Discover how the best media brands and solo operators are winning at newsletter growth & monetization.
Hosted by SparkLoop's cofounder Louis Nicholls and SparkLoop's newsletter nerd, Dylan Redekop—we take you behind the scenes and share the strategies, trends, and tactics you need to know to build your email audience and revenue.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the smartest media experts and operators out there today. Including from the Hustle, Morning Brew, Workweek, The Pour Over, and more.
EP 16 - Katelyn Bourgoin
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Louis Nicholls: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send and Grow podcast. I'm your host, Louis Nichols. In my day job at SparkLoop, I spend all my time helping the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world to grow their audiences. So I get to see firsthand what growth tactics, strategies, and channels actually work, which ones you should copy, and what mistakes you should avoid.
And now with this podcast, you get that access too. Every week I sit down with a different guest from industry experts to successful operators, and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your email audience. Today I'm joined on the podcast by Katelyn Bourgoin.
Katelyn is the founder of Customer Camp. Where she and her team helped growth and ready businesses to focus on better understanding their customers. To support customer Camp Katelyn started the Why [00:01:00] We Buy Newsletter, a unique weekly newsletter, teaching marketers buying psychology in three minutes a week.
Katelyn's, why we buy newsletter is rapidly approaching 50,000 subscribers and maybe even more impressive than that is the six figure annual revenue it generates. In today's episode, we'll learn all about how Katelyn has been growing her newsletter. A chocolate covered almond content strategy and what you've learned selling over six figures of newsletter sponsorships.
Lets start with what the newsletter is and more importantly, who it's for sure.
Katelyn Bourgoin: If I'm being quite honest, it was for me originally, I love the topic. I'm geeky about marketing, but buyer psychology and understanding kind of the more technical terminologies, behavioral economics. It was always something I was really fascinated about.
Wanted to learn more about it. And my business was a consulting and training company, and we helped people to better understand their customers, primarily through customer discovery interviews and [00:02:00] customer research methods. And so what's one way to understand buyers that isn't through doing, you know, research, primary research with your audience?
Well, it's by understanding people broadly and generally. And so it seemed like a great topic for a newsletter for us to attract people who would. Want to read that type of content regularly. They're obviously gonna be geeky about understanding their customers and then it's gonna be much easier to move them into, you know, buying our courses or signing up for a workshop or, or hiring me for a consulting gig.
And so it really started as a lead gen for my consultancy. And I, my consultancy was just me and like I had a couple team members, but I was planning to grow it into an insights agency and that was kind of my idea. From the get go. And then in, I guess this would've been last year around this time, maybe near close to the beginning of the year, I got contacted by the folks at Ahrefs about sponsoring the newsletter.
And it wasn't the first people who had [00:03:00] reached out about sponsoring the newsletter, but it was the first time I actually said, yeah, okay. Well tell me like how that might work. Cuz typically I assumed like, you know, is this gonna be. A hundred dollars. Like I don't want to promote somebody else's thing to my audience for this small sum of money.
Like that's not my goal with the newsletter, it's really about lead gen for us, and I was. Having the conversation with their team and realized, oh my goodness, this is actually an asset beyond what I imagined it to be, which was just lead gen for us. And this is actually, you know, a mini media company. And so that's how why we buy went from, you know, a little side project that I was doing for lead gen to something that I was like, oh, I'm gonna actively work on growing this and this has real potential as a company.
So
Louis Nicholls: one of the things I think is particularly, Interesting to look at with your newsletters, with you being in sort of the marketing and the growth space, there are a lot of marketing newsletters and growth newsletters. What made you sort of think, okay, [00:04:00] I can, well, is it, I can provide something better, I can provide something that's missing?
What, what gave you the confidence to start to news there and say, yes, there are already thousands of marketing newsletters out there, but people will want to subscribe to mine. People will, will love mine.
Katelyn Bourgoin: So the honest answer is probably ignorance because I don't read most newsletters. I'm not a newsletter reader myself.
I have become one, and I've been fortunate enough to discover some real gems that when they hit my inbox, I always read them. But I had been subscribed to over the years, probably hundreds, and they all follow the same playbook. They were often these long meandering stories from whoever the author was.
That was just
Louis Nicholls: Name names. Name names, yeah. We, we want names. Joking.
Katelyn Bourgoin: Well, people know. People know the names. Let's just say like, I wouldn't be reading newsletters. I get stuck in email funnels, right? You sign up for X freebie and suddenly for the next two weeks you're gonna get this drip sequence that's pushing you towards buying a thing.
And I was like, [00:05:00] I don't wanna buy your thing. I just wanted that cheat sheet, or I just wanted that pdf. And so I was subscribed to many and I was reading almost none. And so I thought, what if I didn't promote at all through our newsletter? What if I used almost primarily, exclusively just to educate and inform and like delight people?
Like I was going for a walk today and I was thinking about what I want, why we buy to be, and I want it to be like a chocolate covered almond because like almonds are good for you. They're dense. They're rich in nutrients, they're like a brainy super food. But like nobody wants to sit around eating dried almonds all the time unless you're on some very restrictive diet like, and you're counting your almonds.
But like chocolate covered almonds, like those are delicious. They're tasty, they're this little treat, and I wanted why we buy to be like that. I wanted it to deliver dense knowledge, but do it in this really fun way and. I don't know that I had found that. And [00:06:00] so it was like, I bet you we can do something like that.
And I was very inspired by James Clear's newsletter cuz I thought he just did it so well and I thought, you know, I can take what he's done in his space and the principles about why it works and apply that to what we do and. The newsletter's longer than it was when we started. It's, it's kind of changed forms.
We have different formats than we did when we started, but really the, the nucleus was like, I want something that's a tasty treat that marketers are actually gonna wanna buy, where they don't open it and go, oh, I'm getting sold to again. I love that.
Louis Nicholls: The chocolate covered element. I guess one thing that stands out to me about your newsletter, what I'm trying to think of myself, like why, why is it successful where.
Maybe other marketing newsletters haven't been quite as successful or haven't grown quite as quickly, and obviously a lot of that is just, um, sort of your expertise behind the scenes and your consistency. A
Katelyn Bourgoin: lot of that is also SparkLoop, like, let's plug SparkLoop. We started going way, way faster, but when we started using SparkLoop, so like shout out.
Louis Nicholls: Well, it's very kind of you to say, we, just to make things clear, you have to, [00:07:00] what is it con, contractually obliged to, to give us three compliments throughout the, the recording. Sorry. One down. We release your family. That's one down, two to go. We're okay. No, but, but seriously the, I I think something that's really interesting to me about your newsletter is that it's quite opinionated and it goes into detail and there have been some things where I've, you know, I've read about the topic and thought.
No one's really talked about that topic much before, but most of the time it's not really in that direction most of the time. It's a topic that I have heard talked about, but you have your own quite opinionated sort of view on it, and you obviously thought about it a lot and you've, you've taken a lot of time, even though it is quite.
It isn't like a James clear length of newsletter, right. There is, there is a lot more content in there now, but it's still incredibly well thought out. I think compared to the average newsletter, you've spent more time on it. It's more like what you used to see in a blog article. I think a lot of the time, like someone's personal blog article rather than a, a company sort of blog article, there's a, [00:08:00] there's a lot more sort of like densely packed, considered information in there.
From like a, you know, your own obvious, obviously your own point of view. Do you think if someone else had been writing this, or if this had been written as like just a sort of a company newsletter that wasn't, from your perspective, would that have been as well received, I
Katelyn Bourgoin: guess. I mean, I think that the newsletter has gotten better because you know, we're planning ahead, we're thinking about what are gonna be the topics that we're gonna talk about in the future.
We've got like a ideas backlog, and once an idea goes in the backlog, I'm unconsciously or consciously then kind of scanning everything I'm seeing. Whether I'm on a landing page or that I'm scrolling through social media, or that I'm getting hit with an ad, thinking like, I wanna find examples of this. I wanna be able to show this in the wild.
I wanna be able to talk about this and kind of. Make it feel real to people. So I think that because, you know, I know what it is we're gonna be talking about, and I'm kind of priming myself to go, okay, like, how can [00:09:00] I make this really juicy when the time comes? And so I will also share that, like, I'm not alone in the writing of the newsletter.
It, you know, it's, it comes from me that like I am the final say on, and I'm the final editor, but I work with a really talented writer and we co-write it. And so I wanna give her a shout out too. But I think that what makes it unique is that we get this time to let those ideas percolate and we know what the concepts are we wanna talk about.
But then, you know, we have our backlog built out, like, you know, at least eight weeks in advance of what we're the topics are gonna be. So like I can start kind of like. Pulling things that I see and we can use those as examples. I use my, um, personal email as my to-do list, and so I'll just like see something, screenshot email to myself.
It's kind of annoying actually. So I'll wake up, I'm like, oh God, I must have wine last night. There's like 12 screenshots here waiting for me. But I think that that's part of it. It like, and I'm geeky about it. Right. And one of the things that I'm, you know, I'm sure that's echoed by other people that are on the [00:10:00] podcast, but.
When it comes to like audience growth, whether it be a newsletter or audience growth on a social media channel, I think if you choose something that you think is like the right thing to do, but it's not something that you actually intrinsically are motivated to do, you're always gonna struggle with it.
Right? Like, but if it's something that like you genuinely get pumped about and like you love learning about, so that comes through, then your audience gets to feel that too. I like
Louis Nicholls: that. I like that. It's, I'm just, my, my brain's still going on the, the James clear comparison. Cause I, I, I hadn't thought of that before.
I really hadn't thought of it as being really similar to James's newsletter in, in really in any way. Like the format is is quite different. But I was thinking, and it is in the sense that what I think James Clear's newsletter specifically does a really, really uniquely good job at is you read that newsletter and you come away from it and the end result is that you feel smarter.
In my That is
Katelyn Bourgoin: it. You just, yeah. [00:11:00] I've got a document where I describe why we buy it. It's like people are gonna read this and they're not gonna think, wow, Katelyn's smart. They're gonna think, wow, I'm smarter now. And that's what's good about it, right? Like and that's what I want them to feel. Because they can immediately take it and start applying it to their own work.
And I get emails all the time. People be like, I'm applying this. I'm seeing results. I get to look like a badass. I like if you go to the signup page, you know, using a clever behavioral science technique. But it's like an image of me staring up at the head headline, which says, I can't remember what the exact headline, but underneath it says in parentheses and look like a genius to your team and clients.
Like that's what it's about. It's about people being able to like offhandedly sit in a meeting and be like, well, like what if we were to change this? Because that would tap into this like cognitive bias called ling goods. And like then they get to look like a badass. And that if people walk away and they get to do that, like we're doing our job every day.
Yes. It's
Louis Nicholls: so awesome. I I really love that. So, one thing I wanna move on from there quickly to, to talk about the, the growth side of things, because [00:12:00] I think one of the things that, that will be quite interesting to people listening to this. About your story and your newsletter growth compared probably to most of the other guests that we've had on the podcast is that you are, you are very prolific on social media, on, on LinkedIn and, and Twitter, which most media brands, you know, that we talk to, most newsletters aren't.
They tend to be getting their growth from elsewhere. How much do you think that, does that play into. How the newsletter's growing is, is that a conscious decision? Are you sort of linking the two in your mind, like
Katelyn Bourgoin: your Oh, certainly. Yeah, certainly. Like I think of the, the, I do a lot of reworking of content from the newsletter and concepts from the newsletter.
For social, with the goal of showcasing those little, you know, snackable insights and then driving people to the newsletter, like I'm very consciously using my social media presence to drive interest and signups for the newsletter. I would say that [00:13:00] for me, the social media is also an opportunity because of the fast feedback loop.
It's an opportunity to apply the things that we're teaching people in the newsletter. So before a topic goes out, oftentimes I'll take that concept and go like, is there something I can action from this? Like, you know, with negativity bias, for instance, the way that you phrase something, if you have a negative slant, it's gonna get more attention than if you frame it positively.
Like, that's something that I can learn about. And then I can go, okay, now I can go and apply this. I'm gonna write a post-it with something and I'm gonna use this in my content. So for me, social media has really been the driving channel of growth for the newsletter, aside from kind of like organic referrals that I can motivate through this kind of like little cool flywheel that I've come up with. But then also the, the much bigger driver of our growth of the blade is definitely SparkLoop number two. Here's number two, sparklers. But there we go.
Louis Nicholls: One more. And we're Okay. But I I, before we, before we talk about how amazing SparkLoop is, I would love to spend a little bit more time on the, on the social side [00:14:00] of things because it isn't something we've, we've covered here before. It's not something I know anything about at all. Um,
Katelyn Bourgoin: well, here's the thing that I do that I think is pretty smart. Yeah. And like, not to like toot my own horn, but like, So people, when it comes to why people share, right? Like why we talk about things. There's a great book called Contagious, and who's the author?
Jonah Berger is the author. But it's all about why people share things like what's behind viral content and the. There's a couple concepts. He's this framework called, um, this acronym that's steps, and I can't remember all of the ones in it, but like the one to me that is always the most compelling and interesting is this idea of social currency, right?
We share things oftentimes on social media that make. Us look good. And so if somebody compliments us, there's just something good about our company or our product, you know, we're likely to share that. And if we come across a post that is unique and novel and interesting and counterintuitive, like we're more likely to share that cuz it positions us as like a thought leader, somebody who's like [00:15:00] having a different point of view.
And so one of the things that I started doing kind of tripped upon. As a kind of growth lever is when I would get feedback on the newsletter, like positive feedback. I would screenshot it and share it. I didn't, you know, sexify it up. It didn't turn it into a quote image or anything. I just did it very lazily from my phone, and that was by design.
Because it feels a lot more authentic when it's a screenshot of somebody's email or a screenshot of somebody's shout out than when it's a beautifully designed graphic. But what ended up happening there was that the people who I was screenshotting and sharing if it was something they shared with me publicly, That I wouldn't make it anonymous.
I would, I would comment and tag them. I think it then created this lovely snowball effect where people would see me do that and they'd go, I'm gonna say something really clever about Katelyn's newsletter. Maybe she'll screenshot me and share me next week. So I started building this awesome library of like love notes, and the more I shared them, the more people [00:16:00] would share them with me.
So it became this great kind of flywheel that I. I thought this, I knew that the social proof was smart. I hadn't considered how it would make other people go, oh, this is a visibility opportunity for me. Until I started seeing it over and over and then people were like, DM me and be like, feel free to use that if you'd like.
I'd be like, oh, this is like smarter than we realized. So that's been an effective strategy for us too.
Louis Nicholls: I love that. That's, it's interesting you said that. It is. It's similar to what we see with referral programs. Specifically with the referral program, giveaways for newsletters, which is that it's not just about sort of what you're mentioning there, which is all super important, but also sort of just reinforcing the expected sort of group behavior.
And if you see other people, especially in your newsletter, And you see that they're all referring and they're all being thanked for having participated and done specific things. You just naturally seem to become a lot more inclined to also take the same action,
Katelyn Bourgoin: want to a hundred percent sort of fit.
And the other thing that is [00:17:00] smart about it, and one of my favorite, again, buyer psychology concepts, is this idea of what's called the mirror ex. Exposure effect, and we wrote a newsletter on it, but it's insanely powerful. It's the reason why Coca-Cola spends 4 billion a year on advertising, even though they're best, most recognizable brand on the planet.
The more we see something, the more we come to trust and like it. Over time, assuming we didn't start off with like a really negative perception of it, and so I've had many people. Write me and say, okay, this is like, you know, I've seen you like share these, um, notes from readers. I'm signing up finally. I don't even like newsletters and I'm signing up.
We'll get a lot of that. People be like, I don't even like newsletters, but like, you know what, fine, I'll do it. So the more that they see it, the first time they might go, okay. And the second they're like, yeah, and then the third time they're like, well, maybe I am missing something. And then the fourth time they're like, Huh.
And then the fifth time, like, okay, I'll just freaking sign up. There's time I'm, it's gonna cost me nothing. So I think that just the repeating that same content structure over and over [00:18:00] creates that mirror exposure effect cuz it's that similar expected thing and then that works and just kind of like beats people down over time.
Louis Nicholls: So when it comes to the other stuff that you're doing for, for the newsletter growth, we mentioned, obviously you have the, the funnels that you have coming in from LinkedIn and Twitter and social media. You have the organic referrals, are you still doing those with the brainy battles?
Katelyn Bourgoin: Yes. We actually have a brainy battles issue going out.
Um, next week. Our first, we're gonna do one a month cuz they're a big lift for us. But we're gonna do one a month. Well look,
Louis Nicholls: can we talk about brainy battles? Cause it's something that I love. I love people doing more interesting things inside of newsletters rather than just, Like sending out a, you know, a boring article.
Not that UN articles are boring, but you know what I mean, like a mm-hmm. A sta a standard sort of newsletter edition. Anyone who's doing anything interesting and innovative, there are so few people doing it that I love it. So can you explain what, what brain battles are? Yeah.
Katelyn Bourgoin: I mean, what we talked about earlier is a great primer for it because it really came out of the idea that.
I wanted to get people [00:19:00] sharing the newsletter. I wanted to incentivize them to do so beyond kind of what was expected. I wanted it to feel different and unique and marketers, people who are nerdy, but marketing like us, like they have strong opinions about what's good and why it's. Good. And they like to share them.
And so I was like, how can we kind of create gamification inside the newsletter so that there's some incentive or motivation for somebody to share, but how do we also make it something that they would wanna share cuz it's gonna make them look smart and clever and interesting. And so I started thinking about that problem and that kind of, that that challenge.
And then I. Came up with this idea of like, you know, at first it was just gonna be a marketing tear down cuz marketers love marketing tear downs where you kind of take a newsletter or you take an asset and you kind of break it into its pieces and show why it's smart and like that was the original idea.
And then I was like, But what if I turned it into a battle between two brands that did the same thing? So my original concept, when I was [00:20:00] pitching it to sponsors, I wanted to sell sponsorships for it before we actually went through the effort of building it. Cause it's a big lift. I was like, you know, you could look at like Sahil Bloom's like newsletter signup page compared to, you know, maybe demand curves and like, we're both doing smart things, but they're very different.
And how can we show what they're doing and explain it so people can, you know, learn from it, apply what works for them to their, to their own landing page. But also they get to vote on who they think did it better and they get to feel like they have some agency and say, so that was the idea behind it.
It's complex to create because they're really visual. We're doing one a month and I'm kind of changing the, what the incentive is. Cause I had an incentive that was strategy call with me and that's a big lift for me too. And so I'm cha and I'm changing kind of like that piece of it, but the core structure of, here's two awesome marketing assets.
Here's why they're both good. Which one do you think is better or keeping that? I love it.
Louis Nicholls: I love it. I, I think [00:21:00] I just love seeing people do fun stuff inside of newsletters, especially in like the, I guess like the more professional space. Just like the more fun it can be. I think it's. It's so underrated to be, to be funny.
Katelyn Bourgoin: I think that for me, I, I, I get a lot of people being like, oh, I wish I could do more marketing like you, because I mean, if you go to my sales pages, they have memes and gif on them, and I use curse words and like, I can get away with that because it's kind of like I'm the face of it. But the reality is it comes back to that chocolate covered almond thing.
Like there are lots of almonds out there and there's lots of, you know, almonds are good and they're good for you and everybody knows you should consume them, but like the chocolate covered ones are fun. And I just, I wanna make it fun. I wanna make it this treat that shows up in your inbox as opposed to this thing where like you're like, I know there's gonna be good stuff in there.
I should probably save all of these and read them later. And then it feels like work. And like marketers are already overworked. Like I feel like marketers in many companies are some of the hardest working, least [00:22:00] appreciated people. And so I don't wanna make more work for them.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, I, I, I can hear that well.
Awesome. So what else are you doing on the, on the growth side of things that's really working or That has been
Katelyn Bourgoin: not as much as I should be. So this is something that we're in the process of talking about. So I, I recently had, we launched a new program in collaboration with the team over Demand Curve. And that first mm-hmm.
Round went really well, and now we're gearing up for round two. And then in the middle of that I moved across the country. So I've been. Really, the last six months have been crazy, but now I'm starting to think about what does the next stage of growth look like? And I've got, we've got some ideas. We're reaching out to other newsletters to do more cross promotions.
I'm toying with doing more paid social. Trying to like, you know, play with some of that, but like, I wanna do some less expected stuff and explore some maybe less obvious and overused channels. So realistically, like, I'd love to hear [00:23:00] what you think are some of the bigger growth opportunities. Cause like we're already using SparkLoop, it's massively valuable for our growth, but like, what are you seeing people doing outside of paid referrals or free referrals that are, that's working for people?
You can't turn
Louis Nicholls: this into a free strategy session. That's not what's happening. It just did. That's no, we're not, we're not doing that. No. Um, it's ok. We can arrange payment efforts. Um, yeah, no, so I mean, I tend to be quite cautious when we approach newsletter growth for people we work with and sometimes the boring stuff just really is the stuff that's gonna work and, mm-hmm.
Facebook ads, obviously kind of having a little bit of a recurrence at the moment. Debatable about the quality. That's always the issue with newsletters is that it's so much harder to assess whether you're actually getting a good ROI or if you're just getting sort of vanity metrics out of it compared to purchases and things like that.
So really big media brands, they're very good at that because they have [00:24:00] huge teams of interns and spreadsheets. Mm-hmm. Most of us don't have time for that, and we just sort of like to, Tell ourselves that it's all really good engagement and everything's going great. So I'm a little bit, little bit wary of that.
But I mean, the paid recommendations, the free recommendations, as far as I can tell, it's blowing everything else out of the water for pretty much everybody who's doing it. In terms of like the ROI on the time and the, the money
Katelyn Bourgoin: invested, that's our experience for sure. Like it's just, When you talk about the ROI in that time, it's like there are a few products that honestly feel like magic.
Like, you know, there are so many products that it's like, okay, I know I get a lot out of this if I put a lot into it. Like, but I don't wanna, I don't have that much time. But like, it really like SparkLoop did feel like magic when we turned on the, we started with Up, when we started with UP Scribe. I think we may have been part of the private beta, is that I think, oh
Louis Nicholls: yeah, you were like one of the first five or six.
Yeah,
Katelyn Bourgoin: for sure. Oh, that's amazing. But when we turned that on, it was just like overnight and it wasn't, we didn't have to do anything extra. Right. It was like the things that we were already doing were generating more value for other newsletter operators, and that [00:25:00] what they were already doing was generating more value for us, and the people who were signing up were super high quality because they were signing up for newsletters.
That had similar value propositions to ours. Different content, but similar promises. And so it really was one of those magic things that I just turned on. And so it's really been a journey that I've been thinking about. You know, crunching numbers, being like, do I just max out that budget? Do I look at other channels and try to grow on other channels, knowing that they might be slower to start, but they'll be able to build momentum longer term.
Like I'm, it's, it's a question that we're kind of debating right now around growth, but it's certainly the easiest and most. Cost effective channel we've done ever.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, no, I'm glad to hear it. We love it. I think one of the things that's interesting to me, and this is. I, I dunno how useful this'll be for you because obviously you, you really know what you're talking about.
But I think something that, that a lot of people who come to newsletters more from sort of the, the editorial side rather than from the growth side. Something that's non-obvious to them as someone who's running a business for the first time is if you look at like a [00:26:00] traditional like SaaS or D2C brand or just anything that has like an actual product that they sell to people.
And that's mainly what the, the product, you know, the business was, was built around. In most cases, they don't really have very many levers that they can pull to increase, like the, the lifetime or the, the meaningful lifetime value of the payback period of, of, of a customer or of lead. It's quite difficult.
They tend to be pretty good already at, at optimizing that, whereas with newsletters, Almost every single newsletter I've ever seen, with the exception of like Brennan Dunn and like three other people, they are already pretty good at getting subscribers. Mm-hmm. But the biggest lever they can pull is to earn more and earn sooner per
Katelyn Bourgoin: subscriber.
I'm so glad you brought up Brennan Dunn, cuz the stuff that he's doing is just, yeah. Really fascinating. He's, it's exciting to see the way that he's building it out. I've shared that with my teammate who's helping on our growth set. I was like, follow, everything Brennan do is doing, there's stuff we need to learn from what he's doing.
And he's really taking [00:27:00] a surgical approach to virality and, and monetization that I'm sure lots of other operators are doing it, but he's sharing it, which is nice.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, it's, it's great to, to follow along with what he's doing. I think that's the one thing that I would say to most people in, in sort of your shoes, who are looking to see how they can grow faster is to say, well, At the moment, if you can happily spend, let's say $3 per new subscriber and that works out for you with the, with the payback period, you know, within the first month or two months, that's great.
Finding more subscribers at that same price is probably going to be reasonably difficult or cheaper. Mm-hmm. Whereas finding a way to make $3 50 in the first month from your subscribers, or $4 or five folds, or even $6 is probably gonna be really easy if you haven't spent a lot of time doing that.
Katelyn Bourgoin: I think it's important right now too, given that.
