👋 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 $25-500k+ / month with newsletters.
New reader highlights: Welcome to Ben Billups (Noble Digital), Jamin (Crypto Nutshell), and Zach Goldman (The Points Guy)
Last week I booked a last-second flight to see Tyler Denk (CEO, beehiiv) and Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) do a fireside chat in San Francisco.
It was an awesome trip. I met a bunch of folks in/outside of the media space.
A few highlights from the newsletter side:
Pete (The Neuron) has great taste in ramen
Nick Martell (Snacks/Sherwood Media) + I chatted about an awesome product history podcast he’s working on - I’m hoping he’ll do one on how the inventor of Dynamite pivoted to creating the Noble peace prize (how wild is that?)
Clint (Tl;dr Sec) is an improv veteran (improv classes are still on my list of things I want to do before 30 - 3 years left, we’ll see… agencies ain’t easy)
But let’s talk beehiiv.
Tyler’s never had a flat month.
I think all of our companies can learn a thing or two from beehiiv’s ops chops.
Here are 3 lil’ nuggets I think you should be stealing from beehiiv and installing into your business.
Want to do founder mode? Host a company-wide meeting every week where everyone tells you their priorities.
Every Monday team members throw their biggest priority into a Google doc.
On Fridays, the full team does a round-robin on whether that goal was accomplished.
I love this because:
The best solutions are often the most simple/obvious ones. Are you a CEO who needs to keep in touch with every employee? Host a bigass meeting - boom!
It forces you to think about what’s important. Are you going to be the guy/gal that doesn’t list something that sounds like it moves the needle on Monday? No way.
What does that mean for you?
Talk with your copywriters, designers, and editors a lot + share ad data. It’s very easy for specialist roles to become focused on inputs (e.g., number of videos edited) vs. outputs (video performance)
I'm surprised how often I hear ad sales <> marketing teams not meeting to talk about sponsor CTR. Definitely do that.
Launch the damn thing - perfect is progress’s worst enemy
I think fancy folks call this agile or something.
I like how Tyler phrased it - most people over-index on first impressions that everyone forgets about.
Case in point:
beehiiv just launched a pretty large posts update after ~2 weeks of QA.
They knew there would be bugs. There were.
Half of them are addressed already.
In a month no one will remember any of the bugs, they’ll be using the 2-3 extra features beehiiv launches by then and thinking “Wow, I’ve never seen anyone make progress this fast”.
What does that mean for you?
Newsletters should move faster.
I’ve been helping my buddies Jesse Pujji and Andrew Warner launch their info product business at Bootstrapped Giants.
Over the next ~1 week they’ll close ~$250,000 in revenue on a B2B sales accelerator that was just an idea scribbled in Figjam on August 1st.
Will it be perfect?
No.
But we’re launching small and those folks are going to get so much hands-on attention I don’t see how they won’t close more in sales than the cost of the program ($5k).
Angry customers are a blessing - it’s the apathetic ones you should be worried about
Angry can be awesome - you have users who care.
And visibility into what can go better next time.
When I heard this I immediately thought back to an email Chenell Basilio sent late one day, which was followed by 20+ ‘where’s your newsletter’ emails.
A writer’s instinct would be to feel guilt - you sent people something late.
But 99/100 newsletters wouldn’t have gotten any ‘where are you’ emails that day.
No one cares about those 99.
What Chenell is actually feeling is content market fit :)
Alright, that’s the letter.
- Nathan May
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