Something interesting happened this week at Hampton that’s updated the way I think about organic newsletter growth in the early days of a publication.

First, some background:

Currently, our strategy for growing the newsletter is 100% organic. Both of our co-founders have large social media followings, so there’s a lot of juice to squeeze there before needing to go paid. We’re also still learning a lot about our audience and what they want – figuring out the content.

So organic is the way.

The official plan basically riffs on Justin Welsh’s system. We…

  • Lean primarily on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Hacker News
  • Post 1-3 times per day, occasionally linking back to our blog
  • Do pre- and post-newsletter calls for signups (like this and this)
  • And generally try to share cool stuff people actually like

The “plan” has been to gradually build the reach of those audiences, so that each time we link to our site, we drive more and more traffic, and grow the list faster.

Then, this happened…

This off-the-cuff Tweet from Sam sent thousands of clicks to our site, many of whom signed up for the newsletter. All-told, we hit ~70% of our growth goal for August off this tweet alone.

I know what you’re thinking.

If you know Sam, you’re probably thinking, “Of course he can pull this weight. He’s famous.” And to some extent you’d be right. A decent percent of our monthly traffic still comes from him Tweeting about Hampton or retweeting our posts.

But the conversion on this was much higher than normal.

Hence, my updated idea…

Before this, I would have said that the most important part of early organic growth was consistency. You plan your content schedule, and you stick to it, tweaking and getting better as you go.

Now, I think differently.

The most impactful part of early organic growth are these black swan events. And the consistency is only important to the extent that it forces you to take shots on goal, increasing the odds you land one of these.

It is probably inaccurate to say that these black swans drive more growth than consistent posting. Over a long enough time span, I bet consistency wins.

But early on, they definitely account for your biggest growth swings. And more importantly, they offer some kind of signal about what your audience actually craves.

So what about all the other Tweets?

Do you keep sending them? When one post out-performs weeks worth of content, it’s easy to question the purpose of it all.

But I learned something there too. Because a day or two after this crazy viral hit, Hampton’s account sent a tweet that got just a handful of likes (low even for us).

But multiple readers re-shared it with messages like this, and it reminded me of something important:

The purpose of your content is not to “perform” or “drive traffic.” Not really.

Its purpose is to move people.

It’s easy to forget, or get caught up in the numbers. But the reality is that the real measure of worthwhile storytelling is the ability to get one idea out to someone where and when they need it.