Author: Ethan Page 2 of 6

How To Write Stuff No One Else Can

On February 9, 2024

Last week, I wrote a piece about five of the key hires who took Morning Brew to $40 million in revenue.

I mentioned that I had a process for finding such people, and was surprised by how many of you were interested in hearing more about that.

So this week, I’m going to show you that process, but I want to ground it in something a little more important – namely, why look for these people in the first place?

Well, here’s why…

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In any business, including the creative ones, there are really only three types of advantages you can have over your competitors:

Resources: You have money to burn, and they don’t
Behavioral: You naturally do something that they don’t
Information: You know something they don’t

When a writer buys $200,000 worth of their own book in order to guarantee it lands on the bestseller list (yes, this happens), that’s a resource advantage. They have enough money to manipulate the system, giving them an edge, even against people who may be better writers.

If someone writes compulsively, and just can’t help themselves, that’s a behavioral advantage. They have an edge over the person who has to force themselves to sit down and write.

Personally, I prefer an information advantage because I think it’s the only one you can choose to cultivate, and is most resilient to AI.

And when it comes to information, the biggest moat that you can have is access to people. Not famous people. But rather, the people behind the scenes who have just as much insight and far less attention.

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Stephen Hanselman, Heather Jackson, Donna Passannante, Tara Gilbride, Ilena George, Lindsay Mecca, Kate Perkins Youngman, Laura Hurlbut.

Do you recognize any of those names?

Probably not, but they’re some of the first people that Tim Ferriss thanked in the acknowledgements section of The Four Hour Workweek, and they belong to his agent, editor, marketing director, and publicity director, respectively, along with the four interns who helped him get the project over the finish line.

Isn’t that interesting? The stories they could tell…

That book spent more than four consecutive years on the New York Times best-seller list, and fans like me default to giving Tim all the credit for that. But he himself considers these people absolutely crucial to the success of the project and we don’t even know their names.

And this is the big point – there’s an asymmetry between the people who have interesting experience and insight on any particular topic, and the people who get the attention.

It holds true in every arena. Every company. Every creative project. Attention flows like water towards a few people at the front. But for every CEO, or lead actor, or author, there are lots of people slightly behind the scenes who have just as much fascinating insight. Maybe more.

More?

Yes, maybe. Check this out…

A quick Google of Stephen’s name reveals that he didn’t just work with Tim on each of his five books. He also worked with other incredibly popular authors like travel writer Rolf Potts, investor Kamal Ravikant, and stoic Ryan Holiday.

Indeed, he’s actually a co-author of at least two of Holiday’s books.

So if everyone wants to write a story about how Tim Ferriss or Ryan Holiday became best-sellers, the path taken by most of your competitors will be to either…

Do a lot of Googling, and rehash other pieces or…
Try to contact the authors for (yet another) interview

An option that’d set you apart would be to reach out to people like Stephen.

Tim and Ryan are practically impossible to contact because of the volume of inbound they get. Stephen’s Gmail address is listed right on his Publisher’s Marketplace profile.

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I think my old company, The Hustle provides an interesting example of how this works in practice.

Our main competitor was Morning Brew, and if you subscribe to both The Hustle and Brew, and a few other similar newsletters, what you’ll find is that maybe 40-60% of their daily coverage overlaps.

They report on the same stories, share the same links.

Why? Because everyone’s pulling from the same few information sources.

Running a multi-million dollar daily newsletter is all about efficiencies. Over time, each writer finds their favorite sources – a few places they’re guaranteed to find the stories readers want – and there are only a handful of those.

Then there was the Sunday Story.

The Sunday edition of The Hustle was refined by Zachary Crocket, and it sprang from his desire to do more in-depth, long-form coverage of business stories that were further off the beaten path. Things like…

You can’t just Google these kinds of things. That’s why they’re so interesting.

Zack spent his time combing through old newspapers, absorbing the comments in very niche Facebook groups, or rifling through long-forgotten boxes in the dark corners of museum archives.

Almost as a rule, he tried to avoid talking to big, well-known names. Instead preferring the people who were deep in the trenches, had lots of experience, and almost zero attention.

He wrote what no one else could because he looked where no one else would.

And he (read, “we”) were rewarded for it. The pieces were insanely popular. To this day, it’s common to surf Hacker News and see one of the old Sunday Stories from years ago trending on the front page again.

When you write what no one else can, people want to share.