You know, we have a couple ways we monetize our audience. We have sponsorships that we work with. Mm-hmm. We also have a couple kind of like on-demand products that we're always promoting, and then we've got this unignorable [00:28:00] challenge that is this new thing and it's showing a lot of promise. That being said, I definitely have been playing with, like looking at the on-demand products that we have.
They were built before I planned. To build the newsletter into a business. They are built kind of for like the former business, which was the insights agency. And so I'm thinking about wanting, I wanna create something new that's really geared towards the behavioral science buyer psychology space, not just towards.
The audience research promise. So that's good for you to hear you say that. Cause I think that that's been something that's been on my kind of like to-do list. But after this next launch of Unignorable, I'm gonna move it to my doing list.
Louis Nicholls: Awesome. And then the only other thing I'd, I'd say that I think that newsletters like yours that we're really sort of bullish on them that seems to always work is this idea of not participating in a sweepstake, but running your own sweepstake.
And I really love that, especially in like the, any [00:29:00] B2B niche, but especially in marketing, to go out and find 40, 50 brands that you want to partner with have already sponsored you. Any mix of the two, get all of them to give you. A coupon code, which everybody will, you know, $50 off here, a hundred dollars here, that kind of thing, and get all of them to offer a prize, which they all will for free, which has a, you know, a huge price, price tag attached to it that doesn't really cost them very much.
And then you put all of that into, you know, run it over a month. You have this. This giveaway, the sweepstakes with hundreds of thousands of dollars of prizes from these top brands. You have this giveaway, sorry, coupon booklet for everybody who part participates. Everybody who signs up can get this coupon booklet worth, you know, $10,000 with all these things in there.
And it's, it's not very much work to put together. You then have all the contacts for sponsorships for the rest of the year if you want to work with them. And the hardest bit that most people don't do, which is also the most important bit, is getting those brands to promote. The, the giveaway to their own audiences.
Katelyn Bourgoin: [00:30:00] Louis, I feel like after this call I'm gonna have to pay you. Definitely feels like you're giving me free strategy. That's genius. I'm gonna write that down because that's something we were looking at doing a summit in September in kind of like lead up to the next, the third launch of Unignorable and I think that the Sweepstake could even actually be better than the summit and get the, create just as much value for our audience.
Help us grow our audience a lot faster and take a lot less work. That's, that's genius. It
Louis Nicholls: is genius. It's not my genius. The, the first person I've seen do this really, really well was Aleyda Solis who has runs the SEO FOMO newsletter. Okay. And she did a really, really good job of that. And I've been there. I stole it and been telling people to do it ever since.
So she should get the, the credit for that one. Well, awesome. I, I did wanna talk a little bit more about the monetization side of things that you have. Cause I know you have the on-demand products, you have the advertising, and you, you said you sort of stumbled into the advertising. Basically by accident?
Is that, is that right? Yeah. Well, I mean,
Katelyn Bourgoin: a couple people had reached out saying, can we sponsor the newsletter? Which my response was always, no. Mm-hmm. [00:31:00] Because I think I was just so busy at the time and I was a new mom and I was like, I don't need to mess around back and forth. Having conversations with brands for 50 bucks, like our audience was that big.
I think at the time that people started reaching out were like around 6,000, and I was like, you know, it's just not worth it for me. And then I don't want my audience to come to expect that they're always gonna be pitched. Other people's stuff, I'd rather than just pitch our stuff. And so I always said no.
And then when my friend Corey Haines, I remember he had shared something on social. We were having a call, I can't remember exactly what it was, but he told me about how he had partnered with five. Sponsors for his newsletter. And he had given them like a year long commitment and this was the package and this is what they're gonna get.
And I went, oh, that's a lot easier than, you know, dealing with these one-off sponsorships. Like I should try it that way. And so when Ahrefs reached out, they were really one of the brands that. Went really deep and said like, we're gonna spend a lot of money on affiliates and or more on sponsorships than affiliates rather.
And so they were [00:32:00] working with Corey, they were working with other brands. And so when they reached out, I knew that Corey was working with them. I said, yeah, I'll have a colleague. I'll talk about it. I'll learn about it. And. Then after hearing about that, I did make, I, it was like I committed to Ahrefs to work with them for I think 10 months.
And I was doing the same thing that Cory was gonna do, but I, well, I got this great insight from the sponsorship lead over at Ahrefs and he is like, you're charging way too little. Like, he's like, we like, after the contract was signed, he was like, you charged way too little and gave way too much. I was like, shit.
Okay, well I know nothing about this world. It's a complete black box to me. Like, I don't know what sponsorship should cost. I don't know what it should, like, what should be included. And so when I went out and reached out to another three sponsors and I ended up having four sponsors that I worked with over the course of, of three month period with Ahrefs lasting for another.
And like the rest of the year, I pitched them the same deal. I pitched to Ahrefs except for, for three months instead of 10. And they all said yes. [00:33:00] And I was like, I'm still charging too little. Like they're all saying yes, if yeses are coming too fast, you know you're doing something wrong. And so once I kind of did that, then the sponsorship.
