👋 Hi friends -
Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.
Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25k-$2M+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Max, Founder @ Caper | Rich, Co-founder @The Assist | Eleni, VP of Events @Morning Brew | Jimmy, Senior Growth Marketer @ TLDR
Thank you to Ryan and Jesse for having me moderate these awesome folks!
The Newsletter Conference was amazing, although increasingly, not about just newsletters!
Topics included events, consulting businesses, investment syndicates, community flywheels, and more.
The newsletter is still central - folks are just seeing newsletters as the anchor to any business, media or otherwise.
I’ve picked my 6 favorite conference takeaways (plus a bonus at the end) - lil’ nuggets that you need to know to grow your business this year.
Enjoy!
1. The inbox is about to change. Know where you stand.
Here's how I think about what survives.
You either need to be famous for your taste or produce original writing.
Yeah - curation WILL survive if you’re a tastemaker.
Shaan Puri’s Five Tweet Tuesday is pure curation…
But I open it every week because I've listened to hundreds of hours of his podcast and trust his taste completely.
On the flip side, no one is able to replicate the work of How to AI, Status, Workweek, or any other media business with original writing.
The closer you are to your own research or experiences, the safer you are.
One line from Dan Oshinsky I loved: if AI can summarize your newsletter in three bullet points and that summary is as good as your newsletter…
You have a content problem, not an AI problem!
2. Who not how many - and operators are finally measuring it
Building a small but mighty audience came up in virtually every panel.
Advertisers increasingly don't ask about list size.
They ask about purchase influence and what decisions those readers are making right now.
Workweek doesn't use subscriber counts internally. Adam Ryan's line to an advertiser evaluating a competitor who claimed 500k subscribers in a B2B niche: "There are only 60,000 people who do that job. You're wasting your money."
Annex runs 55 niche B2B brands. Their position is 20,000 qualified industry professionals is more commercially viable than 200,000 casual visitors.
The Flyover's acquisition metric: cost per ad clicker. Every channel gets benchmarked against that number. If the clickers aren't there, the list size is a vanity metric.
This is even more important if you sell your own products / services.
You must be zealous about qualifying the people who come onto your list and making sure they’re your ideal customers.
3. Events: the room is the product
Small-format events with the right readers are one of the primary ways many speakers are getting more revenue out of smaller lists.
Newcomer's model: 45-50% of every room is startup founders.
They source invitees by going directly to VCs and asking who they've backed that hasn't announced yet.
Punchbowl does 50+ events a year and almost all are TINY… 75-120 people.
They’re selling exclusivity, not 2,000 people walking into a room.
Everything in the event is fed directly into editorial.
That integration is part of the pitch to sponsors.
Axios had a cool strategy here - they don’t try to create destinations (expensive and high-risk), they build satellite events around pre-existing conferences as a trojan horse into the C-suite.
Davos, Cannes, F1, etc.
A curated dinner of 25 people in the right room, fully sponsored, beats a 500-person conference you can't fill.
3.5 An event you won’t want to miss
Speaking of events - I’m going live with Sam Parr, Just Welsh, and 12 other founders on how to build an audience and scale your business.
The Personal IPO Summit on June 2nd and 3rd is virtual and 100% free.
It’s going to be the single largest event of the summer for founders and creators.
We had 1,000+ people register within the first week of its announcement!
4. Your post-signup flow is your most valuable real estate
The Assist ran the most tactical presentation of the day.
New subscribers hit a thank you page with a five-question quiz.
83% complete it with their department, seniority, etc.
Enough to segment everything that follows on their quiz results page, which has 15+ affiliate offers all matched to their responses.
Then you receive a seven-day welcome sequence with offers woven in via a problem-solution framework.
Their goal is to recoup the $3-4 cost per lead within seven days.
This lets them pay MORE per lead for a higher value reader, which significantly lifts sponsor performance.
They’ve driven 1,000+ demo calls alone for one of their top partners!
5. Media brands are going face first.
A single writer at The Hustle dramatically lifted their 3-hour open rate across 1.5 million subscribers.
His name was Trung. He had no personal brand when Adam Ryan hired him.
That was the insight behind Workweek, which takes expert individual voices without audiences and builds media brands around them.
People follow people.
Axios is doing the same thing.
Individual writers are pulled out of the newsroom and have full franchises built around them with newsletters, events, memberships, video.
Sarah Fisher on media.
Dan Primack on deals.
Punchbowl's YouTube show is Anna Palmer (their founder!) in a baseball cap at 4:30am.
She’s rocking a home office, not an anchor desk - and they’re on track for seven figures in video revenue this year.
If your content doesn't have a face attached, ask why not
The operators compounding fastest have built adjacent businesses off the back of their newsletter audience.
Every's consulting business - helping companies implement AI is now a $200k+ per month revenue stream and nearly as large as their subscription business in less than a third of the time. I broke down their model here.
Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine opened a physical cafe. They host events and run a marketing agency running behind the same brand. The physical space is a moat for trust - very cool idea for our local newsletter operators out there.
Lenny Rachitsky built the Product Pass - tools from founders in his own audience, bundled at subscription cost. Readers get more value. Audience founders get distribution. Nobody else can build that product because nobody else has that community.
Bullet Pitch runs SXSW events, invite-only networking, and an investment syndicate. They get first look at deals because they own the community and sponsor relationships that surface them.
The pattern across all of them: they’re building a ‘media bullet’ with the newsletter in the front and higher ticket offers in the back.
7. Other numbers / tactics I wrote down
A few things that don't fit neatly above but are too good to cut.
The Flyover raised $5M from 3,700 of their own readers at ~$1,400 average. Pre-validated by $300k in unsolicited tip jar donations over two years, plus readers who had already invested eight figures in third-party deals run inside the newsletter. They got a 30% higher valuation than going institutional.
60-67% of email clicks are security bots. Higher for corporate domains. Up to 90-95% for irregular sends like webinars. If your platform isn't filtering bot clicks out of your automation triggers, you're sending the wrong sequences to the wrong people.
Morning Brew's event model: charge for in-person, stream virtual for free. 200 in the room plus 1,000 virtual beats 200 paid virtual. Put someone dedicated on the virtual feed so it doesn't feel like an afterthought.
ManyChat: several operators using it to convert social content directly into newsletter signups and event registrations. We have several clients with 100k-10M Instagram audiences testing this and it’s super, super worth it.
SMS as a companion channel. Flyover's model will be to send three headlines that broke after the morning newsletter at 2pm and monetize it with sponsorships (typically a 10%+ CTR on SMS). If this works well I think it will set a huge precedent for SMS-based sponsor links outside of financial publications.
That’s the letter.
- Nathan
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The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales with newsletters every month - get in touch to work with us here
