Hitting 50k newsletter subscribers isn't easy. But the Growth In Reverse podcast reveals how newsletters are doing it. Chenell Basilio has spent the past 2+ years and thousands of hours reverse engineering how the biggest newsletter creators in the world have grown audiences of 50,000 to 1M subscribers—and beyond. Join Chenell and her cohost Dylan Redekop every week to learn the most effective and unique newsletter growth strategies, hear from other newsletter experts, and figure out how to turn your newsletter into a profitable business. Check out the newsletter of the same name at growthinreverse.com →
VIDEO - Anne-Laure deep dive walkthrough
===
[00:00:00] Chenell Basilio: All right. So today I want to walk through the story of Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Ness Labs. So I wrote this deep dive back in 2023, early 2023. But I did update the growth timeline and everything. But I wanted to walk through this because Dylan and I actually had a conversation with Amlor that we're going to be releasing later this week.
And so I wanted to give you some backstory here as well. All right. So the playbook for growing to six figures with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, how do you get 6, 000 email subscribers in just four months and keep that momentum going for the next three years? And then launch a membership charging just 5 a month and end up making more than 120k a year from it.
Anne Laure Lecomte from Ness Labs has figured out the recipe for sustainably growing her email with that level of momentum behind it. She sent out the first edition of her MakerMind newsletter in July of 2019. Since then, she's written hundreds of articles that have attracted [00:01:00] over 75, 000 newsletter subscribers and 2, 500 paying members.
And at this point she's over a hundred thousand subscribers on her newsletter. Ex Googler turned neuroscience PhD Anne-Laure went from working at Google to moving to London to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. She started Ness Labs as a way of holding herself accountable to properly understanding the concepts she was learning in her studies.
After realizing people were interested in how she explained these complex topics, she started sending them out each week. As the Maker Mind newsletter. Since then it's grown to over a hundred thousand subscribers, bringing in more than six figures per year. And then we'll get into how Ness Labs makes money.
So Ness Labs, which is the overarching company that Amlor has built, seems to make money in a few different ways. First is the membership community. There is the Ness Labs community. Which charges an annual membership of just 49 and includes everything Amlar creates. While you might sneeze at the 49 a year price point, the volume she's doing is nothing to laugh at.
[00:02:00] Over 2, 500 people are paying for the community, and at this point I'm not sure the exact number of subscribers she has there, but 2, 500 times 49 a year is over 120, 000 a year. And that 2, 500 member number was last discussed in her 2021 annual review. It's now 2025. So I'm sure there's been a little bit of growth there as well as some churn, but also probably some growth.
While some might suggest raising the price, the low cost allows people from all over the world to be able to join the community. She's going more for impact and volume than revenue per subscriber. She also loves the simplicity of having one thing people can sign up for that includes all of her paid products.
The second way she makes money is through sponsorships. There are three levels of sponsorships for her. Well, there were at this point, I'm not sure what it looks like anymore, but she had newsletter ads in the brain pics part of the newsletter tools for thought, which was interviews with founders of mindfulness tools, which I don't think she does anymore, but I could be wrong on that.[00:03:00]
And then she also did webinars with different brands in her community. It's not clear how much each costs, but I'd imagine those alone bring in a decent amount of revenue each year. Anne-Laure is openly selective about who can sponsor and they vet each one really well to make sure they're actually providing useful information and tools for her community, which makes sense.
It's something all creators should be doing, but I wanted to call that out because it looks like that is how she's. with this and keep the trust alive within her community. Between the membership and sponsors, I think it's probably safe to say that she was making over 200 K ARR, which is annual revenue at this point.
The third way was affiliate marketing. There was some affiliate marketing in. Some of her posts and that kind of thing, whether it was a book recommendation or a tool she used, there was a little bit of money coming in from those, but I'm not sure how big it was. So I kind of just left it out of the total estimate.
And then at this point she has a fourth revenue source, which is her book. She is. Launching a book actually this coming [00:04:00] week called Tiny Experiments. And from what I've read, I read the first chapter and it's great. Like really, really good. Already sent me down a couple of different rabbit holes. So excited to kind of get that in my hands and read the full thing.
