👋 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: Robert, CEO @Morning Brew | Davide, Former EIC @ Industry Dive & VP of Editorial @ Informa TechTarget | Jaclyn, President @ Shriver Media
We’re working with two of my all-time favorite My First Million guests (guests, not hosts, to be clear!) on scaling their product launches.
One a cohort course and the other a community.
They’re going great. I’ll share numbers 3-4 newsletters from now.
In the meantime, it got me thinking: I hear many folks say they want to diversify beyond an ads-only business.
But I see very few launch their own products.
Or if they do, they aren’t launched as big as they deserve to be ($25k-50k launches that should’ve been $250k-$1M).
This (in my opinion) comes down to 4 mistakes:
Launching the wrong thing: not validating the product pre-launch quickly
Fear of selling: Sending the wrong type or frequency of emails to drive meaningful traffic to a sales page / webinar / call
Mis-matching price & process: Selling mid-ticket ($500-2k+) / high-ticket ($5k+) without a webinar/sales call, or lower ticket ($1-$500) with a poor sales page
Designing a launch with 0 urgency: Missing the opportunity to pull demand forward by imposing time/availability constraints
When you get these right, magical things happen!
My friends Jesse Pujji and Andrew Warner have a fantastic newsletter for bootstrapped founders.
It will cross $1M this summer with only 30,000 subscribers.
A ~$33 1-year ARPU - that’s great user economics from great customers (I’m in a Slack with their Stripe notifications + see some of you here are even customers!)
My team helped launch all of their core products.
I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with them on sales/marketing, and they’ve been extremely generous with letting me share numbers/processes.
So I put everything I’ve learned into a free 65-page deck and 45-minute walkthrough:
Validating your product idea quickly using hand-raiser emails
Exactly how we built out an educational nurture flow that builds conviction in the ‘why now / why this solution’
Subsequent sales emails that build social proof and systematically melt objections
The sales page framework folks like Justin Welsh and Dickie Bush / Nicolas Cole use for their digital products (which we borrowed from, heavily)
Download the deck for free here.
Watch me unpack the full product launch here.
That’s the letter.
Nathan May
P.S. Even if you’re at a big company, the ‘offer creation’ frameworks in here are extremely relevant to you - you can map them to how Axios sells its $1k memberships. Heck, even McKinsey/Bain/BCG use elements of the offer framework without realizing it.
P.S.S. Don’t miss the deck, but if you’re just looking for a few quick-hits takeaways, peek at this LinkedIn post
Find me on LinkedIn
This is a private newsletter - if you want a teammate added, please reach out with their email
The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales with newsletters every month - book a brainstorming session with me here