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Growth In Reverse is the must-listen podcast for anyone serious about growing an email list and turning a newsletter into a thriving business. Hosted by Chenell Basilio and Dylan Redekop, two leading voices in the newsletter space, this show pulls back the curtain on how today’s top newsletter operators actually grow and make money.
Episodes include deep-dive teardowns of the strategies behind the most successful newsletters. You’ll hear how creators like Justin Welsh, Codie Sanchez, Sahil Bloom, and other creator founders are building loyal audiences and turning subscribers into revenue. Learn how they attract traffic, increase conversions, boost retention, and scale without burning out.
Whether you're launching your first newsletter or refining your growth engine, Growth In Reverse gives you proven tactics you can use right away. From onboarding systems and referral programs to sponsorships and paid products, this podcast helps you grow faster and smarter. If you’re ready to stop guessing and start applying what works, tune in and learn how the best are building newsletters that last.
VIDEO - Matt McGarry v1
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Matt McGarry: [00:00:00] It's like, oh, you build a newsletter audience and the sponsors will just come. And then you just have one ad per newsletter. That's a really bad business model and maybe it used to be good. Sponsorships are, are one of the worst ways to monetize audiences. You really want to have direct audience monetization.
But the lead quality from LinkedIn is, is crazy high. And that's, where we've got probably like 80% of the thousands of subscribers I've gotten from LinkedIn. And we're making like $76. From everybody who signs up from LinkedIn
most recently, it's been YouTube. I just hit 10 or 11,000 subscribers, and that one has only really recently become a newsletter growth channel.
we got hundreds of subscribers from that video.
Dylan Redekop: Welcome back to the Growth in Reverse podcast. My name is Dylan
Chenell Basilio: and. I'm Chenell.
Dylan Redekop: We are here today. We're really excited actually because we've got our guest, Matt McGarry, who is joining us today on the podcast. And if you don't know Matt, which if you're listening to this podcast, you probably have an inkling, or you might've heard his name [00:01:00] or you're very familiar with him.
Matt is the founder of Grow Letter Grow letter.co, where he's helped massive newsletters like the Hustle. Milk Road 1440, the gist just to name a few, grow their subscribers, and their list to many of these over a million subscribers, and some multiple millions. So Matt's company is also, hosting successful live events like the 2025 newsletter marketing Summit in Austin, Texas.
He's also hosted audience camp in North Carolina. Needless to say, Matt is one of the first people I look to. Chenell, I'm sure as well, uh, that we look to when we wanna learn more about newsletters in media. So Matt, we're stuck to have you here on the show. Thanks for coming on.
Matt McGarry: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Dylan Redekop: So, thanks for doing this.
We, we have a lot of questions teed up for you, but I thought it would be interesting to start by, , maybe just talking a little bit about your newsletter itself, newsletter operator, which you, uh, you're helping a bunch of other newsletters grow, but you also. The power of starting an email list. So talk to us a little bit about how [00:02:00] you've grown a, how big is your newsletter now?
When did you start it and what were kind of some of the key strategies you've used to grow Newsletter operator.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, I've been sending a newsletter for, I guess since January, 2023. Over 50,000 subscribers now. We get great engagement, you know, 50% plus open rate, 5% plus click through rate, even at that. Level of scale is, it gets way harder as as you grow. And I've definitely seen that in the past couple years. We've, um, one thing I'm working on is branding this year and like I have so many different brands. Like last year our event was called Newsletter Marketing Summit. We changed it to New Media Summit. Our company's called Grow Letter, but my newsletter's called Newsletter Operator. So trying to simplify things and eventually kind of everything will be under the grow letter. Umbrella. And then we'll have like the event New Media Summit under that. And then the newsletter may not even have a name anymore. It's just our newsletter, GrowLetter's newsletter. What's the stuff that's worked well to grow? It has evolved so much. I'm, I'm sure you [00:03:00] guys have seen this where it's like what I did in uh, 2023, what that crushed.
It got me my first 1000, 10,000, 20,000 subscribers. Is completely non-existent now and what's working now is totally different than back then. Um,
can I walk you through like the evolution of it?
Dylan Redekop: Yeah, please, please.
Matt McGarry: Yeah. And it's just, I mean, it's just typical marketing 'cause platforms change and evolve over time and you know, work too well and then everybody adapts and then that, that dies out.
The only thing that pretty much stays relatively consistent is actually email itself. That's why we're always trying to get people onto our email list. So at first it was Twitter and Chenell did a lot of that too. Back in the day we were so. Super active on there, and now we're non-existent on there anymore it feels like and that just, it was just so easy to get website traffic from it. Like the, the, the bio people would click it. You had that like embed, in your profile to collect email addresses. You could do threads that actually worked, auto replies, comment to get something. You DM hundreds of people and so I got. [00:04:00] My first 1000 subscribers just through posting, you know, two to four times a week, like a quality thread, quality post, stuff like that on Twitter. Which still works. There's just probably different platforms now. We did, we did a lot of paid, we've done paid ads throughout the years. We've done meta, we've done, we did Twitter ads.
Twitter ads also used to work super well.
Dylan Redekop: Hmm.
Matt McGarry: they just, it's not a great platform. Um, we've done Meta ads consistently since. Around when I started, but with relatively low budgets, it still is mostly organic growth and we've just had so much more success. Taking people who sign up from organic sources like social media, YouTube, in search, and converting them into buyers where it's pretty easy to get signups from meta ads, but getting them to buy something and get value from those people has been always a challenge, and it's a challenge for our clients too. So after kind of Twitter fell off for me and I moved on other platforms, it's been LinkedIn, which is still one of our biggest growth sources now. Throughout that evolution, [00:05:00] because I've been posting a newsletter every week and I just published that exact newsletter or the, the article of that newsletter to my website, to my blog. We've built up pretty good search traffic without even trying, like I've done no optimization, no backlink strategy, but just publishing good stuff for a couple years, you start to build up, um, search traffic. So we do some. Email some basic email capture stuff, and that's been a great consistent channel.
It's not huge, and maybe AI is affecting that more, but it's not my only channel, so I'm not too worried. So we got a, we got a lot of people just from Google who are searching for terms around newsletters or marketing and stuff like that.
And then most recently, uh, just like you guys have, it's been YouTube for the past year or I'd say 2025 is when I started focusing on that. I just hit 10 or 11,000 subscribers, and that one has only really recently become a newsletter growth channel. And our, our strategy in all these places has been really simple. It's just like publish [00:06:00] useful content. That gets people to view or watch or read and then just have some type of next step for them to get onto the email list, whether that's just asking them to join the newsletter for more content strategy about that, or a relevant lead magnet that's related to the content.
So I did a YouTube video on cohort based courses. I promoted the lead magnet that was a free guide on cohorts, and because the content's relevant, we got hundreds of subscribers from that video.
Chenell Basilio: Hold on, hold on, hold on. Did Matt just say he got hundreds of subscribers from that one video? I had to go and research it because I was so curious about this. I could barely concentrate after he said this. So I went down the rabbit hole as I normally do, and I found all the places he promoted it, how he optimized his video for this thing.
And I actually texted him to get the results and he said he'd driven over a thousand email subscribers from that one video. And so I put together a free resource and lead magnet to show you exactly how he did that. And you can [00:07:00] grab it down below. Okay. Back to the video.
Matt McGarry: So it's, it's a lot of fundamental stuff like that. There's definitely some growth acts in there I can talk about later, but that's kind of the evolution from Twitter to LinkedIn to YouTube and, and Google as well.
Chenell Basilio: It's so funny, Matt. 'cause we actually, I think so I started my newsletter December, 2022 and yours was like, right, right there, right around the same time. So it's fun, it's been fun to like grow alongside you and just kind of
like see, um, how this, how this is going. Yeah, definitely miss the old Twitter days of just like, you know, post your stuff, engage with people, get some subscribers and, and go from there. Uh, but like you said, I think just. Trying out new channels. Like it probably still works just on different channels, so, uh, YouTube seems to be a good spot. Instagram is another one. So hoping to, uh, play around with that a little bit. What, what similarities are you seeing from like, Twitter, LinkedIn, those, those good old days to like YouTube now?
Like what are you seeing is like a good, good strategy there?
Matt McGarry: Well, I'll start [00:08:00] kind of step by step for each LinkedIn. We could talk forever about each of these rapid LinkedIn. Um, what I see works is you have to have just good editorial value based content and not really worry about the call to actions too much on those posts. That's just the foundation. You know, it's the classic like jab, jab, right hook.
Gary Vaynerchuk and I say that 'cause some people miss that. Like I talk a lot about these. List growth strategies where it's like, how to get subscribers from social media and I share all the list growth stuff, and then people do that, but they forget you actually still have to post useful content because if you don't post useful content, no one follows you, no one sees your stuff.
And then there's no one to actually take action when you do have some type of call to action or, or way to get them on your list. So that's step number one. Um, and I, I don't, you know, I've tried like. You know, mentioning, Hey, go to my bio. Hey, click the view my profile, review my newsletter link in my profile. All that stuff hasn't worked very well to actually get people onto the list. The best way to get people on the list, I've found is comment to get [00:09:00] giveaways or comment to get whatever you wanna call them, right? Where you, you basically promote some lead magnet. And I'll talk about how, I don't even make lead magnets, but I still do the strategy in a minute.
But, um, promote a lead magnet type thing and you say, Hey, if you want to get this comment, one relevant word, one keyword, one k comment, newsletter, comment, email, and I'll DM it to you. And they comment that feeds the engagement on the post, so it gets more views, more comments, and then you DM them a link to your landing page where they sign up. And that's, you know. Where we've got probably like 80% of the thousands of subscribers I've gotten from LinkedIn. And we make, you know, I, I track my revenue per, um, signup source and we're making like $76. From everybody who signs up from LinkedIn, for example. 'cause a lot of them buy our products and they're great leads.
So it's hard to grow your list there without comment to get. But the lead quality from LinkedIn is, is crazy high. Right? And then of course there's an art form, like writing a comment to get posts that like hooks people in and actually gets them into a comment. A lot of that just comes down to having a good lead magnet that's like [00:10:00] relevant.
We could get into the difference between good lead magnets and bad lead magnets, but what I do is I haven't. Made a dedicated lead magnet ever, which is, uh, not necessarily a good thing, but I just never do it. What I try and do is each newsletter I write every week, I try and just write something so valuable, so concise and insightful that it could become a lead magnet. Every time I promote a quote unquote lead magnet, it's just one of my newsletters behind what I call an email gate where people have to enter their email address to actually read the content. And so it just creates no additional work for me. I just have to actually write the post and then do it. So that's the main LinkedIn growth strategy.
There's a couple others like pre-call to actions, post call to actions I could talk about later, but that's like the, the bread and butter of LinkedIn newsletter growth.
Dylan Redekop: How much are you optimizing or testing your bio and like your links in your bio and stuff like that on LinkedIn?
Matt McGarry: Not enough, but I also think there's only so much juice you can squeeze out of that. I think you have, you know, if you have a LinkedIn premium [00:11:00] account, a premium account, and you have like the View My newsletter button, kind of a no brainer to have, you can have a featured link and if you're gonna have that, you should probably only have one or two links.
One of them should be your newsletter, or maybe the only one should be your newsletter. And probably even better than your newsletters to lead magnet. What I'm finding now is that, um, people are just less excited to sign up for another newsletter than they were a couple years ago. And, but, but people like lead magnets have been around for, for decades, maybe since the beginning of time.
Who knows? And they're just not going away. So I think. I think every, everybody who's struggling to grow their email list, grow their newsletter. Um, either you don't have a lead magnet or you haven't tested enough lead magnets. Then if some, for some reason you've already done that, which is, that actually eliminates 99% of people, 'cause most people don't fit the two criteria. Then you need to find better ways to promote those lead magnets. And I think organic list growth really just comes down to those three things. And so lead magnet in the feature section. Your description of [00:12:00] your LinkedIn account, I don't think anybody reads those anyways, and that's, that's about it as far as profile optimization, maybe a call to action, your banner for the lead magnet, just directing all that traffic to one place and then avoiding the common mistakes of, like, you've talked about this on the program, like don't have a link tree in your bio because that distracts people with five different options.
Just send people to one or two places.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah,
that's, that's pretty sound advice. I, I put a. My main link before I signed up for LinkedIn Premium, um, my main link was Get your first 1000 subscribers was the link. And so that was a really great, it went right to my five day email course of getting a thousand subscribers, my lead magnet. And I found that worked actually, pretty decently to, to at least get the right kind of person on my subscriber list.
So I think that's a, for me it's, it's worked decently. I think that's a good piece of advice.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, and, and honestly, YouTube is not that much different than
every social platform. It's just like the format and [00:13:00] layout is slightly different. So it's like you have a video about a topic, you have a lead magnet related to that topic to condense it or give them more useful information. You could get fancy lead magnets.
A lot of times I'll just say like. If I'm doing a video of slides, Hey, do you want the slides
so you can like, read this and revisit it, click below and opt in to get the slides. Like it doesn't have to be that complicated.
Dylan Redekop: And you've already created the slides, so it's like no extra work for you.
Matt McGarry: exactly.
Yeah.
Or like, AI prompts work great. Now it's like, Hey, I made this, this video teaches this thing, but like, do you want a prompt that like, does a lot of it for
you? Click here to get it. And then that's the, the placement's important. So like the first link in bio needs to be the lead magnet. Of course, you have your description below that with timestamps and all that stuff.
And then the pin comment also needs to be the lead magnet
Dylan Redekop: Right. We're talking on YouTube for
Matt McGarry: on YouTube. Yeah.
And that, that's YouTube, um, list riff. I mean, I'm sure you can get more complicated, but that's like where your prime real estate is and that's how to use it. I.
Dylan Redekop: Hmm.
Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I like that. Um, are you doing like shorts or anything on YouTube as well, or [00:14:00] just straight long form video and just That's it.
Matt McGarry: We just started, I have neglected it because of, um, my personal addiction to shorts. And like, I don't want to contribute to the, all the slop that I, I, I feel like it's just not healthy and I'm, I'm the, I'm a victim. Right. But, um, I think it's, I think I'm just like, putting my personal beliefs above what works in business and marketing.
So I'm gonna stop doing that and start posting more shorts. Of course, there's a bandwidth issue that like all of us have, like, oh, I gotta write a newsletter and do one video week, and then shorts on top of that. It's like, how do I manage all that? I have a team that helps. And right now we're just, you know, clipping, which, um, can work.
I think dedicated shorts will work better. And I haven't put in the effort to do that yet.
Dylan Redekop: Can you just, uh, explain for the audience what a distinct or distinction between clipping and a dedicated short.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, absolutely. So just like a long form video, like a podcast or a long form kind of teaching YouTube video like I do, taking a 30-second, [00:15:00] 60-second, 90-second clip from that and doing that as a short and same thing with reels and tiktoks and all that stuff.
And then de, you know, dedicated is just like something really meant and built for that platform that I film. And, um. I wanna do more of that. I think a lot of people can go a long way with like just doing shorts and then having a weekly newsletter. Not everybody has to do a long form or make long form YouTube videos or do podcast. you know, the short form mediums is really powerful and kind of still underutilized, especially in like the, the more business B2B space.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah, I think, I think.
Chenell Basilio: there.
Dylan Redekop: And I have both. We've had, uh, Milly Tamati on our podcast who's just blown up her list on TikTok, just with shorts or like, you know, tiktoks, right? Short form video. And that lead to like a quiz, and then that's like her lead magnet. And then we also have somebody in the Growth Reverse Pro community. Uh, her name's Charlie, who's done something very similar on TikTok. Again, just with short form video, like two, maybe three minutes [00:16:00] long that lead to another lead magnet. So I think you're, you're spot on with that. With that insight.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, and I wish I could speak more from experience, but like I just think people need to do it more and get over being on camera and not worry about editing and treat these like throwaway videos. 'cause they are, it doesn't matter if one gets a hundred views or 50 views, like
that won't affect you in the long run. 'cause it's just, I see people growing way faster when they just focus on making some half decent shorts versus trying to like write amazing LinkedIn post or
figure out SEO or. Try and make Twitter work when it really doesn't work for, um, email audience growth anymore.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah, I said 2025 was gonna be my year of short form video, and it wasn't. So 2026
is
Chenell Basilio: Spoiler alert, it was not.
