You can build $1M funnels with AI

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.

Zero formality or ads - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25k-$5M+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Luca, Founder @ Refactoring | Brian, Owner @ The Flyover | Mark, Head of Canadian Partnerships @ Substack

I have never been more excited about what one person with a few AI tools can build.

I’m telling you: you plus 2-3 AI tools can build a $1M funnel. Full stop.

Two months ago I ran a 7,000-person virtual summit with Chenell Basilio. Sam Parr, Justin Welsh, Dickie Bush, Katelyn Bourgoin, Jay Clouse, and a bunch of other buddies spoke.

Here's what a build like this would usually cost:

I built the entire funnel myself in 7 days for… $59.25.

I described what I wanted to a no-code software called Lovable and it built everything we needed.

We got a huge number of high caliber creators and founders in a room, many of whom came from paid ads.

And so today I’m going to give you a few of my biggest paid ads learnings from the summit so you can steal them as you build yourself:

Most of you are running a sign up flow that looks like: ad/social channel → landing page → thank you page.

You learn nothing about who just joined and you don’t train your ad platform to find you the right subscriber.

Here's the flow I ran instead:

Ad → This landing page → Typeform → conditional routing.

The Typeform asked audience size, business model, and their phone number.

This is how I drove 500+ registrants with audiences between 25k-500k.

Roughly 2/3rds of these folks have spent money on community/courses to grow their audience.

Kit bought a room full of their exact ICP - this is why they came on as the flagship sponsor.

Pretty cool!

I designed our funnel to bring in the highest quality people possible (for a free event, at least - paid events are always higher signal).

~33% of registrants came from paid ads

I’ve been trying to shake a bunch of you by the shoulders for 18 months now telling you to go optimize your ads for qualified leads.

Very few of you still do it, so I spent my own money to show you the impact it has:

CAVEAT: Based on Kit’s LTV (high), these were reasonable CPLs for me.

If your newsletter does $50k/month or more and sells sponsorships (where you typically have a $5-15 LTV), my team can do this for you at a $2 CPL if you’d like to get in touch here.

I paid ~$2 more per lead and made each qualified lead 3x cheaper. I'll take that trade every day.

We do this constantly for clients - one in a high-income niche went from $85+ to $13 per qualified lead and $80/day to $1,000/day in revenue switching to us from another agency.

→ Full breakdown on the funnel you should use for that here

Two things happen post-click that most folks never measure.

First, creative-level quality. Different ads drive wildly different registrants.

On the regular-lead campaign, Meta shoved the most budget - $5,404 - into a text-over-video ad because it produced the cheapest raw leads.

It also cost $81.89 per qualified lead.

The second we optimized for qualified leads, spend flowed to the longer-form UGC I'd shot myself - me talking to camera with a CPQL 1/4th of that cost.

Second, show rate. Two levers you should always pull to get people to show up to events:

My one regret: we didn't collect phone numbers until 2,000+ people had already registered. Whoopsie!

1. Build an event where the worst case scenario is you learn a bunch of cool stuff

I love tactical events. Dickie Bush mapped the email flows powering his $700k/month business. Sam Parr and I jammed on all the stuff he and friends and ours did to maximize luck in their 20’s / meet their heroes.

Even if the event was a total disaster and 5 people showed up, I still would’ve learned a ton to plug into my life/business.

2. Sell secondary sponsorships

We had last second / late conversations with Perspective, Sparkloop, and Lovable but there just wasn’t enough time to finalize them. We thought about sponsors ~20 days out from the event, which should have been more like 45+ days.

3. Get a big speaker before you reach out to everyone

Sam Parr is the man. He is also crazy busy and so I was really grateful to have him come spend some time with us.

He was the first speaker to say yes, which made yes’s from everyone else a lot easier.

4. Have guests make cool things for attendees.

Almost every guest made something to give away. A win for them, and attendees walked out with a stack of free assets.

Speakers like Dickie Bush / Jay Clouse made custom assets JUST for the summit (pretty wild - thank you to you both + appreciate you joining this newsletter the other month).

5. Give your registrants bonuses

We gave away sponsorship emails and lots of other goodies just for registering. This boosts conversion rates. Never host any kind of event without a bonus for registering and a separate bonus for showing up.

What’s next:

I’d love to double next year’s summit to 15,000 registrants. I have two goals with this:

Let’s see if I can do it!

That's the letter.

- Nathan