You need a personal newsletter this year

👋 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: Austin, Co-founder @Morning Brew | Alex, Co-founder @Bytebytego | Jeff, Founder @Raging Bull |

If you’re a founder or exec and you don't have a personal newsletter, I think you’re being financially irresponsible.

Let me explain!

The vast majority of newsletter media companies have customer lifetime value in the $10-20 range.

This is good and very scalable.

But I’m watching a lot of B2B companies learn what I assume HubSpot did while buying The Hustle, Mindstream, and Starter Story…

…attention is way better when applied to expensive stuff.

Software, services, and your career.

A few examples of this:

A lot of people want to create a personal brand on social to build a business or a C-suite career.

But having a newsletter is far higher leverage than having a social media brand.

The Feed has become the largest agency for newsletters and media companies.

My peers (who are awesome - please know I mean in no way to discredit the great work they do) had a year head start, much bigger audiences, and came from top media companies.

But this newsletter has shown it can be better to be known well than to be well known.

So today I’d like to unpack my own newsletter and a few tactics I’ve used that can be applied to your business or career.

1/ Social media is extremely fickle

Every social platform has moved to a feed-based system.

You’re shown content based on its ability to keep you on the platform (= more ad dollars), not who you follow.

10-15% of your followers see your posts.

Meanwhile open rates on newsletters run 40%+.

With a newsletter, every time I hit publish, it reaches every single person I would potentially want to work with.

2/ 90% of your ideal customers are not ready to work with you today

The vast majority of people you interact with are not even in-market when you meet them.

Maybe they’ve just hired internally. Or already work with another partner.

That’s okay.

The newsletter keeps you top of mind so that when they ARE ready, you're the first call.

3/ You go from vendor to thought partner

I get messages from founders running eight and nine figure companies saying things like "I sent this to my team" or "we're using this tactic you shared."

I really like this. It makes me feel seen and like what I do matters.

There are no tricks here - I do this with good intentions and ultimately I think it’s a very fair deal.

Fair!

Go do interesting things, write about them, and you’ll never be short of ideas.

Tactically, this looks like two things for me:

Most of my content falls into three categories:

1/ Lessons from work we’ve done

We were working with The Rundown, one of the biggest AI newsletters.

Their previous agency was obsessed with driving down cost per lead.

Problem: cheap leads aren't always good leads.

So we developed a concept we call click score - a way to track reader quality versus acquisition cost.

This helped us increase CTR from Meta readers by 70%+ and we 4x'd spend together.

That framework is now what we use across every sponsor-monetized client.

That became this newsletter about click score.

2/ News or frequent industry questions

Three different founders reached out in the same week with emails like the below asking me about selling their newsletters.

My inbox told me what to write.

So I wrote you an email on how much I think your newsletter could sell for here.

3/ Breakdowns of industry trends or other people’s businesses

Sometimes I geek out about stuff and go down a rabbit hole on a business.

Often I’m documenting for myself, but sharing it with you.

This has led to a few of my most-replied-to newsletters:

I started with a handful of people.

Clients and folks from The Newsletter Conference.

I took a very simple growth strategy very seriously.

Step 1: Build your Dream 100 list.

Sit down and think: who would I LOVE to work with?

At each company there are maybe two people who could make the decision to work with my team - the founder and the head of growth/marketing.

If there are 500 companies, that's 1,000 people.

I could put those people in a Google Sheet - that feels very attainable!

I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for this.

(Optional) Step 2: Make it private.

I positioned this as an invite-only newsletter.

"I run a private newsletter for media operators doing seven and eight figures" is a fundamentally different pitch than "hey, sign up for my newsletter."

No way to measure if this worked - but it feels like it was special.

Step 3: Outreach one by one.

I’ve sent 1,000+ messages just like this one.

Robert runs Morning Brew.

He’s really cool and lots of cool folks have joined from messages like this.

I mention who already reads (ideally their peers or friends), explain what the newsletter covers, and ask if I can add them.

Then I manually add them directly to the newsletter - if you’re a 7-9 figure operator, I would never do you the disservice of sending you to a landing page!

Step 4: Convert social followers with lead magnets

Lead magnets are the primary way we grow now.

I have a buddy, Shamus, who makes $150k+ per month at 20 years old doing LinkedIn ghostwriting.

We gave away his LinkedIn playbook in this post.

600+ comments and 170 extremely high quality newsletter subscribers added.

Value first. Ask second.

This newsletter (I hope!) earns the right to make asks by proving competence over time.

You lead with months of giving people stuff they can actually use.

The folks who work with us generally come from three things.

1/ Evergreen CTAs.

Every edition has a light call to action.

"The Feed Media drives hundreds of thousands of subscribers and sales with newsletters every month - get in touch to work with us here"

Not pushy. Just there in case somebody's ready.

Many people also just reply to the newsletter and we book a call directly.

2/ Direct 1:1 outreach.

I enrich my list using Megahit.

This lets me see whose opening and where they work.

Then I email those folks 1:1 and ask to hop on a call.

Robert Dippell, Morning Brew’s CEO, has a 61% open rate - pretty good.

I haven’t reached out to him yet.

But watch out Robert… maybe I will!!!

3/ Mutual introductions

My buddy Jesse Pujji built a $30M/yr agency - he taught me this and it’s surprisingly effective.

My hope is that these emails show how I think about media and, if I’m doing my job right, folks will see we can be helpful to other people they know.

We just got an intro to a big newsletter we’re kicking off with next week -

Sean Griffey was extremely generous to make the intro (Sean, thank you again, this was really kind of you).

This is all I do in a nutshell.

It’s not fancy - the best ideas are simple ideas taken very seriously.

The last few weeks have been really cool and I owe a lot of it to this newsletter you're reading.

My buddies and I got featured in The New York Post for building our businesses out of a gym called Chelsea Piers Fitness on 23rd and Park.

Sam Parr calls us the media mafia and was extremely kind to feature us on My First Million the other day.

My friends all started working together because we run similar business and use content to grow.

Which is a direct output of me writing these emails.

My most important takeaway has been this:

This newsletter and my business (and by extension, all businesses) are best when you think of them as vehicles to find people you love and do life with them.

Our group sees how the people who are ahead of us have done this and we’re trying to design our lives the same way.

Having a personal newsletter is one of the best decisions I’ve made.

And I think you should have one if you don’t!

If you want to start a personal newsletter, here are a few that I love for inspo: