0-1m subs from scratch
Yesterday, a new reader sent me a fun question:
Louis — if you had to build a newsletter from 0 to 1 million subscribers from scratch today... how would you do it?
If you've been following me for a while, you'll know this isn't a topic I talk about a lot.
For most people, building a 1m+ subscriber newsletter isn't a smart goal: It's way easier to reach 7-figures in revenue by building a niche newsletter for an affluent audience of 10-100k subscribers.
That said — if you really want to try and build a 1m+ subscriber newsletter — I think there are four viable ways to do it.
But first, you need to understand a super important secret about the world's biggest newsletters...
The Secret 1M+ Sub Newsletters Won't Tell You
After 5+ years of working at SparkLoop, I'm pretty sure I've seen the "true" growth data for more 1m+ newsletters than anybody else in the world.
And the truth is... every single one of them had a "secret unfair advantage" in gaining their first 200k+ subscribers.
Something they leave out of public interviews, but without which they would never have made it to 1m+ subscribers.
It's not my place to share individual stories. But you can bet that pretty much every 1m+ subscriber newsletter you know had one (or more) of these unfair advantages :
- They had a huge existing audience elsewhere (eg on social media)
- They had a ton of money to invest into growth (eg on Meta ads)
- They were able to use someone else's audience to "seed" their newsletter (eg an established newsletter in their space gave them their first 200k subscribers in return for equity)
If you want to build a 1m+ subscriber newsletter from scratch, you should know that a referral program and "really great newsletter content" isn't enough.
You need to find (or create) your own unfair advantage.
How?
Here are the four ways I'd go about it if I were trying to build a 1m+ subscriber newsletter from scratch today (with no existing audience and no $$$) 👇
1️ Find an investor
Depending on your target audience, you'll need a war-chest of $300k-1m to quickly grow a newsletter to 1m subs.
Luckily, newsletters are an easy business model to understand. The risk is low (compared to eg tech companies), and there are plenty of related success stories you can point to of other newsletters as "validation".
So it isn't as hard as you'd think to find an investor who'll fund your growth in return for a significant equity stake.
More than a few 1m+ sub newsletters were born this way.
Start by making a list of founders/executives of the kind of brands you think would be the ideal sponsors of your newsletter.
They're likely to be the ideal investor to fuel your newsletter growth (because they understand the market and have a direct interest in co-owning a media brand that serves their target audience)
2️ Partner with a brand
It sounds crazy, but there are thousands of brands out there who already have 1m+ email subscribers... but no newsletter.
Find one of those in your space, and it's the perfect opportunity for a win-win partnership:
- they provide the initial audience
- you handle writing the newsletter + monetization via sponsorships etc
- your quality content (and strategic placement of their brand/product) drives an increase in sales for them at zero cost
Finding and putting together a partnership like this can be time consuming and expensive (legal fees).
But — if it works — you could be at 1m+ subscribers and 7-figures in revenue in less than a year!
For example:
- (Convert)Kit has 500k+ email subscribers... but no standalone newsletter covering the creator industry
- [The watch brand] MVMT must have 1m+ email subscribers who love watches... but no newsletter at all
- Little Chonk gets email opt-ins from millions of dog owners... who never receive a newsletter from them
I think we'll see a lot more newsletters starting this way next year.
3️ Partner with someone famous
Just like brands, "famous people" are also waking up to the value of email newsletters.
Musicians, YouTubers, Movie Stars... they all want to have a newsletter without actually having to do any of the work associated with having one.
That's a huge opportunity for a smart newsletter operator.
You do the work of running the newsletter business (content creation, monetization), they provide the initial audience for free thanks to their huge existing followings on other platforms.
More and more of these "celeb + operator" partnerships are happening every day...
Some, like Neil Patrick Harris' Wondercade, are run as a branded partnership with his direct involvement.
While others, like Bay Area Times, are standalone brands that you might not even realise have a "silent" famous person behind them!
Sure, you might not have access to an "A-list" celebrity to partner with like Neil Patrick Harris. But the great thing about the internet is there's now a whole bunch of "internet famous" people with huge social followings that are much easier to reach (and much more interested in monetizing their followings).
4️ Find an audience arbitrage opportunity
There's one other way I've found which could get you a few hundred thousand newsletter subscribers very quickly and at low cost: Audience Arbitrage.
Still, in 2024, there are tons of websites and social media accounts that are great at getting traffic, but terrible at monetizing that traffic.
For example:
- "free tool" sites (think, calorie calculators)
- "X of the day" sites (word of the day, poem of the day...)
- "deal" sites (eg Bold.org, coupon sites, point sites...)
- "faceless" YouTube channels
- "meme" accounts on Twitter/Instagram
Often these sites are already collecting thousands of email addresses each month... and doing nothing with them.
If you can come up with a monetizable newsletter their audience would be interested in, that's a huge audience arbitrate opportunity.
For example, one newsletter operator I know (in the running space) partnered with a "free tool" site (a "couch to 5k running plan calculator").
Users of the free tool were prompted to opt in to my friend's newsletter lead magnet (a free email course).
For a flat partnership fee of $2k/month, my friend was able to add 10k+ new (and high quality) subscribers per month.
And there are A LOT of sites like this out there if you go digging.
The real opportunity
I personally know multiple newsletter operators who've reached 1m+ subscribers using each of the 4 "unfair advantages" I shared above.
But the really cool thing?
→ these 4 strategies work just as well to give you a head start in building a profitable, 10-100k subscriber newsletter.
So, as you start to think about your own newsletter goals for next year, take 30min to brainstorm how you could apply each of the 4 strategies to your newsletter growth. Or even combine them.
I bet there's at least one quick win in there worth exploring!