Dylan Redekop: of. Yeah, exactly. But no, uh, I've seen, I've seen so many people just crush it with short form and it's like my, I just overthink it. So I need to put that aside and just start recording. Get [00:17:00] over that. Get over the ego, get over the, the fear of looking like an idiot and uh, just start publishing.
Matt McGarry: I'll do some with you. We'll talk about it later,
Dylan Redekop: Ah, ah, there we go. I like it.
Matt McGarry: maybe at our event, maybe I'll, I'll film some with you There
Dylan Redekop: Yes. Yes. Why don't we, I mean, that's a great segue, Matt. So let's lead in a little bit to, um, the new Media summit. It was called the, uh, newsletter Marketing Summit last year. We're changing it, uh, we're changing a little bit of the scope, so talk to us and the audience a little bit about the new Media Summit coming up.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, well, I can talk, I'll talk about the event and if you ever wanna talk about event businesses and like how they do them, I can talk about that too.
But New Media Summit, which just, it's becoming, and it's going to become the event for what I call the new media and content economy. So it's kind of the people like us, people that listen to this, people, um, like speakers that we have, like Sam Parr, Codie Sanchez. Um, Sagar from Breaking Points. Tim Huelskamp from 1440. We have about 25 plus speakers now. Ryan [00:18:00] Deiss,
Dylan Redekop: Chenell Basilio,
Matt McGarry: yeah. And Chenell Basilio and Dylan, who's gonna be our MC So it's like everybody here is actually gonna be the event too.
I, I've been to a lot of media events. I've been to even some newsletter events and I've never, I'm never really satisfied with them.
Media events, they tend to focus on like. Legacy media. Um, you know, and just like they're all talking about the same topics every time. I don't know if you ever listened to like media podcast or, or been to some of these media events where it's like there's a certain like, uh, media corporate speak that they use and the content is just totally non-actionable. And some events have been fun. Some events have been really disappointed with there. Um, there, there's some great conferences about just newsletters, which is kind of what we did last year, even though the, the name was about newsletters, but the content at the conference was not. And I just wanna have a wider scope. You know, we want to cover people who are building media, businesses, newsletter businesses, education information businesses and community businesses too, all at one event because I really think you need to [00:19:00] be, you don't have to do everything as a business, but you need to have a full stack understanding of the information space.
And so we're gonna talk about how to grow on YouTube, how to grow on social, how to grow and monetize your newsletter, how to sell information products, how to build communities, so on and so forth. So that's what the event's about. And also a lot of it's just about networking. Like we don't have back to back sessions forever. We have really cool dinners that we host, lounges that we have, so people can have those conversations where the real insights happen off stage. So that's all I'll share about it. If you know, if you have more you wanna ask me about it, let me know, but it's, if you want to check it out, it's new media summit.com and I won't promote it again.
But if you want to attend, of course we have a discount code. I'm a marketer, I gotta share one. So it's GIR20 for 20% off.
Chenell Basilio: I think that was my next question ' cause we actually had that on our list, so thanks for, uh,
Matt McGarry: you.
Chenell Basilio: that.
We'll make sure to put that in the, in the show notes too.
Um, but I think, I think you're under a hundred tickets left, so people need to
Matt McGarry: Yeah, by the time [00:20:00] you see this, like prices are probably gonna increase soon. Tickets are gonna be
nearly sold out, but there'll still be time left. But if you want to take, if you wanna attend, take a look soon. I would say
Dylan Redekop: And, uh, forgive me if you did mention this, but I should repeat it, February 25th to
Matt McGarry: I didn't. Yeah, that's probably the most important thing is like where
it is and when is It's in Austin, Texas on February 26th and 27th.
Dylan Redekop: 26, 20 seventh. Great. Um, and that's of 2026. Obviously if you're watching this in 2027, I'm sorry. So come hang out with me and Matt and Chenell. We're gonna be there, with Belson and you'll hear us 'cause we'll be jingling. So, yeah, I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be a great time. I'm really excited.
I've never been to Austin, so selfishly, I'm, I'm even just excited to check out the
Matt McGarry: It is great. So.
it's like right in the center of downtown Austin where like everything is, you know, there's a zillion bars and restaurants and stuff that do around the event venue.
Chenell Basilio: exciting. It was a great time last year, um, just to be near and around like all of the people in the newsletter space was so fun.
Um, [00:21:00] and it was actually right. After we launched this podcast, and this was the event that I went to
where everyone was like, I love the podcast. I love the podcast. And I was like, what about the newsletter guys?
Like I spend more time on that.
Matt McGarry: That's the funny thing about when you go to events and people talk to you, and we're fortunate enough where like, you know, some people know us at events or a lot of people in Chenell's case, right? But,
um, people generally mention, uh, your podcast or long form content like YouTube and they don't mention the newsletter as much, but the inverse is they all buy from your emails.
You know, maybe they discover it or kind of make the decision after listening to a podcast or YouTube video. But then like the marketing emails and the newsletters, get them to take action and, and move them off the fence.
Dylan Redekop: Well, Matt, you just published a video that was, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna paraphrase sort of the title, but it's basically like. You don't need a big email list to grow a really,, successful business. And I assume this is, uh, [00:22:00] by doing things like maybe events or selling courses. But do you wanna give us a lowdown of kind of this new, idea that, you know, when Chenell started growth in reverse pro, or sorry, growth in reverse.
