founders tinkering with Claude chat and people building full-blown tools and train their team on them.
Here are five awesome use cases for AI that will make you or save you a lot of money with your newsletter.
1. AI avatars of founders are crushing on organic right now
Every newsletter covering news & events should be moving on this ASAP.
Rowan at The Rundown has grown from 48,000 to 480,000 Instagram followers in 18 months on an AI avatar, and I cannot tell the difference between him and the real thing.
Building that normally takes a dozen hours from a founder sitting down to record every month.
This requires none of his time and at millions of views a month, it’s worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The stack: Fish Audio for voice cloning (more expressive than ElevenLabs), HeyGen Avatar 5 for the avatar, Higgsfield for b-roll stills, animated with Kling 2.6.
People follow people, and this removes the part where the founder has to be in front of a camera.
Do it with your journalists. Do it as the founder.
Hell, even do it solo without a newsletter - I know 21-25 year olds making $10-20k/month making these and selling IG sponsorships to AI SaaS companies.
Video creation is the cheap part now - make topic selection and scripting where all of your time goes.
2. Cut your editing time in half with AI-powered writing tools
MarketBeat took editor article review from 30-45 minutes per article down to 10-15.
That's 40+ hours a month back to their editorial team.
They did it by building their own editorial portal that:
Scores the strength of every pitch…
…and pulls every factual claim out of a draft and checks each one against everything MarketBeat has published, plus a broader internet search.
You can see here, on a recent ETF comparison it caught the writer saying a fund's top 10 holdings were 42% of the portfolio when MarketBeat's own data said otherwise.
The whole thing is 100% Claude Code. Their dev lead has never hand-edited a single file in it.
3. Build beautiful dashboards that yield more profitable growth and sales decisions
We measure EVERYTHING and thanks to AI we don’t need a 6-figure business intelligence/data team to do it.
We’re doing a head-to-head on one of the largest newsletters in the world with another agency.
Our quality dashboard makes it extremely easy to see we’re winning on driving quality readers who open & click:
(FWIW, my team has a 90%+ win rate in head-to-head tests with other newsletter growth agencies across 20+ newsletters. If you’d like the dollars you already spend on ads to make you more revenue, get in touch here).
Another newsletter my team does growth for spends ~$400k a month.
A year ago this operator would have quoted you his $2.30 CPL proudly. He's now perfectly happy at $5.
He…
Built his own dashboard on Claude Code + his ESP’s API.
Allocates sponsor revenue across his list based on how much each subscriber opens and clicks
Models that dollar value back onto his ad data
LTV:CAC went from 2x to 5x+ once he started optimizing his ads to readers who click in the newsletter.
We've built dashboards like this for clients and let me be extremely clear: You WILL make more money if you invest in tracking how paid ad performance drives clicks.
4. Let your advertisers grade their own sponsorships
Your renewal rate is downstream of how well your advertisers perform.
And you are sitting on a treasure trove of data about what performs in your newsletter.
Which sponsorships work. What kind of copy converts your readers. Whether a lead magnet beats a webinar beats a straight offer.
MarketBeat turned their version of that data into a tool that estimates your ad CTR vs. the benchmark ad CTR of all sponsors.
The creative opened with an earnings recap but every top performer in the benchmark set opens with intrigue, a bold claim, or a time-sensitive catalyst.
Instant self-serve feedback that reduces ad ops and makes a sponsor more likely to renew!
5. Equip your ad sales with battlecards to win more deals
A buddy of mine runs a $10M AI transformation company focused on go-to-market and sales.
He’s got agents buildin the sales team assets and ‘battle cards’ that cut sales research time by 4-6 hours a week.
One of his clients rolls up marketing services for law firms.
Before the discovery call, their agent scrapes the prospect's website, pulls their sharpest internal templates, and builds a mock-up of the prospect's new site.
The rep opens the first call with this vs. sending a Figma file a week afterwards. Clients are FLOORED by this, dramatic increase in close rate.
There’s a dozen different ways to extrapolate that to newsletter ad sales:
Media kits that automatically pull in examples similar to your sponsor
Grab every placement an advertiser has bought in other newsletters - look at where they’ve renewed, and position your audience as similar to those publishers
Look at every campaign the company is running outside of newsletters so you come in knowing what strategic priorities you should tell them your newsletter can help drive forward
Choose the right things to do
There’s doing the thing right, and then there’s choosing the right thing to do.
The hardest part of building with AI when you have a team is:
Picking the highest leverage problems to solve instead of FOMO-ing into what sounds cool to build
Getting the team to use what you built
Time audit your team. I put a time tracker on myself and on one of our growth marketers for a week to understand where we need to use AI across ad creative / media buying.
We’re also building back-end analytics on every tool we build.
Sure, we built something, but are people logging in? Are they running the reports / clicking the buttons we need them to? All of it is tracked.
The whole world is changing. Go build some cool shit (or if you want an intro to my buddy’s AI transformation company to do it for you, drop a reply and I’ll connect you)!
That's the letter.
- Nathan
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