Like interest kept coming, and then we moved to a different model where now we do work with sponsors for a one-off issue and we will work with sponsors for, typically we sell a package of three, or I'll do a creative collab where we might do three newsletters and then we do something on social or we do a webinar together, something like that.
But it was really, The wild West. I didn't know how to price anything. Like, you know, you do research but you hear the CPM or cost per mille. For listeners who may not know that term, you hear, you know, $25 up to like $150. So like, I'm like, I don't know where I fit in that. Like, so I'm gonna go high. It doesn't hurt.
But I feel like we're in a different economic environment now than when I first started this a little over a year ago. And so, Finding [00:34:00] sponsors is not as, it's not like they used to just come to us in droves. Now we're actually actively seeking sponsors. We're still not having a hard time filling our spots, but it's not as easy as it had been.
So I'm mindful of that and thinking about when, you know, if, if we do have a harder time getting sponsors or they are looking to spend less. Then historically they have, then I need to think about how do I justify our investment in growth and make sure that those still continue to equal out.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, for sure.
Who, who is we on the, the sort of the advertising revenue side of things? Is that you doing all of the, the outreach and the. The sales
Katelyn Bourgoin: as of recent, we, I brought somebody, um, so Eva, who was working with me on the content creation, she's also doing some outbound, but I work with Mad Rev, which is a team.
They were formerly in-house at the Hustle and they were part of their sales team, and Sam Parr introduced me to them. They've been awesome. I also get a few sponsors from the [00:35:00] ConvertKit partner Network, but Mad Rev has brought in a lot of folks, so I'd say it's between. Like we probably get inbound, like 60% and then Mad Rev makes up the another 30 and then maybe 10 from the Convert Kit partner network.
But now I'd like to, you know, as good businesses do, uh, mad charges a fee and as does the Convert Kit network. So I'd like to start actively seeking more of the sponsors and retaining more of the sponsorship ourselves. Very cool.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, we had Katie from Mad Rev on the podcast, I wanna say about a year ago, so it's one of my favorite episodes.
She really knows that stuff.
Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, they've been a delight to work with. They're so easy. They always find us sponsors that they know our audience are genuinely gonna be interested their products. That's what it's all about. Like there's, there have been a couple sponsors that have reached out either to us directly or one time through Mad Rev and it was like, you know, are they a fit?
And like, I'm not afraid to say no if I think that it's not a fit for our audience because [00:36:00] I wanna make sure that they genuinely trust that if so, work. Promoting something in the newsletter, even if it's very clear that it's a sponsored ad, I still want, that's still our reputation. And if that's not a product that I feel really excited about and that I know that my audience would feel really excited about, then I'm not gonna promote it.
So Mad Drab is just so good at finding the right sponsors for us and it, it's been a godsend working with them.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, I mean I've only heard good things and they are, they are super smart people. So I, I guess one thing I wanna ask, cause I'm, I'm conscious of time and I don't wanna keep you longer than you, longer than you need to, although you do, I think, still owe me one.
I do, I'm saving it for the end One SparkLoop compliment. You're saving that for the end. Okay. Very good. Just making sure. No, so I, I guess one question that I do want to ask is, in all of this, you know, you're sort of stumbling, I guess, a little bit into the newsletter game and stumbling into the ads.
Revenue and ad sales space, what's one thing that you learned that was really unintuitive and that you think potentially other people [00:37:00] are gonna be tripped up by?
Katelyn Bourgoin: I think that really the cpm, and I think that, I think that's one thing that people go into and they just don't know. Like I still am charging significantly more than a lot of other newsletter operators in the marketing space, and I think that.
People like when it comes to pricing and you know, Patrick Campbell is the, the best at this. When it talk, talking about having to figure out your pricing, most people just kind of guess. They just do a little Googling and they try to figure it out. And so what I would say is that then it was the least intuitive is because I had no idea what I should charge.
I started out too low. And then once I got, fortunately, thank you again for the sponsorship rep, rep at uh, Ahrefs. I. Raised the prices and then I pitched another sponsor who said yes really easily, and then I raised the prices again, and then I kind of just kept pushing them up. Until I started getting pushed back.
And so what I would say to folks is it comes down to the brand and ultimately what does ROI look like for them? And for some [00:38:00] brands, you know, I worked with Reforge on a project and they did a $7,500 investment. It was kind of over a period of a couple of months and I had a very small list at the time.
I think we were only 10,000, but they saw 6x return on that investment because they sell $2,000 seat. Education programs, and so that was a really good partnership for them. Meanwhile, at that same size, when we were only 10,000 people, there's probably lots of brands that could never justify doing a $7,500 investment in a sponsorship because the payback period would just be too long.
So I'd say really think about if you're at the very beginning stages, think about not just who your audience is going to be, but also who wants to get in front of that audience. And what type of products those people sell and how lucrative those products are. And I just happened to kind of luck into realizing that my audience are.
Experienced marketing leaders and founders at high growth companies, [00:39:00] those people spend a lot of money on software. They spend a lot of money on education. They'll hire agencies, and those are all lucrative businesses. And so I'm able to charge significantly more to sponsors than maybe somebody who's in a much broader space, like my friend Nathan Baugh, who's his newsletter is about storytelling.