The newsletter was like, how people got 50,000 and beyond subscribers and all these, you know, large lists, which, which are great, but talk to us a little bit about why the big list isn't always necessarily the best list.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, it's a lot of the, there's a couple reasons for that. A lot of the, the big, big list. People can grow with just a general audience that isn't valuable with like paid acquisition sources or co-reg or, or various, I wouldn't call them growth hacks, but just ways to acquire emails. That doesn't actually build an audience.
You like get people to join the list, but they don't know, like, and trust you and therefore they're not financially valuable. And I think people mostly wised up and stopped doing that. That doesn't mean paid acquisition or anything is bad, just means not every email address is created equal that you acquire. And I think a lot of people when they, when they look from the outside into this space. [00:23:00] They look at the big creators and publishers who have tens of thousands, hundreds, or millions of subscribers, and they're using, their businesses are at scale and they're using ways to monetize an audience that is also at scale, which means large.
So they're, they're monetizing with sponsorships and their newsletter, podcast, YouTube, they're selling lower ticket digital products, a hundred dollars, 500 bucks, 50 bucks, and they can move a lot of volume 'cause they have a large audience. You get it like at scale stuff. That's really, if you're just starting from scratch, as most people probably are that are listening to this, if, if you do the exact same things that those folks are doing and build your business model in the same way, it's harder to become successful.
You have to approach things differently. And what I recommend, not to everybody, but to most people, um, and when I talk about that in video, in that video is like, how, how do you acquire a targeted, small group of people? There's always the ability to scale well beyond a thousand or 10,000 subscribers later.
'cause the reality is, if you can get to a thousand [00:24:00] subscribers organically, you have the skillset, you have the momentum to get to an audience of 10,000 plus newsletter subscribers. And if you can get to 10 K over a long enough timeline, you'll be at 50 K or a hundred k too. So that's important to note.
It's like it's, you're not gonna be at one K forever. But you should probably focus on. Writing content that solves a problem for a more niche or group of people, it shouldn't be like, here's the news of just the facts. Here's um, the, the five hot stop tips for just a huge audience. You should try and differentiate.
Differentiate yourself at first. 'cause you can always expand and broaden your content in your audience later in the way to monetize an audience like that that cares about a certain thing and has a. A specific set of problems that aren't relevant to the general population is not through sponsorship.
It's not through low ticket products, it's through higher ticket services, like an agency service, like a consulting service, a higher ticket or higher touch coaching or, uh, consulting program. Maybe with some [00:25:00] actual deliverables. You shouldn't be afraid of actually selling your time. A lot of people get into newsletters 'cause they're like, I don't wanna sell my time, I don't wanna do any services, but. Everybody starts that way. And the best way to build a scalable business is to do stuff that doesn't scale first, like do services and then transform that into a scalable product or digital product later on. Anyways, so I think in that video, like I say, some pretty straightforward things, like if you have a. I forget the math now and I'm not gonna do it, but it's like if you have a a thousand email subscribers and like 1% buy a two, $2,000 per month service, I think you're around $20K MRR. My math may be off, but like a, a really one 2% conversion rate when people are buying something that's a thousand dollars, $2,000 a month or even one time becomes really meaningful revenue very quickly where you can get to 10 K per month, 20 K, 50 k. Um, I, because I had a high ticket service when I started my newsletter, when I was about. At about 935 subscribers, I have the exact number in that video. I was at 50 k per month. MRR 'cause we just had a [00:26:00] service that was around $3K per month in fees. And you don't have to do a service. You could have a, a higher ticket product that's 1000, $2,000, $5,000.
So you could do an event that has a ticket cost of one to $5,000 and then has sponsorships on top on top of that. And so. That's what I encourage people to explore. We could talk about the details later, is that, build your business model, not just your audience, and build a business model where you don't need tens of thousands of customers or an audience of millions to actually make a great living.
I.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah,
I think the, the sexy temptation is you look at, you know, some of the, to be honest, some of the email or some of the newsletters we just listed in your intro, like 1440 in the Hustle and Morning Brew, and those who grew these massive email lists and then can get these CPM, you know, ad placements that are making them, you know, six figures a month.
But that's not the reality for, the 99.9% of people. And [00:27:00] so I think the. Again, the vanity metric of having these large lists is not, is not the same thing that it used to be.
Chenell Basilio: I, I made this mistake when I first started too. Like I kind of fell into growth and reverse, which is hilarious looking back, but like. I had no idea what I was doing. Zero clue. Wouldn't sell a course, didn't wanna do anything. I was like, Nope. Sponsorships. I'm not gonna charge my audience anything.
No paid newsletter, nothing. And then over time I'm like, oh, this is really silly. Like, what am I doing here? Like, I am spending more than a full time jobs worth of work every week and not getting paid very much. And so it like wasn't sustainable and so I quickly realized like, oh, I do need to start doing like coaching and like newsletter audits and all that stuff.
And so over time it's grown, but it's just, yeah, I would highly recommend people listen and do not make that mistake from the beginning 'cause it does happen. Yeah. Great advice.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, a lot of people, just for whatever reason, I've kind of, when I was a maybe beginner, I felt this way too. It's like, oh, you [00:28:00] build a newsletter audience and the sponsors will just come.
And then you just have one ad per newsletter. That's a really bad business model and maybe
it used to be good. Sponsorships are, are one of the worst ways to monetize audiences.
You really want to have direct audience monetization. There's a lot of ways you can do that that we mentioned and we could talk about more. And people think like, because they haven't experienced it firsthand, they think sponsorships are a magic bullet, but they actually suck. I mean, uh. go work with, we do like six figures in sponsorship sales at our event. Um, and I love all the sponsors and we only have to work with like 10 of them. But like, it's, it's really difficult. And at The Hustle, when I used to work there, we're talking a hundred plus sponsors a year. Constant grind to get new ones. Keep them happy, satisfy them, deliver the creative, get it reviewed.