And then of course the fifth one, she's actually now a research professor, I believe So that's another source of revenue. It's not really a creator source, but it does tie into all the other things she's doing. Okay, so let's jump into the growth timeline of Ness Labs. So I did update this with the numbers that I could find.
Although it doesn't look as exciting lately because the numbers aren't talked about as much. But I went through Twitter, the internet at large, various podcasts she's been on. And I said, she's been interviewed on so many, and since then it's been even more because of the book launch. I think she was doing multiples every week including ours.
So I'm excited to release that here later this week. But this growth timeline, if you're just listening. It's actually pretty inspiring. So she started off her Twitter journey. I think she had [00:05:00] around 12, 000 subscribers or followers when she started. Oh yeah. Look at that. She had 12, 000 Twitter followers when she started in July of 2019.
And then the email line starts at zero at that point. And then the two grow like perfectly in sync until around late 2022. actually until right around when I wrote this. And then the newsletter kept growing. She's now over a hundred thousand subscribers and Twitter kind of like stabilized, I guess you would say.
And it's kind of slowly growing, but not really, but the newsletter is now over a hundred thousand. Her Twitter following kind of tapered off around 64 ish thousand, I would say. Since then, but I think that's pretty common these days. Okay, so let's dive a little deeper into and get some more detail into how she's grown her audience.
So I found five growth levers of Ness labs. And this one, this was a fun deep dive to write. I remember doing this research and I was excited by it. I don't think it got as much attention as it should have, however, it is really good. Alright, so [00:06:00] the five big reasons why I think Anne-Laure has been able to grow Ness Labs so sustainably are, one, building in public, or as Anne-Laure calls it, building with the garage door open.
She sh she has shared her process, numbers, and experiments online since before she even started Ness Labs. Number two was writing a hundred articles in a hundred days. This was an awesome challenge to watch her go through. She actually challenged herself to write every weekday for a hundred days.
So, obviously, you know, there's some balance. She took the weekends off. And this brought her over six thousand subscribers in her first one hundred days. Number three was being an active member of groups and communities Anne-Laure is one of those people who will help others in her community, even if it seems like she doesn't have the time.
Number four was consistency. And I said, now before you write this one off, it's something she brings up in literally every interview because it's been so impactful. And it's not just the typical send an email every week kind of consistency. So we'll dig into that more. Number five is search and SEO. Many creators leave SEO to chance.
While Anne Laure isn't actively [00:07:00] trying to rank for keywords, she's following some simple best practices and it's led to SEO being her fastest growing growth channel. Okay, so let's dive into each of these and see why they worked and what the results have been. And I guess this is a good time. If you're not subscribed to the newsletter, I send out deep dives like this.
Pretty regularly. It was weekly, but now it's fallen off a little bit just because they take so much time. But there is a full catalog of these that you can go back through. So if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, I think it's a great time to jump in there. You can go to growth in reverse.
com slash Ness labs, Ness dash labs and sign up, or you can just go to growth and reverse. com and grab the newsletter signup form there. But you can also read along at growth and reverse. com.
Okay, let's jump into the first growth lever, which is building with the garage door open. Anne-Laure mentions her willingness to build in public every time someone asks her how she got her first thousand subscribers, first few thousand subscribers. And yes, she calls it opening the garage door and letting people [00:08:00] see what's going on.
It seems like a play on the fact that a lot of tech and startup founders began building in their garage . Instead of building in private, she's opened up the door and is letting people in to watch. There are a few reasons Anne-Laure enjoys the concept of building in public.
Number one, you get early feedback from your audience about whether the thing you're considering making is something they actually need, like, or even want. Number two, You'll build a base of raving fans who will be more likely to share the final product because they're invested in your work. And number three, building in public allows you to think through your work and better plan your next steps.
It's all about feedback loops, and building in public is one of the better ways to do this. Plus, getting yourself out there will open you up to a bunch of new opportunities you wouldn't have access to if you were to build in private. And a quote from Anne Laure that I found was, all of the partnerships, sponsorships, consultancy work I've had were all inbound.
People read my blog, reach out. And we figure out if we want to work together. I strongly believe this would not be possible if I [00:09:00] was conducting my research and building products without sharing my progress on a weekly basis. I thought that was cool. So I think she's kind of recognizing that all of the growth and monetization opportunities she's had so far are coming from being open and willing to talk about this in public.
Okay, let's get into the meat of this because this is the fun part. Number two. 100 articles in 100 days. In July of 2019, Anne Laure challenged herself to publish 100 articles on her blog in 100 days. I said 130 days if you count the weekends. She is a mindfulness researcher after all. Anne Laure has mentioned that she doesn't like letting people down, so announcing this challenge Publicly made her really want to stick with it.
She set aside one to two hours every morning to write, to make sure that nothing else on her schedule got in the way. And it's probably no surprise that she shared her progress in public. In the first 63 days of this challenge, Anne Laure posted on IndieHackers that she had crossed 2, 000 subscribers and had 85, 000 [00:10:00] visitors to her website.
That's a lot, if you're not familiar. Plus 2000 email subscribers in two months is pretty awesome. I said, read those numbers again. That's a lot of traffic and a lot of subscribers in a short amount of time. By the time the challenge was over, mind you a hundred days in, this is like a little more than three months.
She had quite the showing 6, 000 total email subscribers with an average of 50 to 60 percent open rate, 250, 000 page views on her website in a hundred days. She had written a hundred articles that are evergreen and now people can find them again. The SEO, which we'll talk about later, and she made the front page of Hacker News four times.
I said I'd call that a successful launch if I've ever seen one. And I may or may not be considering something like this as well after seeing those results. Writing deep dives is not something you can do every day but maybe I can do some growth lever posts or something. All right. The third growth lever I found was being an active member of groups and communities.[00:11:00]
One of the reasons she was able to get a huge jumpstart on her own growth was that she had been building other projects in public and was deeply ingrained in the quote unquote maker community. She had built a few projects before and was showing the process of learning how to build and create projects on Twitter.
She was also a part of a few other groups and communities like Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, and Women Make. These groups are full of makers and creators with a lot of them also building in public. She's also created her own communities on Telegram and a paid community for Ness Labs. Having these communities allowed her to get a bit of traction every time she launched something.
Number four, the fourth growth lever is consistency above everything. I know that we hear this day in and day out as creators, but it's playing out true over and over. When you're consistent, you're building trust with your audience. They know when you're going to show up, and when you say you will.
While Ann Lord jump started her growth with the 100 day challenge, she didn't let up much after that. She was posting three times a week after the challenge [00:12:00] ended, and still posts two to three times per week. Consistency for her is about publishing schedules, not length or superior quality. While she doesn't just publish garbage, she isn't trying to be a perfectionist either.
After all, if you can't find anything wrong with your first 100 posts, you aren't growing. She doesn't force herself to write a thousand words if the topic doesn't warrant it. In fact, one of her most popular posts is about the generation effect, and it's only 300 or so words. And one of her quotes was, embrace the cringe.
It's a sign of personal growth. I thought that was cool. And we actually did ask her about this. I don't want to spoil too much, but just to give you a little teaser of what's coming. She was talking about how quality is not as great as quantity, especially in the beginning of doing something. There's a scientific study that was done that quantity can actually produce better results over time.
And so we dig into more of that and ask her about that, but I wanted to share with you a little, little teaser. Okay. So building consistency for [00:13:00] readers Anne-Laure is very serious about the contract she has with her readers and just note that she calls it a contract, which just tells you everything you need to know about her personality.
She tells them they're going to get one email a week and she makes sure that happens no matter what. On the same token, she doesn't email them more than once a week either. Every week, the newsletter is structured in a similar format. So I break down each section here. First is the opening. These are updates, etc.
She likes to give some highlights about personal stuff, timely events, or the annual review workshop she runs every year. Number two is brain food. This section is the article she's written that week, along with any from Others who have published on Ness Labs. com. Brain Candy, as she describes it, is little nuggets from her Twitter bookmarks that week.
Click on the card to read the full tweet. Brain Picks was essentially the sponsor area of her newsletter. Brain Trust, this is a static section that promotes the Ness Labs community. And lastly, Brain Waves is a section asking people to share the [00:14:00] newsletter with someone who might enjoy it. And I love that these are all just like brain oriented.
