Negative CAC at $70k/month in spend

👋 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-$1M+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Welcome to Gina, Senior Product Manager @TechnologyAdvice | Niklas, Founder @Megahit | Nate, Co-founder @Ad Astra

My buddy Andy gave a killer talk at the recent newsletter conference about a revenue strategy that’s changed the trajectory of his business.

His media company, The Assist, has hit negative CAC (e.g., spend $2 on a subscriber, immediately recover that $2) at meaningful spend – $70k+ a month on paid ads.

It’s been extremely clear this is a playbook people want ASAP:

• Multiple of our clients have asked about it

• Andy + his co-founders (Sean, Joanna, Richard) were nominated for an Innovation In Revenue award by The Inbox Collective last week

• I watched multiple large media CEOs hunt Andy down during the conference to pick his brain on how to borrow this for their business

Your post-sign-up flow is your most valuable, least-monetized real estate

Immediately post-signup is the most valuable real estate that you will ever have with a subscriber.

How you use that real estate – to collect first-party data, upsell things, or show partner offers – is an extremely critical decision.

A big theme of this newsletter is how you go deeper with your sponsors.

So I'm going to show you 2 companies that have spent 100s of hours painstakingly detailing the best sponsor monetization answer to that question.

We’ll talk products, 1P data, etc. another day.

The Assist: The Offer Wall Strategy

I had a blast being a part of The Assist’s growth to 100,000 subscribers and have watched them dial in an incredible funnel the past year.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a marketer and have a chart that looks like this?

They're spending roughly $70,000 a month on ads and making something close to $100,000 a month in onboarding revenue (eyeballing the chart).

Their secret? A quiz-based funnel that leads to a partner wall with carefully negotiated CPC deals.

Newsletter sign-up → quiz → paid offer wall

The optimization is in four things:

• Negotiating partner CPCs + monthly levels of spend

• Creating lead magnets - when needed - to drive partner CTR

• Managing the offer order to not blow through your big partner budgets too early

• Matching quiz-takers with a role-specific offer wall based on their selected department (HR, ops, etc.)

Their partner offers broadly fall into three buckets.

Incentivized Lead Gen: Rippling offers people a $100 gift card to members of The Assist who put themselves in as a lead on their page. High-value SaaS company, high LTV, happy to pay for qualified leads.

Trial Offers: Wrike offers a simple trial start, explaining why their tool will "cut 83% of your meetings" by implementing their project management software.

Co-branded Lead Magnets: A weekly wins planner Joanna (Co-founder + CEO) co-created with Miro. It includes templates for goal setting, deadlines, and celebrating team wins.

I've talked to several people who run these programs.

Some do it programmatically via a simple ad server, others handle it manually, and everybody seems to fall into the $5 to $25 CPC range based on partner strength / their ICP.

If you’re a consumer founder, I don’t want to leave you hanging - I believe there's a misconception that this could only work for B2B.

Rather, this is a playbook that B2B has mastered.

And it's sitting there, waiting idly, for B2C to steal and take it for themselves.

You just need to find the right high-LTV consumer niches:

• Red Ventures makes a tremendous amount of money with Amex/Chase offers.

• SmartAsset sells Fisher Investments leads for financial advisors (and gets paid anywhere between $90-$800 for EACH lead).

• In local, 6AM City’s world, real estate agents could be a great candidate

• I know someone selling leads to certain niches of research panels making a killing

Generalizing: anything related to investing (advising, housing, etc.), high-ticket hobbies (cars, watches), or critical life events (new parents) would be a great consumer candidate for this.

Industry Dive: The Co-Branded Asset Strategy

Industry Dive takes a similar approach with an even deeper integration that’s worth understanding.

When you sign up for CFO Dive, you’re presented with one or more partner lead magnets:

This is all custom-created content for partners like SalesForce and Ramp.

This approach is about becoming a marketing partner that creates evergreen assets their sponsors can leverage ANYWHERE, not just a marketing channel that the sponsor allocates spend to.

You would be surprised how much content is worth.

The big consultancies like BCG or McKinsey charge $500,000 to $1,000,000 a month for strategy projects where the end product is essentially a series of board meetings and a well-researched deck.

That's the extreme end + far from what a media company could charge.

And I don’t mean to undersell the work that goes into those decks. It’s a lot.

I just want to illustrate what’s possible - 7-figure PowerPoint decks are a thing.

We put this into practice earlier this year by creating an executive report for a B2B company in the corporate learning space.

We charged $20k for it and, after talking with a few folks who do this full-time, I realized the market rate would have been $30k or $40k for the same work because the ICP of our customers were executive-level decision-makers.

This is doable. We've done it. You should be thinking about this.

And when you do, you get to double dip on monetization:

1. Get paid once to create valuable, evergreen assets for partners that they can use across all their channels

2. Get paid again when your subscribers download these assets as lead magnets

Start by having a conversation with your 1-2 largest sponsorship partners about deepening the relationship.

Figure out how you can create content that gets them in front of their prospects.

For our executive report, the GM of the client’s business needed to interview execs within their ICP.

That was a perfect opportunity for them to get high-touch, 1:1 time with leads while we created something they could distribute across all of their channels - a win-win.

If you remember one thing from this newsletter:

Partner, not channel. Partner, not channel. Partner, not channel!

That's the letter.

Nathan May

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