It becomes like a service business. So why not just do a service for your customers instead, right? And then eventually you can productize that service and turn it into something digital and more scalable. And the maybe one [00:29:00] actionable thing I would add to that is if, if you're not sure where to start, you know, first is start publishing a weekly newsletter, building an audience on a discovery platform like YouTube, LinkedIn, so on and so forth.
But just. Sell a 45 minute, 30 minute consulting call for a hundred bucks, 200 bucks or less, and then just try and help people work through a problem that they have. After you do five or 10 of these calls, you're gonna see clear patterns in the problems that your audience has, and then you could develop maybe a more structured coaching service to solve it. Maybe an actual done for you service or maybe some type of. Digital product that solves that problem too. But you don't want to be a hammer looking for a nail where it's like, I, I'm gonna sell a course, I'm gonna sell a sponsorship, I'm gonna sell an ebook, I'm gonna sell a paid newsletter. That is the completely reverse way to do it.
Or you, you should do it in the reverse way, I should say, right? Growth and reverse or whatever. But, um, you should go in, so much reverses going on here. You
should go and just find the problem and then whatever [00:30:00] problem pattern that you see. You identify a product or a service that is the best solution for that problem and not the other way around. Does that, I think that makes sense.
Chenell Basilio: It does. And I think, I think a lot of people go for the sponsorship route in the beginning because they're so scared to like ask their audience or like charge them any money. But honestly, if you think about it, like your audience is probably reading your stuff. They trust you. They think what you're talking about is interesting and you know what you're talking about. And so it's like you're almost doing them a disservice by not. Having something for them to buy from you and being like, Hey, I read your stuff every week, but you're not actually helping me pass that because I need, I have this question, I'm not able to get past it. And you're like, well, I'm just gonna like put sponsors in my newsletter where it's like if you actually had a call like Matt's talking about, or, or a product that people could buy, it's so much more valuable for them too.
So you're not just like, you know, grifting money out of your audience, like you're actually giving them something of value as well.
Matt McGarry: it. took me a long time to develop that mindset. I wanna [00:31:00] share maybe a rule that would help people who have that, have that, you know, are not sure to overcome that. But I would just, I, I've, I started with that mindset too, and I've eventually shifted. And this also can become toxic. Toxic, if you go too far away is like, if you don't buy this, you are worse off.
And I'm doing you a disservice if you don't buy it. Because now that I've. Acquired so many customers and worked with thousands of people. I know people who just read my free stuff are not gonna get the same results of people who just pay me, you know, $1,500, for example, for, you know, one product or one, one cohort that I do, or a service or an event like I, I, I'm so. The confidence has come from doing it for a long time, for doing it for at least two or three years. It doesn't, that's not gonna happen overnight, but I think everyone can develop that over time. There also is a point where you can take it too far, but, uh, the rules that I have, 'cause I'm a very like, rule-based person, that have helped me with this or the following.
So, you know, I send a weekly newsletter. I try and just make. All value. And at [00:32:00] the bottom I just put like, here's how I can help you. Here's the three products I have, the three third, the three products or services I have. So it's like I'm not selling there, I'm just listing out what the options are if you want to take action. And then you have to send marketing emails to sell things. But I don't send anyone a marketing email until they reach some type of engagement threshold. So they've opened at least three or two emails and they've clicked at least one. I won't market or sell to you until you've done that. So I don't feel like you're so, you don't feel like you're getting hit over the head with like a call to action without really getting some value first.
And the final rule I have is that at the bottom of any marketing email, I'll just give you a way to opt out, not interested in this product, click here to opt out, and you click that button. I won't every email you about it again. And so I feel like for me, that's just giving me more confidence to market more.
'cause I know I don't market them until a certain threshold. I always give them the way of the optout every single time. And so I, I just, I feel [00:33:00] more safe marketing. And the one thing I'll add to that is that the click through rate on that, like click here to opt out and I won't ever email you about this, is, is very, very low.
It's like 0.1%, 0.05%. So most people are not telling me explicitly they're not interested, they're just not quite ready yet.
Dylan Redekop: It's, um, emailing with integrity is what, I dunno, that feels like right. You're not, you're not
Matt McGarry: I'm trying to.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah, you're not doing like kind of the grubby, sort of like email marketing three. It's our launch. We're doing like, uh, eight emails a day and you have no choice but to receive all of them more unsubscribe, you know, completely.
And yeah, I've, I've been part of your launches and you do a couple days where there's multiple emails a day, but like you said, you have this option to, Hey, I don't wanna hear about this anymore. But I still like Matt, I still wanna get his a newsletter, but I just don't want to be part of this launch. And so you have given them that option to opt out and I could see that giving, you know, if I did that, that would gimme some peace of mind as well, that I'm [00:34:00] not doing them a disservice and wasting their time and crowding their inbox for, um, and making them resent me.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, and I'll say one more thing. I do multiple emails a day are great for deadlines. It's not, you
know, like the final day of, of a real, you know, legit deadline. But I only send those to people who click. So it's
like if you don't, if you don't click my sales page to buy my thing, you're not gonna get email number two.
And I've done like a max of three usually. Maybe there's one or two exceptions to that in the past couple years. But those are not going out to everybody. It's just like people who really raise their hands.
Dylan Redekop: Nice.
I've got Chenell, unless you have a follow up question to that, I've got, I think we could do some like sort of rapid ish fire questions.
Chenell Basilio: Sure, go for it.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah. Okay. Um, Matt, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for newsletters or newsletter operators in the coming year?
Matt McGarry: I think it's all about business model monetization. I don't think it's like, [00:35:00] Hey, if you set up TikTok ads, you know you're gonna crush it and grow your audience. I, I think you know, the audience growth and lead generation opportunities. I feel I've been getting more and more difficult, except for a couple exceptions, like short form video, like YouTube, like the comment ticket, things still works on LinkedIn.
Meta ads are always gonna keep working, but what makes all that stuff work better, especially paid ads, is just having a business model where you have high customer LTV, you have repeat purchases, you have high customer satisfaction, so people buy again, you tell their friends and you have a, you build a positive reputation for the product. That's one of the things that um, a lot of beginners won't realize is that like you get some of the biggest gains in business after you've been selling the same product service, or in my case event for multiple years, like when I did the first event. Really hard to get people there, really hard to get sponsors.
'cause the first ever event has no reputation. Uh, but with Write, Grow, Sell, saw my cohort now we're in like the seventh cohort that I'm doing and it's been around for over two years and like people have thought about it. [00:36:00] For six or 12 months and they're much more likely to buy now 'cause they've already thought about it.
So it's like starting that, um, product, whatever. It's for your product service event, starting that as soon as possible so that one year, two years, 10 years from now, you reap the benefits and staying consistent is the biggest opportunity. But I think people struggle to identify, what is the type of product or server that that actually solves a problem for their audience. And then how do you market it and sell it, and how do you actually deliver it? Kind of hard for us to answer that question, like rapid fire format. I've done some content on this, that I hope helps and maybe we could, I could send to you later. You could put it in the description.
Uh, but that's the main thing.
Dylan Redekop: Okay, awesome. Someone start paid growth for their newsletter? This ties in kind of thinking a little bit to what you were just talking about.
Matt McGarry: Yeah. There's no right or wrong answer. 'Cause I've seen people never do it. Because you don't, you don't have to use that as a channel ever to build a successful business. I've seen people start from day one. I generally say you want, con some semblance, some idea of [00:37:00] content market fit and um, monetization and understanding of your subscriber lifetime value. There's some nuances to that. So content market, and I think you want all of those things, all three of those things, if for like a clear criteria before starting. So content market fit is like my newsletter consistently hits 50% plus open rate, five to 10% plus click through rate. I don't have some astronomical, uh, unsubscribe rate. Most people can, can achieve that, right? Um, monetization. That's the hard one. Getting, you know, one, five, 10% of your customers to convert into buyers or some way, or having a large enough list where you're already selling ads and monetizing, that's the harder one. But it's important because there's not really much of a reason to start paid advertising unless you can make that money back in 30, 60, 90 days after someone joins your email list. And then the third, I think I forgot what it was, but the final thing, that I'll say is that, some people do it from day one just to like kind of like build momentum and dip their toes in. Like I think Chenell has talked about [00:38:00] how Dan from the TLDR newsletter has done this. He just like set up an ad campaign at five bucks a day and he gets 10 subscribers a day and it's like, that's a great way to just learn the platforms, like understand how to use paid ads. Kind of like you're, you're paying money to Facebook to learn the platform.
You're getting some subscribers. You may or may not be able to monetize them effectively. But it, it's probably worth doing. If you want to learn paid ads in three, six months from now when you have content market fit and monetization, then you can dial that ad spent up more. The final thing, the third thing I forgot was, some idea of ARPU average revenue per newsletter subscriber or LTV lifetime value per subscriber. And so that could just be taken like total revenue from your list and then your total list size and like, that's your rough LTV.
The challenge of that is, let's say I make $76 from everybody who joins from LinkedIn. I'm not gonna make that much money from someone who joins from Meta because there's a different quality of lead. Different audience intent that they have. Um, they have less experience [00:39:00] than me if they just saw one ad. And so as a rule of thumb, it might be safe to say that your LTV from paid sources, if you're just kind of like guesstimating to just get started, it's probably half over, over organic sources or less.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah.
Chenell Basilio: Yeah. I'm curious, sorry to disrupt your speed round, Dylan. For lifetime value, are you just using like beehives. Metrics are you pulling in anything else, like any other tools you're using? Because I know Beehive has now started to like take into account website traffic and and revenue from that.
But I'm curious how you, you've been doing that in the past?
Matt McGarry: It's, it's, that's also, uh, a every, everybody has this, whether it's like a huge business or a small business. It's this ARPU for, for a newsletter subscriber or a lead is really tough. And, uh, beehive hasn't totally solved it, but it's actually a lot better than other platforms. 'cause you can combine other things to figure it out. That's, that's a good opportunity for someone to like actually have a software or service that does this. But, um, what we do is like, we kind of [00:40:00] export our beehive subscribers and Beehive has a, does a good job of see, of giving you some newsletter subscriber by source. So I got a thousand subscribers from LinkedIn, five a hundred from YouTube, a a hundred from Google search. And then I go into, 'cause we don't really sell sponsorships really, but I go into my customer database of all of their email addresses and how much revenue. We have made from those customers and a separate CSV file. I put those both in the ChatGPT, and I forget the prompt, but it's like, find the matching email addresses, see how much, revenue came from each signup source, LinkedIn versus Google versus all this. And then it gives me, how much revenue from each source and then the, uh, revenue per subscriber from that source. So LinkedIn at 76, Google, it's 55, et cetera.