It's funny. This gives her readers a consistent format each week, so they know what to expect. So she's building consistency, not in just the timeframe and the timeline of her publishing schedule, but also in the content that's being put out. And I talk about this a lot. I think this is so important making sure that you're not giving your readers whiplash every week of sending them something completely different unless that's of course the premise of your newsletter, but for most people, it's not.
Okay, number five for growth levers is she doesn't ignore SEO. A lot of creators don't understand SEO and how to rank in Google, so they just don't pay attention to it at all. Anne-Laure does not take this approach. She uses some of the best practices that also help her readers have a better experience. It's no wonder that SEO has been her fastest growing traffic source.
For 2022 and 2023 building a connected web of content Anne-Laure simply writes what she's interested in and follows some SEO best practices. After all, if people are searching [00:15:00] for it, it'll be nice to show up. Wouldn't it? So what is she doing differently than other creators that help her rank in Google?
There are a few things, but the most obvious one that I found was her interlinking her posts together. Interlinking is simply just linking another article, linking to another article that is relevant to the current one. Using internal links to connect pages on your website is a common method used by professional SEOs to help increase Google rankings and search traffic.
And I said, Anne Laure is a master interlinker if I've ever seen one. And then I gave an example. And so throughout her articles, she has, there's an, there's an image of this on the screen, but I'm just going to explain it for you. Throughout her articles, she has these interesting takes and ideas, and she will link to other posts that are related to that one she's writing about or that topic of that sentence.
And she does it really well. She doesn't just say like, You know, the concept of mind mapping is blah, blah, blah, and then say, parentheses, here's a link to an article I wrote about that. She says [00:16:00] the concept of mapping information in a visual way and mapping information in a visual way is linked to her post about mind mapping using branching, branching traces back centuries.
So the full sentence because I think I confused you the concept of mapping information in a visual way using branching traces back centuries. That's the sentence within that she links over to her post and it's giving you just a way to go deeper down the rabbit hole. I actually said these aren't just random links to other stuff.
She's also helping the reader better understand the concept. These internal links make it so easy to go on her website and not come out of your rabbit hole for a really long time, which I did multiple times and then like during this deep dive research and then even going back to research it again for our interview, I went down multiple rabbit holes again, so beware if you do end up reading her content, it's not easy to come out of them.
And they also have the added benefit of being good for SEO and helping Google understand the content. She does this in every single article, and it [00:17:00] doesn't hurt that she has hundreds of articles already written so she can link back to those if it makes sense. Her fastest growing source of traffic. The other benefit of search engine traffic is it's a little bit more sustainable, although nowadays I wrote this in 2023 nowadays, maybe not so much, it seems to be on a heavy decline, but I think there is still something here for this.
While she has said that Twitter drives much of the subscribers to her newsletter, if she doesn't tweet, then she's not going to grow her list.
But with Google traffic, people could be searching in the middle of the night. and sign up for her email list because they found some super interesting content and want more from her. I looked up Ness Labs. com in a tool called SimilarWeb and it, it's a tool that estimates search traffic and other stats and it's showing she's getting almost 200, 000 visits per month from Google and they're really rough estimates, but I'd probably estimate to say it's somewhere near there or at least it was at the time. But can you imagine getting that many eyeballs on your content every month? Even if you only converted [00:18:00] 2 percent of those people to join your email list, that's 4, 000 subscribers a month from a quote unquote passive channel. I'd have to imagine her email list is starting to really gain traction from this traffic. She also started a YouTube channel recently and Google owns YouTube. So her videos will likely start showing up there as well. Although at this point, I feel like her YouTube channel, she like went pretty hard with it and then kind of stopped. So that's not as relevant.
Moving forward, but in the time it was okay. How can you use some of these methods to grow your own newsletter? I realized that was a lot. So let's break down some actionable ways. You can use these method methods One build in public while it might sound a little intimidating Building in public can be as simple as posting milestones on twitter linkedin wherever you hang out or asking your audience some questions about whether they like the new design you're thinking of using, or if you should stick to the old one.