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I know I promised you my own personal method for finding these kinds of interesting employees in a company, so here it is…

I like LinkedIn.

When I’m deconstructing a company, I start by reading a few interviews with the founders to plot the growth over time, along with any other major milestones.

I chart it so I can see any major turning points. For example…

Then, I search LinkedIn for everyone who’s worked at a place, or was hired around major turning points in a company, and manually plot their…

Name
Title
Department (Editorial, Sales, Operations, etc.)
Start/End Dates

…in a spreadsheet.

There’s probably a way to do this automatically with robots or VAs or something, but I do it manually because I find it gives me a much better feel for each person’s actual relationship with a company.

For example, on LinkedIn, someone may say they were CMO of a company for just three months, and if you take that data at face value, you may think something very bad must have happened for a company to hire and lose such an important role in so short a time.

But when you look closer, you see that this person was a sophomore in college at the time, that the company was just a month old, and that actually, it wasn’t so much an executive hire as it was kids trying to get something off the ground.

That sort of thing happens a lot when you study startups, and that’s why I do it manually.

At any rate, if you do this, what you’re left with is a map that shows how a company grew over time – where their hiring priorities were, and by extension, the major challenges or opportunities they were facing at any given point, as well as the people who played pivotal roles in their success.

It’s not perfect. Some people don’t keep their LinkedIn up to date. But it’s directionally accurate, and enough to give you the kind of look into a company you won’t typically find on TechCrunch.

Once you have that, there are two things you can do:

Sleuthing: I plug names of lesser-known key employees into Google and Spotify to see if they’ve talked about their work publicly at all – often, they have.
Consulting: A lot of people are happy to give you an hour of their time after they leave a company, and for $100 or so, you can learn things the original employer paid thousands to understand.

You don’t need many. In fact, most the time, all it takes is one name, and from there, you can find your way to the rest.

That’s the beauty of focusing on people – they have such rich context. A ten-minute chat can save you hours of research.

And so I’ll leave you with one more little tip I got from Zach when we worked together – something small that’s had a big impact on my work.

When finishing an interview, one of the last questions he always asked was, “Who else do you think I should talk to about this?”

It’s small. But you wouldn’t believe what comes from that.

A New Theory of Growth

By Ethan

On February 7, 2024

In Newsletters, Rambler

One of the very common ways that people grow local newsletters is by sharing in local subreddits. And I was disappointed when some early tries at this yielded nothing for Austin Business Review.

Like… It really didn’t work.

Other writers talk abut overwhelming positive feedback, and getting dozens – even hundreds – of signups. I used the exact same format and got precisely zero.

I have two theories as to why…

The first is that my local subreddit is actually pretty dialed. The moderators watch like hawks, and posts like mine get organized into clusters so that they’re only seen by the people looking for them. So the “drive-by” traffic on Austin’s reddit feels like it’s lower than it would be for other place.

Second, and probably more importantly, my newsletter is a little more niche than typical local sheets. I focus exclusively on business owners, and they may just not be searching reddit in the right place at the right time to see my stuff.

At any rate, it was initially a bummer. But now, I’m actually glad those didn’t take off because it’s got me thinking differently about how to grow in general.

The thing that you have to constantly keep in mind when building a newsletter is that bigger isn’t always better. And getting big fast is also not automatically best.

The value of the newsletter is determined by the calibre of the audience you build, and the trust & connection you have with them. That’s it.

If you have an email that goes to ten people, but they’re the VP of merchandizing at the 10 largest retail stores in the world, and they trust you, and read you, and take action around the things that you discuss, that’s a very valuable list.

So anyways, for me, the thing I’m thinking a lot about now is how to get 100 local business owners who love this email.

That’s it.

I don’t know how to reach thousands of people. And if I did, I’m not sure what they’d want to read.

But I could literally coffee my way to 100 people, and I gotta believe that if you did that – attracted one hundred interesting people who were building serious companies in your city – it would by default lead to some very interesting opportunities.

It’s slower to build. But as one of my favorite writers and founders, Chris Scwartz, is fond of saying, “growing the business slowly ensure[s] that it would be difficult to fail.”

Slow Days

By Ethan

On February 6, 2024

In Newsletters, Rambler, Writing

In the beginning, every new subscriber is exciting. They trickle in day by day, and every single one is a signal that you’re onto something with your newsletter. You were right! People want this! You’re unstoppable!

Eventually, you think, there will be a day when you will count new signups in the tens, or hundreds, or even perhaps thousands per day.

But right now, each one is a big deal.

Then comes the morning where you wake up and the list hasn’t grown at all.

Wait… has it? Did I have 43 or 44 yesterday? Did it shrink?

The analytics show it definitely hasn’t shrunk. But what the hell? What happened to my little rocket ship? Do people hate this idea? Am I a failure? Was my second grade bully right about me? And most of all…

Why bother with this?

Here’s how to keep going in the face of all this nonsense…

Think about the list, however small, as a group of people in a room. Whether it’s 1,000, or 100, or 10 – however small it is, remember those are real people sitting in a room, waiting for whatever it is you’re writing.

Then treat the work the same way you would if you had to go stand in front of those people, and share it with them face to face.

Make something you’d be proud to show to ten people in a room, and you’ll end up with something worthy of ten-thousand. Then, when you get to ten-thousand, and that no longer feels like an accomplishment, put them all in a room and imagine yourself on-stage.

You can keep going with the exercise every day for as long as you work. Because the reality is that it always comes back to the people.

Why I Unfollowed Everyone In The Newsletter Space

By Ethan

On February 4, 2024

In Newsletters, Writing

Recently, for the first time, I noticed daily stories making their way through the newsletter community on Twitter.

Similar to the way national news has a handful of daily stories that all the channels cover, the newsletter industry is now big enough and has enough people talking about it that my feed was filling up with different takes on the same topic every day.

One day, it was, “Beehiiv or Sparkloop?” The next, “Are we in a newsletter bubble?” Or perhaps, “Can you really call creators business owners?” Etc., etc., etc…

It reminded me of this quote from Hemingway:

“Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle…”
Green Hills of Africa

That book is one of my favorites, by the way. I’m convinced you can learn everything worth knowing about writing by just studying that one your entire career.

Anyways, I realized I was spending too much time in the bottle, and it was affecting what I thought I should write about. It was also making me feel less relevant if I didn’t comment on the topic of the day.

Of course, any time spent focusing on today’s “thing” is time you don’t get to spend making something that lasts a long, long time. And that’s a problem.

So I unfollowed everyone, on Twitter at least.

I do still read their long-form stuff, either via their blogs or newsletters, and this has two important benefits over social media:

First, it’s long form. They’re usually exploring an idea in much more detail, and you’re absorbing more deeply.

But second, and perhaps more importantly, you’re taking each person on their own, rather than as a chorus. And the difference between those two things is the difference between signal and noise.

Five Key Hires That Took Morning Brew To $40M+

By Ethan

On February 2, 2024

In Case Study, Newsletters

Often times, when we talk about how a newsletter grew or made money, we talk about the tactics they used. But it’s easy to forget there were people behind those tactics. People who, day in and day out, thought about the problems, tried stuff, found solutions.

I’m not talking about founders and CEOs. I’m talking about the people behind the scenes, who actually have their hands in things.

Sometimes they’re well-known. Most of the time, they’re not. But they’re out there, and if you track ‘em down, you can learn a lot from them.

Here’s how I like to do it…

First, I read a few old interviews with the founders of a company, and news stories going back the last few years, jotting down milestones as I find them.

Pro Tip: Founders are typically very slow to talk about this year’s numbers. But they’re almost always happy to talk about last year, so if you just read a few interviews over several years, you can piece together a really interesting picture.

For example, I’m working on a case study for Morning Brew. After just four short articles, I find myself with something like this👇

Ugly, right? This doesn’t have to be pretty

Right away, you can see there were a few fascinating turning points in the company’s audience, revenue, and team size:

2017-2018: They 10X’d the audience, crossing 1M subscribers
2018-2019: Revenue more than quadrupled from $3 to $13 million
2020-2021: They added ~100 people to the team, two per week for a year

Why? How? Most important, who were the people that actually did the work to make this happen, and what have they shared about it? That’s where my mind goes.

I’ve got a process for finding these “keystone employees“, but it’s a bit involved. So to keep this short, I’m going to cut straight to the chase.

If you want me to write it up, click this.

I’ll check the data and if enough people click it, I’ll do a tutorial on exactly the tools and steps I use to reverse engineer some of the most important hires companies make.

At any rate, the rest of this email is a look at a few people you may not know who played pivotal roles in growing Morning Brew to $40m+, along with some of the insights hey’ve shared about how they did it.

We’ll look at four key areas of growth:

Audience
Content
Revenue
Staffing

If you’re hoping to build, “The Morning Brew for XYZ,” think about when you’re going to hire for these roles, where you might find your version of these people, and what you can learn from the ones who did it first.

1. Audience

If you’re deep in the newsletter space, you may actually know of Tyler Denk. Today, he’s the founder of Beehiiv, the very platform this email was written on.

But before that, he was a growth engineer at Morning Brew, and specifically, he was the guy who built the technology behind their world-famous referral program (along with many other things).

He was one of the first two employees* and was there through the acquisition, working on product and growth, and managing 6-figure marketing budgets.

Learn From Him: Back in the day, he wrote two excellent pieces on how the referral program works, and the tech that powered the newsletter. He also did a great written interview on the early days of the brew, and has appeared on several podcasts, to talk about various aspects of the journey…

*Michael Schwartz was their first employee. Both he and Tyler are building at Beehiiv now, which goes to show how these companies can become talent incubators that launch other successful businesses. Smooth Media is another company founded and led by several by Brew alums.

Big Takeaway: Lightning doesn’t strike twice. Rather than strictly copying the Brew’s referral program, you should try to learn from their hiring strategy. Early on, find someone who’s scrappy, independent, can try a lot, and will find/build the thing that becomes your uniquely effective growth lever.

2. Content

Neal Freyman was hired as a writer in June of 2017, which makes him another one of the earliest-ever employees of the company. He quickly became managing editor, and has now been there through the rise of eleven publications, hundreds of employees, and millions of readers.

I don’t think I can name anyone else in the industry with that kind of editorial experience.

Learn From Him: While he writes regularly for various Brew properties, you have to dig a little deeper to find him talking about how he does his job. Still, it’s out there. He’s appeared on several podcasts to discuss…

He’s also done written interviews on Balancing the Grind and Thrive Global, and interestingly, used to publish on Quora before the brew. It’s pretty cool, you can see the style taking shape there.

Big Takeaway: Content benefits from committed guidance. Are you building an environment where someone can and wants to A) rise up through the ranks and B) stick around for a long time?

3. Revenue

The first major jump in revenue came between 2018 and 2019, when the company more than quadrupled from $3m to $13m in a year. From there, they roughly doubled every year until 2022 (my most recent data) when they did $36 million in the first half of the year.

Wild.

A key person behind this was Jason Schulweis, who joined as head of brand partnerships in mid-2019 and helped completely restructure the sales team.

Learn From Him: He moved on in 2022, but left behind a great body of work outlining what that period looked like.

Every year, he did an annual review (Year 1, Year 2, Year 3) that not only included major strategic decisions and their outcomes, but also linked off to lots of other posts he wrote along the way explaining his decision-making, hypotheses, and lessons learned (from hiring, to B2B advertising, to connecting the dots).

He also appeared on several industry podcasts, including…

Big Takeaway: Experience pays. Before the Brew, Schulweis had led teams at Yahoo, Thrillist, Live Nation, and Media Link. He was able to see the structural problems holding the initial team back, and fix them quickly. If growth and content benefitted from having young, scrappy go-getters, revenue seems like the corollary – pay to bring in someone who’s been there.

4. Staffing

Probably the most overlooked part of growing a company, but crucial to building a cohesive team.

Morning Brew made its first HR hire, Kate Noel, in January of 2020, when the company had ~30 employees, and was doing 8-figures in revenue. She’s still there as of this writing, serving as SVP, head of people ops, and has helped the company grow to 300+ employees.

Similarly impressive is their second HR hire, Lily Mittman. She joined as senior director of talent acquisition immediately after the brew was acquired by Business Insider in late 2020, and was the first person in the company to sit in a talent acquisition role.

Over the course of her first year, she helped take the team from ~75 to ~175 people. Two hires a week. Every week. For. A. Year.

Learn From Them: I can’t imagine the stories these two could tell (although I suppose the first rule of HR is you don’t talk about what goes on in HR). Perhaps for that reason, they haven’t published a ton of inside baseball. But they have appeared in some places…

Someone really needs to sit down with these two though and talk about what it’s like to handle the people side of a media company going through sustained hyper-growth.

Big Takeaway: Brew co-founder Alex Lieberman once wrote that, “I’ve realized that it’s very difficult to ever hire too early for HR,” which on its own is an interesting insight for people who are scaling.

