👋 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: Ben, Associate Publisher @ Chronicle | Mike, Head of Strategy and Business Operations @ ADWEEK

Everyone knows The Rundown AI (TRAI) is the biggest AI newsletter.

But you probably didn’t realize just how big:

Link here

TRAI is doing something pretty special…

Most newsletter operators I talk to are obsessed with driving down their CPL.

Wrong game to play!

This is often a race to the bottom.

All the time, I see people push their marketing team to get cheap leads who don’t buy from you or your sponsors.

The better game: 2-3x your LTV beyond ads by selling a product or service.

Now you can outspend all of your competitors.

That’s what The Rundown does.

Let’s do some napkin math on TRAI at 1.4M readers (from a recent interview) and $10M run-rate revenue:

  • That’s $7 per reader per year, roughly 60 cents per reader per month.

  • If they spend $2 per subscriber, Rowan’s turning a profit on a new reader in 14 weeks

  • My guess is other AI newsletters make 25-35 cents per reader (that’s the math if you assume $30 CPMs, 40% open rate, 25 sends a month).

So every reader The Rundown acquires is TWICE as valuable as its competitors.

A huge component of that LTV upside is TRAI’s $1,000/yr AI education platform, The Rundown University.

It includes a personalized track of workshops, guides, and certifications for roles like marketing, sales, and development.

Rowan did an interview recently where he said the university is approaching 50% of the business.

The implication is that it does something close to $4M ARR and is responsible for nearly doubling the company since it launched 18 months ago.

Now you see - TRAI is a beautiful newsletter business.

So today I want to write to you on 3 things that have been critical to TRAI’s revenue trajectory… so you can steal them for yourself!

1/ Growth: How to acquire readers 2-3x as valuable as your peers

TRAI has made two great moves on the growth side.

  1. Launching with a big organic base

  2. Spending huge sums of money on quality-focused paid growth

It’s hard to understate how large a role Rowan’s organic posts on X have contributed to the newsletter.

100,000+ readers with 40%+ open rates, 12%+ CTRs.

He put up a billion views in his first year on X. Not bad!

His content strategy has a few core pillars…

1/ Event recaps:

2/ Feature announcement coverage

3/ Daily news recaps

And it's paid off in ways beyond just free subscribers.

Rowan gets access that no one else can.

  • Every major AI company has comms/marketing team members reading The Rundown.

  • He's interviewed Mark Zuckerberg twice now - once remotely, once in person.

  • Sam Altman as well.

There’s no ‘attribution’ for how a Zuck interview translates into more sponsorships or purchases.

But it’s hard to believe there isn’t a halo effect from all of the brand-building they’ve done.

TRAI also spends aggressively on Facebook ads.

They run between 25-50% profit margins, depending on each month’s ad spend.

± 25% margins dedicated to paid ads is pretty wild - envelope math, but on a $10M run-rate, the implication is monthly ad spend is up to +$200k on top of whatever their “usual” ad spend is.

All of that growth is focused on acquiring readers with high open / CTRs, even if it means paying more than $2.

Again - TRAI treats paid acquisition as an LTV game, not a CPL game.

2/ Funnels: Converting readers into customers

Here's how TRAI converts newsletter subscribers into $1K/year customers:

/1 A personalized onboarding quiz

New subscribers fill out a multi-step survey that segments them by role (marketer, developer, writer, etc.) and skill level.

Before you hit the paywall, you land on a page personalized to you, along with specific tool recommendations.

→ Tap to view the Figjam layout of their welcome flow

2/ Email nurture

TRAI sends out blast email nurture beyond editorial emails to get folks to upgrade.

Two types of emails:

  1. Workshop teasers (view example here)

  2. Promo of workflows/guides (view example here)

(Note: PDFs disrupt the formatting a bit, but you’ll get a sense of the copy ^)

The sending cadence has been up and down - maybe they haven’t figured out a high-converting strategy here yet:

3/ Daily newsletter plugs

TRAI will do full content blocks in the bottom 3rd of its newsletter, highlighting recent workshops.

It’s worth noting on top of juicing ARPU with product revenue, they frequently sell deep dive emails that look like this:

I’ve heard anecdotally that deep dives can be 4-6x the price of a primary ad slot.

A $30 CPM on 1.4M readers at a 40% open rate is ~$15k for a primary.

So let’s call the deep dives $60k.

I’ve seen 2 deep dives in October - if we gross that up, it’s $120k/month, ~$1.5M a year.

→ View their most recent deep dive email here

Operations: The 15-person team doing the work of 30

The Rundown publishes daily, runs multiple video channels, and operates several ‘children’ newsletters (tech and robotics) to the flagship daily.

They do it all with 15 people.

That’s $700k+ per FTE! Shy of 1440’s $1M/employee but still far above average.

Rowan’s got a bunch of fun internal AI workflows the team uses to get more for less. Here are a few of my favorites:

1/ AI avatars for Instagram Reels

Rowan cloned himself to create short-form video content on Instagram.

He’s sitting just shy of 200k followers and tens of millions of views.

The workflow is fairly straightforward:

TRAI’s video editor takes written content (newsletter / X), writes a script, and feeds it to HeyGen (AI video avatars) and ElevenLabs (AI voice narration).

This is a lot (4+ hours) of work per Reel.

But it allows the team to leverage Rowan’s brand to grow their socials without him needing to be hands-on.

→ The Rundown published their workflow for this here

2/ Lindy for meeting scheduling

The Rundown uses Lindy agents to handle scheduling, follow-ups, and calendar management.

Example:

  1. Prospective sponsor emails requesting a meeting with Rowan

  2. A Lindy agent, Ava, reads the email and extracts: who they are, what they want, urgency level

  3. Lindy checks Rowan's calendar and sends a reply with available times

  4. Upon confirmation, Lindy books the meeting.

My favorite part of this is that no Calendly link is required.

There’s no bigger way to signal you think your time is more valuable than a sponsor’s than to make them book you via Calendly.

Removes 5-10 hours of admin work per week.

→ The Rundown published their workflow for this here

3/ Claude Projects as “Editor in Chief”

The Rundown writes its entire newsletter by hand but uses Claude AI as an editor-in-chief to refine every issue.

  1. Rowan and his team write the full newsletter manually before AI touches it. The goal is to maintain voice, accuracy, and editorial judgment.

  2. They load the draft into Claude, pasting each section into a long-running Claude chat that’s already trained on their top-performing writing.

  3. They’ll use simple prompts (sometimes as general as “make it better”) to cycle through Claude's suggestions on phrases and sections

If I were ever to buy a newsletter business, a few notes to myself from TRAI:

  1. Deep dives are a must - if you have a healthy sponsor program, it’s the most straightforward path to add 20-30%+ to your revenue

  2. B2B creators are the future - a subscriber from organic social can be worth 2-3x one from paid ads. Figure out ways to partner or buy their audience.

  3. Don’t cut CPL, stack LTV - paid ads HAVE to be focused on readers who click and buy, and if you want to build a media company, long-term, you need high-ticket products or services

Oh, and don’t start a business where you have to compete with Rowan Cheung.

That sounds hard!

Rowan spoke at Forbes 30U30 in my hometown recently.

Flew in to support, he’s the man - I’ll leave you with a lil photo from his talk.

They let me up on the balcony with all the fancy people. Very cool!

That's the letter.

- Nathan

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