That's, that's manual. But like that would be a good, maybe we might do it every other month. Probably good to do once a month or once a quarter.
Chenell Basilio: Yeah, I just started playing around with, um, [00:41:00] SegMetrics. It's a tool that kind of promises to do this, but it's not perfect. But yeah, it'll take into account like website visits and, email subscribers and then figure out like where your revenue comes from and stuff like that. So, but again, it's another, another cost, so it's not super simple, but
yeah.
Dylan Redekop: Substack. We can't, I don't wanna make this about ESPs,
Chenell Basilio: just one word, Substack,
Dylan Redekop: word, Substack, go.
Matt McGarry: uh, I was trying to think of something funny to say. I dunno.
I,
I
Chenell Basilio: gonna laugh if Matt goes, I actually started a Substack
last week.
Dylan Redekop: that's right. That
Matt McGarry: you know what I, because substack people get real tribal about their email service provider. Like I talk about Kit or beehive or substack, people who don't use one of those platforms or like, what about flow desk? I'm like. Sure I haven't used Flodesk, but if it's working for you, go, go for it.
I think Substack is like, as every, as a lot of people who are kind of in the know, realize that it's becoming a social platform with some email and newsletter features. It's not [00:42:00] a, a platform to build your media business exclusively on, it's not an email marketing platform. It's not a true newsletter platform. There's a lot of limitations and Substack really wants to funnel your audience into their app, into other newsletters on the platform. So it's, it's closer to Twitter or LinkedIn than it is to, building a business through tools like Kit and Beehive and HubSpot or whatever you choose to use. So. In that case, I think think of it as like a discovery platform. I want to, I'm gonna start utilizing Substack notes eventually. It's been on my to-do list forever, just like short form video. And you could post the type of stuff that you post on LinkedIn or Twitter to substack notes or maybe some custom stuff, and that could be a great way to acquire. Email addresses. 'cause they do have a frictionless signup process on Substack notes, like there's a little subscribe button and they're added to your substack email list and you get the email and you can send via substack or you can export that email to whatever sending tool you use, your other ESP. But I would be concerned about building my entire business on substack [00:43:00] for a number of reasons we don't need to get into. But, uh, I generally, it's helping people, so I'm a fan of it. I'm not like anti substack by any means. To sponsor our, our event. Maybe I'll be more positive, right? I don't think they will, but um, yeah, so that's my thoughts, you know, treat it like a social
platform. But you know, I think you just have to have something else in the long run.
But if you're like, starting news, you're just trying to get up in live and going like, yeah, and you, and you like Substack and are comfortable with it already, go for it.
Dylan Redekop: Yeah,
I mean it's free. So whereas these other platforms, I mean, some of them have free plans, but they're somewhat limiting, so you can really kind of grow, use the network effects user, their social platform. You can grow a decent sized list there. I think it gets some momentum. And then when it comes time. Export, transport, whatever you wanna do to a different platform.
Matt McGarry: Yeah. And another maybe like obvious prediction is like everybody, in the future will just have multiple ways to send multiple ESPs. Like they'll have a beehive account and a kit account, or they'll have substack and beehive or beehive and high [00:44:00] level. Just, just as a insurance policy and also for maybe for like, maybe you send some marketing emails from one and you send newsletters from another.
It's not something that beginners should do, but it's just a way to kind of hedge your bets because, you know, platforms could go down. Maybe one platform gets more effective by a deliverability issue than another.
Dylan Redekop: Yep. That's a good point. Oh, this has been great. I, um, I've got more questions, but I'm also, I wanna respect your time and, and the listeners and stuff. And we've talked about a lot of great stuff. So, Chenell, do you have anything else you wanna hit Matt with?
Chenell Basilio: Um, I don't think so. I think this was, this was good. I'm
excited to get this out there and I don't know, have people listen to it and discover Matt's world and that kind of thing. So
Matt McGarry: Thank you. You're, you're, you're really fun to talk to and it went by fast, but we, we did, we did cover a lot of ground. I hope this
is helpful newmediasummit.com, gIR20.
Chenell Basilio: Come hang out.
Dylan Redekop: give all of the places where we can connect with [00:45:00] you. Uh, you know, LinkedIn, we'll, we'll obviously share 'em in the show notes, but, uh, for people listening who are maybe driving and stuff like that, um, what's your best platform? What's your website and all that stuff.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, it's really just, I, the thing I would recommend is new media summit.com and check out my YouTube channel. If you just search Matt McGarry, you'll find me there. And you can find my newsletter from there too. I've been putting a lot of effort. Hopefully there'll be more videos by the time you see this.
And if you follow me on YouTube, you'll, there'll be more to watch. But I think that's a great place to start.
Chenell Basilio: Awesome.
Dylan Redekop: Mets dish. A lot of good content there, so highly
recommend.
Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Thanks for, uh, coming on the show, Matt. This was fun.
Matt McGarry: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Dylan Redekop: And we'll see you in a few
Chenell Basilio: people enjoyed, yeah, if people enjoyed this, they should actually go check out. I, I was on Matt's podcast recently, so we'll have to link to that one in the show notes too. If you want more content like this.
Uh, go watch that
one next.
Matt McGarry: Yeah, we covered, and we covered a lot of different topics too, so it'll
Chenell Basilio: Yeah, we
Matt McGarry: different types of content.
Chenell Basilio: Yeah.
Dylan Redekop: Sweet.
All right.
Chenell Basilio: Cool.
Dylan Redekop: All right. We'll see y'all in Austin.
Chenell Basilio: Yeah. Howdy.
[00:46:00]