Wrapping Up

Scaling a newsletter is about more than tactics. It’s about the people behind the tactics, how they looked at the problem of growth, and what they learned from what they went through.

The founders, yes. But increasingly as it grows, the people lower down who are closer to the work.

Find those people, talk to them or learn from their work, and you end up with a much higher-fidelity understanding of what you’re going to encounter, and how to deal with it.

What’s Your Advantage?

By Ethan

On February 2, 2024

In Newsletters, Rambler, Writing

I was on the phone with another local newsletter founder the other day. He’s doing 7-figures across a handful of publications, and he asked me what I thought the gap was that my Austin newsletter was filling.

It’s a great question. And to be honest, I hadn’t thought about it much. I guess the way I’m trying to go about this newsletter is I’m building the thing I think one or two of my friends would like to have.

But the longer I spend in business, the less crucial I think an actual gap in the market is. Most of the wealthiest people I know are plumbers, and closet installers, and house painters and the like. They’re not tapping into new markets, but just serving a big existing one with lots of healthy competition.

But I do think a lot about advantages, and what, if anything, allows you to differentiate yourself and stay in business, even if others are serving the same customers you do. And I’ve always liked the framework put forward by Tim Ferriss that says there are essentially three possible advantages you can have:

Informational
Behavioral
Resources

I don’t have millions to make the newsletter work, so I can’t out-spend or out-wait competitors.

As for behavior, I’m a default-introvert who’s quite happy (too happy, really) to lounge around at home rather than going out. Oh sure, I can be social. But there’s no compulsion I have that would make me better at writing a local newsletter than someone else.

The thing I plan to lean on is an informational advantage, and this is may be interesting to you because it’s (I think) the one thing you can choose to develop.

I’ve heard it said that a well-curated Twitter feed can be more valuable than an MBA, and I agree.

So the first few weeks of this process have been largely focused on building the kind of information flow that will allow me to curate something fascinating for readers.

The process is simple, really. Just time-intensive, and you can’t rush it.

I have an RSS feed, Twitter, and a Google doc.

The RSS feed is subscribed to a few great news sources around town, and on Twitter, I keep a list of individual people who say and do interesting things here too.

Each morning, I spend a couple hours reviewing both closely. Anything that seems like a good fit for the newsletter gets dropped in the Google doc for use later.

That’s where most of the content comes from, but the secret is that as I’m reading, I take the time to continue updating both the RSS Feed and the Twitter list.

So if I read a story about an interesting local founder, I may add them to my Twitter list to stay up to date on ideas they share in the future. If they have a personal blog, I may add that to the RSS feed too. Depending on the situation, I may also reach out, introduce myself.

With each new addition to the info stream, I get a better and better sense of what’s going on around town, and what little-known things readers might like to hear about.

It’s really very simple, but it takes time and you can’t force it, and that’s why most people never do it.

With time, you can get to a point where you’re seeing things long before most other people, or you have access to information others can’t get. Then, your audience is locked in because everyone wants access to information that’s hard to find.

This pipeline of information is one of the most important assets you can have as a writer, and it’s one you can build virtually for free.

Launch Playbook for Local Newsletters

By Ethan

On January 26, 2024

In Case Study, Newsletters, Rambler

When Gunnar S. Holm revealed that he was paying $0.50-$0.60 per subscriber (less than half the typical cost) to grow a local newsletter in Oslo, people said exactly what you’d expect…

“Well, yeah… You’re building in Norway! Try doing that in the US and then come talk to me.”

So to prove the point, he spent a month running the exact same playbook on an audience in San Francisco (thousands of miles from where he even lived), and it worked there too.

The other day, he took me through the whole thing, and I think everyone can learn from what he did. So real quick, I’m gonna run you through…

His Content Strategy: The Reverse Lead Magnet
Launch: How He Went from 0 to 1k (and 1k to 10k+)
Monetization: What Worked and What Didn’t

He shared his exact copy, best performing ads, plus a bunch of data and we’ll get into all of it.

Even if you’re not building a local newsletter, a lot of this is applicable, and may just help boost your conversion, cut your growth costs, or add a revenue stream where you weren’t expecting one.

Let’s dive in…

1. Content Strategy: The Reverse Lead Magnet

Having grown up in Norway, the concept he picked for the local newsletter was simple and specific: “Five of the best events taking place in Oslo, delivered every Thursday.”