There are some great guides on ways to get started with this, but I think the easiest is just start sharing your progress and what you've done that day. [00:19:00] Number two, complete a challenge to jumpstart your growth. And I think this is one of the biggest takeaways that I had. I've since written deep dives on other people who have done challenges and there's just something about a challenge that really gets people.
Excited, motivated, you're building momentum Anne-Laure wrote a hundred posts in a hundred days and it turned into six thousand email subscribers and the start of a community that got her to six figures in revenue. She cites this as being very impactful personally and professionally and her quote is writing has been amazing for the business side of things.
I can attribute a dozen. Consulting contracts and many coaching sessions to people who randomly found me through one of the articles Companies have contacted me to do workshops and to license the content Which i'm currently exploring number three is quit lurking and start engaging I've been doing this a lot more in one of my favorite communities lately.
Jay Clouse's the lab and I was just reading everything, but since I finally started engaging and posting, I've seen a lot of great benefits and [00:20:00] subscribers coming from it. If you've been lurking in a community or on Twitter, start engaging with people who are sharing meaningful content.
I promise you it will pay off. If you can't find a community you enjoy, why not build one? Number four, be consistent Anne-Laure is consistent with everything from how often she writes to when the newsletters get sent to what is inside the newsletter. While it's not going to attract new people to you, it will certainly help with the retention of your community members.
And then number five, I dug into SEO a little bit. I said, don't let SEO scare you because people tell you it changes every day and it's hard to keep up with. The best practices have been the same for a while now and they aren't changing anytime soon. This is true. The best practices are still. The best practices, however, the Google traffic overall is declining quite a bit.
So I said, here are some easy things you can do. One, link your posts together. Let's say you write a book, a post about the history of the avocado. And then your next post is about guacamole and the best recipes for it. You should absolutely link back to your [00:21:00] post about avocados from that newer post. For one, it's going to help Google find the other posts.
But secondly, your readers might be interested in that since they're currently reading about avocados. This is making me hungry. I love guacamole, which is why I use this example. Number two, add links to your new posts from your old one. I said, this works both ways. Also go back to that post about guacamole and link to your newer posts about the history of avocados, because they are related.
Number three, do not add images to your site that are over 200 kilobytes large. This is getting a little technical, but even if you're a photographer, publishing a full resolution image is going to ensure it takes the person on the other end at least 15 plus seconds to load it, and Google is not going to rank your site because it's slower than a snail.
This is so true. I've seen so many sites hurt themselves by publishing these huge images that really float on the page load time. Number four, keep your URL short. This is another technical one, but it still relates. Forwards or less, I said. Anne-Laure does a great job with this. Put [00:22:00] only the most important words in the URL.
So instead of Guac. com slash 194 ways to make guacamole, and it is the best food ever. That was the full link example that I gave. Instead of that, do this. Guac. com slash guacamole recipes. That's the full link. And it makes so much more sense. And as personal experience, when you're going back and you're trying to share a post from the past with someone, it is so much easier as a creator to share guac.
com slash guacamole recipes than it is to share that other one. I find this with my own stuff, growthinreverse.com/ness-labs is this URL. But if I had put growth and reverse. com slash Anne-Laure grows her newsletter to 6, 000 subscribers in a hundred days. And that's the full URL. Can you imagine me trying to type that out and send it to someone as an example?
It's not, it's not realistic. Or even just on this podcast, me trying to tell you to go to that website, it would never happen. [00:23:00] Okay, not only is it easier for people to link to, but it's also easier for Google to understand. I said, but what happens when you add the 195th recipe? Because in the example I gave, it said 194 ways.
Okay, this made me hungry. I'm going to go make some guacamole. I hope this was helpful. P. S. Send me that guac recipe. I love trying new ones. This still applies. I freaking love guac. It's definitely one of my favorite foods. I think I could eat it every day. Every meal. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this and I hope you're excited for the interview with and more coming later this week, appreciate you being here.
And if you haven't already, again, go sign up for the Growth In Reverse newsletter. I send out weekly newsletter, growth ideas, and tips for you. And often these deep dives are even more exciting. So keep an eye out for the next one. All right. Thanks so much.