Building a $10k/mo newsletter with 75k subscribers in 4 years

Stephen Walker built his freemium newsletter, Product Strategy, to 75k subscribers and $10k/mo within four years — and he still had time to build Klu.ai on the side.

Here's Stephen on how he did it. 👇

Don't lose your work

When I was employed, I wrote content for my teams internally, making sure that they were up to speed on product management. But when I changed companies, I failed to keep a copy of all that work.

That was my motivation for starting the Product Strategy newsletter.

And here's some advice: If you’re working for a company, one of the smartest things you can do is write for yourself. Document the strategy, the challenges, the wins, the assumptions — everything.

Over time, this will give you an outside perspective, and these notes will serve as a time capsule of your thinking, whether it turns out to be right or wrong.

Making $10k/mo from a newsletter

Today the Product Strategy makes around $10k MRR through a combination of subscriptions and workshops. In 2024, I nearly doubled my readers to 75k.

As the name suggests, it's a newsletter about product management where I share my thoughts and answers to questions I get from 1:1 coaching sessions. I try to provide as much value to people as possible and imagine what I would have wanted when I was younger.

The business model is fairly simple – it’s a free newsletter with a paid membership. The membership comes with additional content and tools focused on product management. Beyond that, folks want workshops on a range of topics from product strategy to AI Strategy.

I'm also working on Klu.ai, which is an LLM App platform for building, evaluating, and optimizing across all model providers.

Keep up the pace

Remember, though — Product Strategy's $10k/mo was years in the making. You have to show up continually and do the work.

Procrastination has always been my biggest challenge. I think everyone faces this. I recommend reading The War of Art to anyone who has the same problem. 

There’s a lot of bullshit advice out there, but I think the number one thing that worked for me was internalizing and updating my self image into someone who does the things I wasn’t doing.

"I am someone who makes the bed. I am someone who writes daily. I am..."

Whenever I wasn’t doing those things, I had to question myself. It’s harder to look yourself in the mirror when you’re not doing the things you claim to be.

Write like they wrote Star Wars

When it comes to writing, it's all about reps. I write in the morning and on the weekends. I usually edit on Sundays. I write a lot, and many things never see the light of day.

Writing is just distilling your thinking. The two people who had the biggest impact on how I think about writing are Safi Bahcall and Steven Pressfield. The War of Art can be read in a day and if you’re working on anything creative, you should read it.

Safi has a great idea: “Write FBR”. It means to write fast, bad, and wrong. Everything is saved in the edit, from Star Wars to Hemingway novels. 

Growing to 75k readers

I have 75k readers now, but I remember when the first reader signed up.

The reason I remember this is that it took weeks to go from 0 to 1. Nothing happens overnight, and the earlier you internalize this, the happier you will be with your daily progress. 

Share what else you do

It doesn’t matter where you get the traffic, but any place you can say, “Hey, if you like this, I’ve got more over here” will help you. I got initial traffic by closing in-person talks with a link to the site.

Many people are just curious tourists, but you’ll snowball interest over time.

A word on product-market fit

There’s a lot of talk about product-market fit, but it's true – if you’re reaching an audience that doesn’t align to what you’re offering, you’re not going to get great results. 

Talk to people

From the beginning, make sure you're talking to as many people as possible about your idea.

I’ve seen advice for and against this, but I’m in favor of it. It's your opportunity to gauge whether or not there’s truly interest in what you’re doing. It’s also your opportunity to identify your ideal customer. If people aren’t excited or you can’t find people with the problem you’re solving, you have to ask yourself why. 

There’s a good book on this: The Mom Test. You need external perspectives to really assess what’s working and what's not.

Missed opportunities

I've had many things not work out, and to be honest, most of that is likely my fault.

For example, early on, I was doing cold outreach to write for others and build an audience back to my site. One site wanted to collaborate further on a course or some sort of upsell product. But I wasn’t hungry and I was potentially arrogant, so I dropped the ball there.

Who said you miss 100% of the shots you fail to take? I would venture that most people fall into this category. 

How to start

If you have an idea, you should start working on it immediately. The momentum will keep you going. 

Starting isn't magic. Everything you see today is a few iterations from a start that took just a weekend.

The key is to just do something. Anything. It’s much easier to reassess once you’ve made some sort of progress.

I set everything up to run on Ghost, and I run a droplet on DigitalOcean. