Nathan May @_May_Ham

If you're a founder/exec without a personal newsletter, you're being financially irresponsible. How my newsletter got me to $1M with only 920 subs: Most newsletter media companies have a subscriber LTV of $10 to $20. Good business. But attention becomes more valuable when applied to expensive things: software, services, careers. I scaled The Feed from $0 to $1M ARR in 11 months with just 920 readers ($1,000 per subscriber). My buddy Max runs an email marketing agency, doing $700K per month with 20,000 newsletter subscribers. Newsletter works better than social because: 1. Social platforms show your content to 10 to 15% of your followers. Newsletters hit 40%+ open rates 2. 90% of your ideal customers aren't ready to buy today. The newsletter keeps you top of mind until they are 3. Over time, you aren’t just another vendor pitching services, but a thought partner your readers want to work with So, what should you write about? I use a simple rule: If a question or topic came up multiple times in a week, I write about it. Most of it falls into three buckets: • Lessons from client work (Why CPL is a bad metric) • FAQs (How much can your newsletter sell for?) • Deep dives (The first AI newsletter to hit $10M/yr) The goal is to share content people can’t Google. Growing your newsletter, too, isn’t complicated. Step 1: Build a Dream 100 list Sit down and think: whom would I LOVE to work with? At each company, there are maybe two people who could decide 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. I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for this. Step 2 (optional): 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 different pitch than "hey, sign up for my newsletter." Step 3: Outreach one by one I’ve sent 1000+ messages like this: “Morning [name]! I have a private newsletter where I share growth/monetization tactics with media operators 2x a month. It’s for operators - 1440, The Rundown, Red Ventures folks, etc.- and they are on it and have found it helpful. Mind if I add you?” Step 4: Convert social followers with lead magnets 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. For monetization, I put light evergreen CTAs in every issue.

@MitcheIl KING! Happy birthday my guy

@therobertleonar Appreciate you ser 🫡

The podcast is exploding in Latvia (taking Carlos's word for it) - I'll take it!

@louiscorneloup On a relative basis they outperform folks on OR. But they also clean aggressively + spend 50-60% of revenue on growth, which most folks aren’t willing to do, so they still grow into high open rates.

1440 has 4.7M subscribers and spends $1M+/mo on Meta ads. Last month, they stopped tracking open rates. Here's what they monitor instead: Open rates have been broken for a while: 1. Inbox providers pre-load emails 2. Apple's mail privacy protection fires a tracking pixel the moment an email hits your inbox, whether you actually opened it or not 3. And an “open” doesn’t generate revenue itself So 1440 decided the metric was no longer worth tracking. Their entire reporting stack got rebuilt around two numbers instead: 1. Click revenue per subscriber When 1440 sends an email and someone clicks on a sponsored link, that click generates revenue. They divide that total revenue by the number of subscribers who received the email. That's their click revenue per subscriber. 2. Ad click revenue per subscriber Same logic, but specifically for the sponsored ad placements inside the newsletter. How much revenue did each subscriber generate from ad clicks alone? This is the number sponsors actually care about: • Did your readers click the ad? • And what was that worth? Both metrics are already more useful than the open rate. But 1440 takes it one level deeper. They track both of these metrics by the ad creative that acquired each subscriber. So they can say: 1. The subscribers who came in from the Middle East news ad generate $X in click revenue per email 2. The subscribers from the comparison ad generate $Y That means they can make media-buying decisions based on revenue per subscriber by creative concept, not just cost per lead. A creative that costs more per subscriber to acquire might still be the better buy if those subscribers generate 40% more revenue per email over their lifetime. You'd never know that from open rates or CPL alone.

@shamusmadan Big Latvia guy eh

Chenell Basilio has studied how 80+ newsletters grew to 50,000+ subscribers. She found that the top ones use the IVC framework to grow fast: Starting a newsletter has never been cheaper or easier (thanks to email platforms and AI tools). Which means standing out is about being genuinely, undeniably useful. The newsletters that grow fastest get replies like: • "Can't believe this is free" • "How do you only have [small number] subscribers?" • “How do you put out content like this every week?” If you're not getting replies like that, you have a content problem. Chenell calls the solution IV content (Insanely Valuable Content). She mapped it to 6 buckets. Hit 2 or more in a single piece, and you have something good. Hit 3 or more, and it almost always spreads on its own. 1. Make money Does reading this put money in someone's pocket? MarketBeat sends daily stock alerts and financial data that help readers make better investment decisions. 2. Save money Help someone avoid a bad deal or costly mistake. The Points Guy helps people use credit card points and travel rewards to fly and stay in luxury for a fraction of the cost. 3. Save time Take something that takes 10 hours to research and compress it into a 10-minute read. Mario Gabriele of The Generalist did this with S1 filings (documents companies file before going public). One filing he covered was 317 pages. His version: 29 pages, plus additional analysis. Three buckets hit simultaneously: make money, save money, save time. 4. Make someone laugh or feel something People don't forward things that are useful but boring. They forward things that made them laugh, feel angry, or feel seen. 5 Tweet Tuesday finds the best 5 tweets each week that do this exactly. 5. Make them feel smart Give someone the insight that changes how they see something. 1440 does this every day. They distill complex news into clear summaries so readers feel informed without doing the work themselves. 6. Speed to market: Be the first. Yossi Levi (Car Dealership Guy) posted about Stellantis layoffs before the market opened. The stock was at an all-time high when he posted. What followed was a nosedive, and Yossi's content was cited as the breaking source by Yahoo Finance, Fortune, and others. You don't need 4000-word deep dives to hit multiple buckets. Justin Moore of Creator Wizard sends a weekly list of brands actively looking to work with creators. This simple format hits three buckets: make money, save time, and speed to market. Before you publish your next piece, run it through the six buckets. Which ones does it hit? If the answer is one or zero, it's not ready. If it's two, it's decent. And if it's three or more, ship it with confidence, and expect it to spread.

@mattepstein Get the guy in red an espresso ☕️

@holmisthename You and me both brother

80% of MarketBeat's revenue comes from subscribers we acquired through paid channels. For years I thought organic was the whole game. The truth is the opposite. Paid acquisition, done with real payback discipline, is the engine. Organic is the cushion underneath it.

@danielcberk Excited to see what you do dude - amazing things coming

I have officially left beehiiv 🤯 After cooking with the most talented team on earth for 4 years, I had to take a bet on myself. The window of opportunity to build any life you can dream of has never been better than it is right now. I joined beehiiv when there were less than 10 of us. We had all-hands every morning. We celebrated $99 Stripe payments like a bunch of hooligans. It was the most electric culture I’ve ever experienced and the journey of a lifetime. I was there for $1M ARR. $2M. $5M. $10M. $30M, and I’m going to be right here on the internet rooting for them when they hit their next milestone. beehiiv has reached escape velocity. Nothing stops it now. The people building it are some of my closest friends in the world, and I will always be grateful to Tyler, Ben, and Jake for giving so much responsibility to me to help them build. As for me, I’m going to be writing everything I know about building businesses that generate money. I’ve done it over and over and over again with emails, courses, podcasts, communities, products, and more. And I’m going to do it again 😏 Subscribe to learn everything I know. danielberk.com/subscribe

A client was burning 80% of their $280K/mo Meta ads budget on the wrong audience. Meta had no idea. Here's how we fixed it: In this client’s case, women engaged more with the ads and achieved lower CPMs. So Meta kept pushing spend there. But when we checked back-end revenue, men and women were converting at nearly identical rates. Meta was optimizing for engagement. The business needed to optimize for revenue. Huge difference. And this happens constantly with newsletter businesses. You think Meta is finding your best customers. Often, it’s just finding the people most likely to click, engage, and consume content. Not necessarily the people most likely to generate revenue. In this case, women were winning the engagement battle early, so Meta stopped serving men altogether. That creates a dangerous feedback loop: Women engage more > Meta serves them more > Meta gathers more female conversion data > Meta becomes even more confident that women are “better” > Male audiences get ignored. Meanwhile, there’s an entire profitable audience sitting there untouched. This is why relying only on platform metrics like CPLs, CTRs, and CPMs is dangerous. Here's the diagnostic to catch this issue: 1. Pull your spend breakdown by gender from Meta 2. Then cross-reference it against your real back-end revenue data Ask one question: Is the audience getting the most spend actually generating the most revenue? If not, Meta has been spending on the wrong people, possibly for months. Here's how we're fixing it: 1. Build male-specific creative with hooks and messaging designed for that audience 2. Push spend deliberately toward men and watch whether the conversion rates hold at scale If they do, the client has unlocked a growth channel that had been sitting untapped in their existing account the entire time. The audience was already there. The conversions were already happening. They just weren't happening often enough for Meta to notice and act on them.

@aaliya_va Thank you for sharing my event with folks - this is extremely thoughtful!! Excited to see you there

Your newsletter might be making $1.50 per subscriber when it could make $20. The difference comes down to one funnel mistake. Most operators are stuck at $1.50 without realizing it. A $50 product converting at 3-5% generates roughly $1.50 to $2 per subscriber. You spent weeks building it, you're burning email slots promoting it, and that's your ceiling. The $20 version looks completely different. A $2,000 coaching offer (or a similar service) converting at just 1% gets you there from the same list, the same emails, and the same audience. The difference is what you're selling and how you're sequencing it. And the sequence should match the amount of trust you've earned. Cold prospects buy based on curiosity. High-ticket buyers purchase based on trust. That's why, for cold traffic, sell products under $50 on the front end. At that price point, impulse buying kicks in, and copywriting alone can close the sale. Someone sees your ad, doesn't know you yet, but $49 feels low enough to take a chance on. Above that ($99, $199, $299), the purchase requires trust. And trust takes time, which means the right sequence becomes: free newsletter > nurture > conversion. This is where most operators accidentally kill their upside. They spend weeks warming readers up, then use that hard-won email inventory to push a $29 product. Every slot spent on a low-ticket offer is a slot that didn't move someone closer to the $2,000 offer on the backend. If you have high-ticket offers, your newsletter should be doing four things: • Building trust • Increasing perceived expertise • Segmenting intent • Moving readers toward high-LTV offers A $29 ebook doesn't help with any of them. That said, low-ticket monetization isn't worthless; it just shouldn't live in your email sequence. Plug in Sparkloop and let it run passively in the background. That revenue comes in automatically while your emails stay focused on what actually moves the needle.

@slashapp @heyStreetTalk @joshsuggss Hell ya!!!

@SeanODowd15 Appreciate you man ❤️❤️

@danielcberk @thesamparr Been looking for a tall handsome podcast host who knows a thing or two about newsletters if you got a guy

@shamusmadan @thesamparr ❤️ YOU