📰 0 to 8,000 Subscribers in 2 Months - The full step by step playbook.

Hello everyone!

My wife Aleesha and I built something that we’ve been using every single day...

http://voicenotes.com/ is an AI note-taker that’s truly intelligent. Record your thoughts freely, get them transcribed using state-of-the-art AI, and ask about every word you spoke.

You can try without signing up. If you want to upgrade, there’s a $50 lifetime deal (normally $10/mo).

We just published a video to celebrate the launch: https://twitter.com/jijosunny/st...

Happy to answer any questions, but otherwise, we appreciate all your support. 🙏❤️‍🔥

For me, 2022 was a year of learning. To prepare for my new life as a professional writer, I spent much of my time scouring books and articles for compelling ideas, each of which I diligently noted.

From among the hundreds of ideas whose names I learned this year, I’ve selected 10 of the most thought-provoking. They are presented below, together with links for further reading (just click on the titles).

Cunningham's Law:

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer, because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them.

Surrogate Activities:

The more we eliminate struggles from our lives, the more we create artificial struggles – sports, video games, Twitter culture wars – because the mind wants peace, but needs conflict.

In just the 26 months since we first launched beehiiv, we have quickly built a reputation for constantly shipping new features. But that was never our goal, it sort of happened out of necessity.

Back in 2021 when we first entered the market…

Substack had just raised a $65M Series B and was the clear leader in this new wave of newsletter-focused platforms.

Twitter had just acquired Revue and began integrating it into their core product.

Facebook had just launched Bulletin and made a splash with some huge celebrities and writers.

The existing email ecosystem was already remarkably crowded and competitive with players like Mailchimp, Active Campaign, Constant Contact, Ghost, Hubspot, and a few dozen others…

And there we were. Brand new, unproven, and offering a very limited set of features.

Automations? Nope.

Subscriptions? Nope.

Custom fields? Nope.

Comments? Nope.

Segments? Nope.

API? Nope.

Long story short — we had a lot of work to do.

We needed to ship as many new features, as quickly as possible, to compete with the existing platforms. There was already a baseline foundation of what our target users expected in an email platform and we didn’t check half the boxes.

So how did we do it? Here’s the beehiiv playbook 👇🏽

Founding team of engineers

Ship or die

Unicorn engineers

Engineering density

Clear roadmap

Parallelize

Tight feedback loops

Full transparency

Progress >> perfection

Mistakes are expected

Working at Morning Brew as a scrappy 23 year old was the best experience I could have asked for. I joined the company in 2017 as the second employee, back when we were just four guys in a closet-sized office.

One of my first projects was to build the referral program, which over time led to well over a million subscribers.

The other was to build social sharing functionality for each story, which organically allowed readers to spread the reach of the newsletter.

I went on to lead growth for 18 months, creating my own ads in Photoshop, managing a ~$500,000 monthly budget, and everything in between.

Fast forward to 2020 — we had over 3.5M subscribers and were acquired by Business Insider.

Fast forward to today — I’ve now seen up close and personal thousands of others utilize the beehiiv platform to grow and scale their newsletters at a remarkable pace.

So when I decided I was going to kick off 2024 by launching my own personal newsletter (the one you’re reading in your inbox right now), I was chomping at the bit to marry my Morning Brew experience with the beehiiv platform.

The verdict: so far, so good 🫡. Over 8,000 highly engaged subscribers in just 2 months.

“We noticed that the traffic coming from the ‘pitch deck’ keyword on SEM was clearly our best type of lead. We doubled down, and very quickly we maxed out the SEM keyword and were already the first result across our target geos. The problem was, of course, SEM traffic is expensive, and not enough (only about 5% of searches). So we started focusing on SEO, around startup-related keywords. This was the first major marketing breakthrough for the company.

That year, we produced a lot of content (~150 articles) and, after a few months, managed to get to 3-5 SERP rankings for most of the keywords we had focused on.

For the next two years, that traffic drove our growth. Eventually, though, we realized that getting to 1-2 rank was probably not going to happen regardless of how many articles we published, so we figured we had to find ‘the next’ search engine: YouTube.

Our first strategy on YouTube was SEO: creating videos that answer questions people are looking for (i.e. ‘pitch deck’).

Once we built an audience, we produce content focused on the YouTube algorithm: focused on high CTRs, high watch time, topics that appeal to broad audiences and sharing. The thing with sharing is that we have little control on that decision.

Your email list is your direct line of communication to your audience. Social media platforms and algorithms can change overnight, leaving you at their mercy. But your email list? That's yours.

With your email list, you can reach your people on your terms. You can deliver value, share your offers, and build relationships directly in their inbox. It's personal, it's intimate, and it's a proven way to make money.

Once I focused on growing my email list, my business skyrocketed. I can confidently say an email list enabled me to create the multimillion-dollar business I have today.

I’ve found so much success with email that I created an online course, List Builders Society, to share the same strategies I use and help you accelerate your business growth.

I’ve done a lot of trial and error growing my email list over the years. What I’ve found are three easy list-building strategies you can start using today, starting with something called a lead magnet.