Last issue I walked you through the unglamorous guts of setting this up. The DNS, the domain, the welcome email, the branding, the hours, the dollars. I built a real little media company in my spare time. Then I sat back, admired it, and realized I'd forgotten something important.
Nobody knew it existed.
So I did what I always do
I asked Claude to lay out every way to grow OR monetize this thing. It built me a spreadsheet, obviously. Here's the whole menu, and the ones I actually chose:
Lever | What it is | Needs | Doing it? |
|---|---|---|---|
Referral program | Readers share for milestone rewards | Nothing | ✅ |
Recommendations | Newsletters cross-recommend at signup | Nothing | ✅ |
Affiliate links | Get paid to recommend tools you use | Nothing | ✅ |
Ko-fi tip jar | Readers tip the experiment | Nothing | ✅ |
Cross-promo swaps | Trade shoutouts with other newsletters | An audience | Tried, no takers |
Beehiiv Boosts | Pay to get placed in bigger newsletters | Money | Not yet |
Ad network | Get paid to run ads in your issues | 500 subs | 🔒 |
Paid social ads | Pay to push your videos | Money + proof | Not yet |
Sponsors / podcast mid-rolls | Brands pay to reach your audience | Real scale | 🔒 |
The affiliate ones actually pay, by the way: Beehiiv is 50-60% and Metricool is 25-50%. Free money, if anyone's reading.
Then I embarrassed myself, professionally
I got ambitious. I reached out to about twenty other newsletters, some through Beehiiv's tools, some cold, asking if we could promote each other.
Nothing.
And honestly, fair. Some stranger with eight subscribers slides in wanting to trade audiences. What audience? I'd have ignored me too. Cross-promotion is a rich-get-richer game, and I am at present extremely not rich.
Why I bet on the boring lever
A referral works exactly as well at eight subscribers as it does at eighty thousand. One person telling one person literally doubles me right now.
So, that’s where I spent the hours. Building rewards for you that are worth sharing for. Tiers at two, five, and ten referrals, each unlocking something real, sitting at the bottom of every issue with your own link. If you've ever wanted free stuff for the low price of telling one friend, that's the whole pitch.
What I skipped, on purpose
Everything with a price tag. The rule I gave myself: I don't pay to acquire a subscriber until there's something for them to convert into.
The honest number
Here's the part where I tell you it's all humming along. It is not. Thirty days in, I have eight subscribers. Eight. I'm not rounding up and I'm not going to pretend that's a flywheel. None of it has "worked" yet in the way a normal person means it.
But the infrastructure is built, the referral program is live, and the thing about building in public is I don't get to quietly delete the evidence. So I keep going.
Your turn - learn from my dumb mistakes
Don't spend eight weeks on the thing and zero minutes on how anyone finds it. And when you get to distribution, start with the lever that works at your actual size. For me that's referrals. For you it might be something else.
And if you want to be the go-getter who gets me from eight to nine, you already know where that link is.
Next issue: the tracker I built so I can watch every number in this experiment without losing my mind.
Want to be a go-getter? Refer some friends and get some free shit to help you start building now. Your unique referral link is below.
Got a question? Ask me here!
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