“I thought of it like a lead magnet,” he told me. Start with one clear problem you solve, then you can expand content from there if you want.

Personally, this helped me a ton. I was getting hung up on the landing page for my own local newsletter because the content was an eclectic mix of local business events, artists, news from around town, and more. I couldn’t figure out how to describe it!

But this “think of it like a lead magnet” approach broke all those mental barriers for me. I ran with a slight variation on his hook (“5 cool events for business owners in Austin”) and sent the first issue the very next day.

Interestingly, this is a concept Matt McGarry and Ryan Carr actually explored this week on the Newsletter Operator podcast too (around 7:57).

They talk about how a newsletter is like a lead magnet people get every week. A reverse lead magnet, if you will.

Because a typical lead magnet offers readers something they want in the moment. It’s a quick hit of adrenaline, and then a crap-shoot on whether they ever open another email from you again.

The best newsletters position themselves to not just send recurring content, but solve a recurring problem, which makes it more likely readers come back.

In the case of Gunnar, that problem was, “What should we do this weekend in Oslo?” And in less than nine months, the simple promise of five cool events each week grew the list to to over 10,300 subscribers with an average open rate of 61.6% and clicks around 9.4%.

By the way, if you’re hoping to build a local audience, starting with event curation seems like the way to go. In fact, Ryan Sneddon built a six-figure newsletter in Annapolis, and recommended something similar (live music listings) in his interview on the Newsletter Operator podcast.

I think it’s smart for three reasons:

It’s useful to readers
It’s a pretty light lift to write
People will keep opening week after week

But how do you actually get readers? Well, let’s take a look…

2. Launch Strategy: Reddit First, Then Paid Ads

Reddit: Gunnar got his first 1,000 subscribers from posting event roundups in the local Subreddits every week. He did this for both his Oslo and San Francisco experiments, and the approach/reception were similar in each.

Here’s an example from SF (screenshot below). You can see, he’s not shy about promoting the newsletter there.

I was surprised by that, and asked if anyone gave him shit for doing self-promo. The short answer: No.

“In big subreddits, like r/Entrepreneur, people are very aware of self promotion,” he said. “But in smaller local channels, they’re not as strict.”

He’d post every Wednesday, and occasionally, someone would gripe. But the moderators were happy to have some valuable posts in the group, and most feedback was positive.

Not all of his posts garnered 100+ likes. But even the less popular ones delivered a healthy number of subscribers, because Reddit is more of a meritocracy than other social channels. Posts don’t need a lot of likes in order to be seen by many, many people in a channel.

Facebook Ads: Around 1,000 subscribers he started using Facebook ads to grow the list faster. If you’re new to Facebook ads, there are a couple different types newsletters tend to use:

Traffic Ads: When you click these, it sends you to a specific landing page
Leads Ads: These can have an email capture right on the ad where people can sign up to your newsletter

He tested both and found that the CPA was roughly the same. But he prefers to send people to a landing page for a few reasons…

First, it makes it possible to integrate Sparkloop, or another newsletter recommendation service where you get paid for referring subscribers to other newsletters (more on this below).

Second, he feels it’s less likely the email addresses are coming from spam bots.

And finally, he says, people are just more likely to remember your email and engage with it if they’ve experienced your landing page, seen your branding, and maybe even read one or two past issues before signing up.

His best ad: “This is by far the best performer,” he told me, sharing the ad creative below from his SF campaign. He tested a lot of these short ads with text in the foreground, and a simple shot of the city in the background.

“The copy is based on months of testing for the Oslo newsletter,” he said. “The copy – Struggling to find things to do in {city}? – works very well in my experience.”

3. Monetizing: What Did and Didn’t Work

When it came time to monetize, there were a couple of surprises…

First Surprise – Sparkloop Didn’t Work: Gunnar runs a newsletter growth agency called GrowJoy, and one of his specialties is the Sparkloop + Paid Ads combo.

Essentially, you pay for ads to grow your newsletter, then add Sparkloop and get paid to recommend other newsletters to your readers, offsetting some or all of the money you spent acquiring them.

He wrote about it in more depth here.

This chart is for a different newsletter, but the growth combo (ads + Sparkloop) is the same he tested for his local newsletters.

Typically when he sets up SparkLoop, he sees something like this from new subscribers…

~50% of new readers opt into other newsletters
~50% of those meet the criteria needed for Gunnar to get paid
Publishers pay ~$1.50-$2.50 per accepted subscriber

So the math looks roughly like this…

.5 x .5 x $2 = $0.50

For every new subscriber he gets to his newsletter, he can theoretically count on $0.50 from a Sparkloop partner. And since the local newsletter was growing for ~$0.50 per reader, his ads would have essentially paid for themselves…

But, alas… No!

For some reason, his local readers opted into other newsletters much less often than expected.

I asked him why he thought that was, and his theory is that there’s a mismatch between the themes of a local newsletter and some of the broader tech newsletters that pay for referrals.

People signing up for a local event roundup aren’t in the mind-space to subscribe to a crypto newsletter.

If true, it’d mean people are paying close attention to the recommendations. So if you’re going to test this, try hard to find newsletters with serious overlap.

The Second Surprise – People Were Willing to Pay: Toward the end of his experiment with Oslo, he’d grown the list to ~10k readers, and started experimenting with paid subscriptions, signing up 240+ people at $5/mo.

Here’s how it worked:

Subscribers joined the list for free
After 2 months, they got an email saying that to continue getting the newsletter, they needed to become a paid subscriber.
Anyone who didn’t pay was segmented to a marketing list that got the newsletter once a month, along with “FOMO” emails every so often, showing events they could have found if they were paying subscribers.

Overall, the response to his request to pay was pretty positive. Some thought $5 was over-priced (some people always will). But generally, people seemed more than willing to support a local creator.

4. Wrapping Up

Ultimately, he shut both newsletters down because his main focus is his agency, and a lot of these side projects are just experiments he uses to refine or prove out what he’s doing with clients.

But I learned a ton from him, and am using parts of his playbook directly to help grow my local newsletter in Austin. More on those experiments in a future email.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more, Gunnar publishes a bunch of stuff about this on Twitter. You can follow him there or check out his company.

Do It Anyways

By Ethan

On January 21, 2024

In Writing Life

If you read too much you may come to the startling realization that, “Oh my god, everything I want to say is already being said by someone else.”

You’re right. But write anyways.

Hell, even the three main religions of the world basically repeat on another on the big points.

How Creator Economy NYC is Pioneering Local Industry News

By Ethan

On January 19, 2024

In Case Study, Newsletters, Rambler

Recently, I said that I think there’s a huge opportunity in local newsletters. Not just local news – but niche, industry newsletters designed to serve specific cities.

This week, I have a perfect example.

Brett Dashevsky runs Creator Economy NYC, (shout-out to Chenell Basilio for turning me onto his work).

I got a chance to chat with him and while it’s early days for the brand, I’m convinced that in 1-2 years this can be a multi-million dollar business. Here’s why…

Background: Brett’s got some really interesting experience with newsletters already.

Back in 2020, he and his brother launched Healthcare Huddle, which they grew and sold to WorkWeek in summer of ‘21. As part of the acquisition, Brett joined WorkWeek’s core team, eventually overseeing Creator Success and helping their stable of writers launch and grow other newsletters.

It was useful experience, but being immersed in the creator ecosystem, he always knew he wanted to get back into building his own brand…

He Started with Just Events: After moving to New York, Dashevsky wanted to build connections. So in January of last year, he started hosting regular creator meetups at a local bar.

They snowballed from 15 attendees to dozens, then hundreds as word spread.

For almost a year, there was no formal newsletter. This was essentially a side project, and it was focused on in-person conection. Then, after parting ways with WorkWeek toward the end of the year, he decided the time was right to go all in, adding a newsletter component and making a real push to turn CENYC into something bigger.

Event Platform:
People sometimes ask what tools are good for hosting events right now. Brett started on Partiful, but switched to Luma last year because he felt it had better features for professional community-building.

“You can build out an events calendar for people to subscribe to,” he said. “It automatically captures RSVPs emails and provides them to you, and events automatically add to an attendees calendar.”

Luma’s also a bit more email-centric, whereas Partiful is built around SMS.

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel: One big advantage Brett had when launching CENYC was experience. He’d built Healthcare Huddle, and spent years helping WorkWeek creators launch their newsletters. So he already knew a lot of the important things about how the newsletter should be built.

He leaned hard on the branding, and I gotta say, CENYC has probably got the best branding of any newsletter I’ve seen recently. Seriously, check this out.

The look is designed to mimic the NYC subway, and every section of the email is a subtle nod to NYC culture. They even hide easter eggs in each issue. It’s great.

