50,000 🎉

How I grew this newsletter over the past three years

This week Growth Unhinged celebrates a big milestone: 50,000 subscribers 🎉

It’s certainly not the biggest tech newsletter (Lenny’s Newsletter has 700,000+ subscribers), but I’m proud of what it has become and the community of people I’ve met along the way. Writing Growth Unhinged is my own professional development, letting me learn from the sharpest software founders and leaders on the planet. THANK YOU for reading, sharing with your colleagues, and contributing your feedback 🧡🙏

Back at 30,000 I reflected on my playbook for writing better B2B content, and for balancing writing without distracting from my actual job. This time I thought I’d share something more on-brand: how I grew Growth Unhinged. I’ll unpack my surprising learnings from writing 120+ editions nearly every week for more than three years. Don’t worry, I’m bringing data 🤓

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How I grew from 0 to 50,000

1. Consistent quality > viral hits

In the first year of Growth Unhinged a post unexpectedly hit the top of Hacker News. Traffic went through the roof — I thought I had MADE it.

It turns out this didn’t move the needle. Subscribers never spiked materially and any growth subsided within 24 hours. (And I haven’t landed on the front page since…)

My learning: B2B newsletters are a game of singles and doubles — not home runs.

I analyzed how many new subscribers joined from each of my 120 posts. The five that went “viral”, like this recent one with

Palle Broe

about how AI apps make money, accounted for only 14% of the total. Home runs are helpful, not game-changing. The singles and doubles, i.e. the posts that generate 50-150 new subscribers, made up 55% of posts and 55% of new subscribers. These are what really matter.

While I want to say I’ve improved over time, I still have my share of strike-outs. One-third of posts brought in fewer than 50 new subscribers, which means they had zero or net-negative new subscribers after accounting for unsubscribes and email bounces. Ouch.

There isn’t a silver bullet to growth. The best way to grow faster would be to increase the frequency of quality content, and to filter out anything that doesn’t measure up.

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2. It’s not about big name brands

I’ve had a chance to feature senior leaders at a who’s who of software brands. Many of these “big name” posts have fallen flat. I suspect it’s because the advice can be too aspirational or too high-level (or too PR-sanitized) — not tactical enough to apply elsewhere.

Looking at the best posts — those that brought in 150 or more new subscribers — two themes emerge:

1. You like when I bring a fresh perspective or original data that’s not available elsewhere. Some examples: the state of SaaS pricing, 2.0 guide to SaaS metrics, and my diatribe against time savings as a value proposition.

2. You like when domain experts get tactical at the thing they’re great at, whether that’s Anthony Pierri on homepage messaging,

   Tom Orbach
   on marketing quick wins, or
   Kate Syuma
   on product onboarding.

I’ll aim to bring you more of both over the next year.

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3. I neglected SEO for way too long

I ignored SEO for the first three years, making up excuses as I went along:

• An email newsletter isn’t built for SEO

• I’m going for quality, not SEO bait

• SEO is dying because of ChatGPT

Even small tweaks eventually translated into real results. Search now brings in ~10% of new subscribers, up substantially from the ~2-5% of the past couple of years.

Traffic from search over time (things were BLEAK in 2021)

And it didn’t take much:

• I moved from a Substack domain to a custom domain. It cost $36 for a three year plan. The migration was done in less than an hour.

• I edited SEO titles and descriptions for every new post. The titles and sub-titles that worked for an email-based newsletter didn’t always land with a cold audience on Google search. Now I adjust them to show up differently.

Next up: I want search to account for 15-20% of new subscribers by next year. I’ll be auditing past posts and refreshing ones that are already getting healthy search traffic. SEO experts out there: what else should I be doing? 😉

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4. Bylines were… fine?

When looking to build an audience from scratch, it’s natural to try borrowing someone else’s audience. Bylines get people interested in your writing and give you instant credibility.

At this point I’ve probably written at least a dozen bylines in different publications. Broadly speaking, my time would’ve been better spent on improving the quality of what I was writing for Growth Unhinged.

The (big) exception is

Lenny's Newsletter

, the 800-pound gorilla of the tech newsletter world. Last week Lenny published our fourth (!) collaboration, a post about how to build winning AI products featuring luminaries like Elad Gil, Scott Belsky, and Cameron Adams.

Aside from the added subscriber growth, working with Lenny has opened my eyes to what best-in-class looks like and how to apply it (spoiler: it’s about aiming high, spending more time, and ruthless editing). This collaboration has resulted in some of my all-time favorite pieces (like this one on how to make an impact in your first 90 days). These pillar pieces continue to attract a long-tail of new readers months later.

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5. Substack recommendations can be a false signal

Substack launched its writer recommendations feature in April 2022. This allowed writers to recommend other publications on the platform, creating a built-in growth loop.

It was huge. More than 275 fellow writers now recommend Growth Unhinged including brilliant folks like

Aakash Gupta

,

Paweł Huryn

,

Emily Kramer

,

CJ Gustafson

, and

Andre Retterath

. Collectively, writer recommendations bring in about HALF of new subscribers.

But I’m not about to double-down on “recommendation swaps” anytime soon. I’ve noticed that these readers are less invested in Growth Unhinged; they don’t open it as often and unsubscribe at high rates. It’s a wakeup call that chasing growth hacks can distract from building a highly engaged community.

To counteract these dynamics, I’ve spent a bunch of time on my welcome email for new subscribers. Specifically, I tell them exactly what to expect, give them the best content to read immediately, and encourage them to reply and open a conversation. (Casey Hill unpacked my approach a few weeks ago on LinkedIn).

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6. Word-of-mouth is hard to rely on

I don’t spend ad dollars to promote this newsletter. Frankly, I don’t have the budget. I rely on word-of-mouth, which is both wonderful and terrifying.

Word-of-mouth can be finicky and notoriously hard to influence. But I’ve found two things that help:

• Referral program. Readers can show their support by sharing the newsletter. Those with the most referrals move up the leaderboard (looking at you,

  Anton Zaides
  👀). My rewards aren’t particularly meaningful since I don’t monetize the newsletter (that said, if you’ve made it to 5+ referrals, I’m happy to set up an AMA or respond to your growth questions via email). Even still, referrals brought in ~600 new subscribers over the past 12 months, ~3% of the total (or ~6% if you don’t include the recommendations feature). Not bad!

• Favorite newsletter posts on LinkedIn. The closest Growth Unhinged came to going “viral” was when it got included in a wildly popular LinkedIn post about the best product and growth newsletters. A single post brought in almost 1,000 new subscribers. I can’t predict these shoutouts, but I can engage with and amplify them to maximize the impact.

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7. The content <> community flywheel improves everything

The old school content creation playbook centered around writing a blog post → then promoting it. My model is to treat content creation as a flywheel that’s made with a community and where creation and distribution are on equal footing.

Many of my newsletters start out as LinkedIn posts. This helps me discover what resonates with a broader audience and meet like-minded folks who want to contribute. If the post does well, I’ll turn it into a full newsletter. And then I’ll share every newsletter back on LinkedIn.

Many posts bomb. But I’d rather know that before I invest hours in writing and research! This approach helps me move fast and double-down on what works (and avoid spamming you…).

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THANK YOU again for your support, it really does mean the world to me 🙏🙏

My theme for 2024 is consistent quality and I hope to bring you plenty more 🔥 stories. If you have a story idea, simply hit reply — I’d love to hear from you.