The 2025 AI playbook for newsletters

👋 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 Bharat, Chief Product Officer @Newsweek | Andrew, Director of Digital Advertising @TechnologyAdvice | Melanie, Director of Email Acquisition @Hearst 

ChatGPT’s 4o image gen launch 2 weeks ago was as important as ChatGPT’s initial launch in 2022.

My very first challenge for ChatGPT 4o: Combine beehiiv’s IRL subway ad campaign with a long-running ad for The Rundown.

A few seconds later… wow!

I posted this (+ a few other AI-generated ads) on LinkedIn… a few days later, it was popping up in the ad accounts of other AI newsletters. Fast!

No shade to Faris’s company - I accept that when I post ads, they’re fair game!

Rather, my point is that the speed and volume at which you can build ads and content businesses have just increased an order of magnitude.

In a world where you can re-create Typeform with replit in hours and competitor ads in a few minutes, distribution will be king.

This will fundamentally alter every pillar (growth, content, sales) of newsletter businesses.

You HAVE to build a culture amongst your team of trying out tools and building out SOPs / use cases ASAP.

And so I wanted to revisit the highest-leverage ways we’re using AI.

I put together a workshop and a 30-page playbook walking through use cases (with results, numbers, and examples to make them real for your team) you can plug into your business.

A few highlights:

1. Growth: I’m training up our team to be full-stack marketers who can use Claude to quickly get to 1st drafts of ad concepts + scripts and 2-3x their output.

2. Content: Only hours after The Neuron was acquired, I wrote a newsletter about how the M&A went down, why I lost, etc. It was my #1 replied-to newsletter and the 1st draft was done entirely with Claude trained on my writing!

3. Monetization: We just did another $200k+ for Bootstrapped Giants using email nurture initially drafted with AI (trained on customer testimonials + previous emails).

Watch the workshop → 

Download the full deck →

That's the letter.

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3. The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales with newsletters every month - book a brainstorming session with me here