There’s also stuff in there every newsletter operator should think about. For example…

1 . Use the same intro line across each issue. It reminds people quickly why they’re there and what they can expect to get.

2 . Remember that people will forward your email to friends – drop a subscribe button up top for anyone who likes what they see.

At Trends, we used to put this at the bottom. I haven’t seen any data on whether one or the other is better, but up top makes sense to me if you have the space.

3 . Use the Rule of Three in your lists or articles. A lot of writers get themselves in trouble trying to create huge lists or round-ups each week. Three is plenty, it’s useful to readers, and visually satisfying.

Growth & Monetization: So far, events have been the main driver of growth for the list, followed by social media posting, and Beehiiv’s recommendation network. It’s early though, and I suspect this year we’ll see those shift as the newsletter becomes more of a focus.

As for sponsors, some big names have taken notice. CENYC has worked with brands like Teachable, Mekanism, Notion, and more.

At this point, many of the sponsors are helping with event logistics, paying a few thousand dollars for food or meeting space. But that’ll change too as the community gains steam and the price of tapping into it goes up.

Why I Think This Will Work: The short version is that CENYC is in a big city, targeting a professional audience. Sheer numbers are on their side.

There are ~20 million people in NY Metro area
Many people want to be creators (like… most of GenZ)
Lots of brands want to partner with creators, and CENYC is uniquely positioned to make that connection

Plus a lot of the content is valid to readers outside NYC. Similar to The New Yorker I expect a decent chunk of their audience will eventually be outside the city. But even if it’s not, the math is still on their side.

If they only ever reach 1% of readers in the metro area they’re still looking at a list of ~200k well-targeted subscribers, and that’s more than enough to build a 7-figure business on.

I think The Newsette is an interesting example to learn from here. In 2021, they did $40 million in revenue with a list of ~500k subscribers, which is incredible.

Almost half of that was ads, and the rest was agency services they sold their advertisers on the back end (e.g., “Look how well your ad worked in our newsletter. We know content. We can help with yours!”).

Creator Economy NYC will have a lot of options when it comes to monetizing – ads, affiliate deals, event tickets, paid creator communities, etc. But the trick will be finding the highest-leverage one.

A creator marketing agency might be an interesting option. After all, they’ve got an ever-growing list of up-and-coming creators. And founders like Mae Karwowski have built these kinds of agencies to incredible exits.

At any rate, this is one I’ll be keeping an eye on. If you want to follow along too, check ‘em out here:

A New Problem-Solving Lens

By Ethan

On December 3, 2023

In Rambler

Another benefit of running a local newsletter that I’m starting to appreciate is that it offers you (as the writer) a very neat focusing lens through which to view your to-do list.

Let me give you an example…

I need new bed sheets. Typically, that’s a trip to Big Lots, or Ikea for some no-name option. But now, as the creator of a local newsletter, my first thought is whether there’s a local brand that might be a better choice?

A little quick Googling reveals at least one option – a store named Feather Your Nsst, which has sold luxury linen in Austin for 30+ years.

If you’re wondering how a store like that could survive for three decades, through the arrival of big-box stores, the internet, and more, the answer is that they charge a truly stunning amount of money for stuff.

The prices are not listed on product pages, but a queen-size duvet cover I chose randomly (because it’s from something called The Austin collection) turns out to be $814.

Maybe that’s over-indulgent. Or maybe, it’s just the cost of fine craftsmanship. After all, when you think about the value of sleep in your life week-to-week, spending $5k or even $10k on an incredible experience (sheets, pillows, comforter, etc.) seems like it could pencil out.

Regardless, I like knowing this place exists. I instantly feel a tiny bit more connected to the area, and I think there could be an interesting interview in this.

It also transforms this thing on my to-do list from a chore of drudgery to something more interesting.

And you can do the same with lots of other things…

For example, my diet has gotten a lot simpler since I’ve started cooking more, and I’m looking for places to bulk-buy beef. What are my local options?

What about candles? I’ve been burning through these coffee candles I like too fast. I like to have them lit while I work early in the morning, or on cold winter days. At some point, I’m gonna need to learn to make them myself. Is there a local brand? Or a class I could take and write about?

Before, all these little things got ignored because they were “outside” work and I just didn’t have the time.

But when you start writing a local newsletter, at the meta level, you’re writing about how to live well in your area. So all of these suddenly become content opportunities, potential advertisers, etc.