Well, it's harder to justify to a brand. That this is a super valuable audience and they should pay top dollar for sponsorship when they don't know what the payback period might be. So I think if I were starting over, knowing what I know now, it would be be really intentional about if you're trying to build a newsletter to monetize your sponsorships, be really intentional about who the audience is.
And then who wants that audience's attention? There's a great example. We use an unignorable when we're teaching about some of this stuff and we, it's a brand, I think it's, I'm gonna screw up their name, but their audience is not very big. They've got a newsletter. It's got [00:40:00] thousands of readers, but like not a 10,000 readers.
Like under, it might be like five or 6,000. But all their people work in the agricultural and in agriculture and innovation space related to agriculture. Very, very niche and narrow, right? And so they're running this million dollar business at the back of this 5,000 person newsletter because it's this super targeted, narrow audience.
So I'd say to folks that are just starting out for one, really kind of like play around with your pricing. Don't, if you're getting a lot of easy yeses, you should probably raise the price. And if you're very early, think about. Who's the audience and who wants that audience's attention? How much are those people willing to pay?
Because that's gonna make the, your business like look completely different depending on which route you go.
Louis Nicholls: I love it. I love it. Awesome. And I, I think personally just interjecting my own experience, I think one of the reasons that you can justify charging such, such high prices compared to potentially other marketing newsletters is that I [00:41:00] imagine that brands don't necessarily just want to reach your audience.
They want to reach your audience, being recommended in the sense by you. You know, they want to be seen, to be accepted, to be, you know, the sponsor of Katelyn's newsletter rather than generic marketing newsletter from somebody that nobody really knows. And I think that that's super underrated.
Katelyn Bourgoin: I hope that's true.
And at the end of the day, you know, it gets, um, we talk about this in, in our sponsor deck. We share it like there's the perception and the halo effect. That comes from being a sponsor in somebody's favorite newsletter. And we're really, I'm really grateful and I'm very proud that why we buy is some people's favorite newsletter.
Like there's a lot of great newsletters out there, but for some people it's their absolute favored. And when you get to be sponsored in somebody's favorite newsletter, definitely cast your brand in a different light than if you're just in another place where people are.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Well, Katelyn, I'm conscious of of time.
One last question before I I let you go. We've talked about [00:42:00] newsletters, we've talked about why we buy. Is there a question that you think I should have asked you about newsletters that I
Katelyn Bourgoin: didn't? That's a great question. Um, maybe about what I think the future of newsletters are, because I do think, and I think you and I have had banter about this on Twitter, I think that what SparkLoop has done for growth and what.
People like me talking about, you know, this little operator writing this newsletter that's bringing in like 300 K a year and like sponsorship revenue. And that's getting people excited and I think that there's going to be a flurry of people who try to move into this space and wanna pay. A lot of money outta pocket for, for audience growth.
And I think that the more competition there is for sponsor dollars, the more competition there is for reader eyeballs, which is like, you know, a huge thing. People have a limited amount of time, you're gonna see this space get frothier and frothier. And so I think the thing that I'm interested in about is like what does the future look like when you've got big brands [00:43:00] that are now recognizing the power of.
Getting in that inbox with something really editorial great. As opposed to just, we added this feature and here's, you know, a sale that we're doing, but it's actually creating like content people love to consume. What does that look like? And I think you're gonna see more of it. And then there's gonna be a car correction and there's gonna be a lot of small operators that kind of get weeded out.
And I think that happens in a lot of spaces. So it'll be interesting to see as it as it grows. But I think that there's a. Watershed opportunity happening right now with like AI content and like, what does that mean for the future of newsletters? I don't know, but I'm excited. I'm excited to see what the future looks like.
Louis Nicholls: Yeah, same. And I'm, I'm, we, we made it almost all the way through without mentioning ai. That's, we almost did it. Katelyn, we, we nearly got there. We can pretend it never happened. It's okay. I'm joking. Awesome. So where can people go and find out more about
Katelyn Bourgoin: you? Yeah, of course. Um, people can, like [00:44:00] my main hang out is on Twitter.
I am @ Kate Bour, so k a t e b o u r, and I still owe. SparkLoop. One more plug. So like anybody listening right now, I will say unabashedly no blowing smoke up Louis' ass. He did not pay me to say this. It is the number one like growth lever we've pulled and it's easy and it's like effective and the support that your team gives, I know you're a small team, the support that your team gives is incredible and I'm just very grateful for the product.
So thank you for having me on and letting me have an opportunity to tell people how great your product is.
Louis Nicholls: Wow. Okay. Thank you very much. That's three. You're done. Family is safe. They've been released. We can let you go now. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been really fun. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Send and Grow podcast.
If you liked what you heard hear are three quick ways that you can show your support. Number one, leave us a five star rating or review in the podcast app of your choice. Number two, email or DM me with some feedback with your questions. [00:45:00] Forward suggestions for future episodes. And finally, number three, share your favorite quote from the episode on social media and tag both me and our guest, all of the links for that are available in the show notes and whatever option you choose.
I am really grateful for your support. Thanks, and see you next week.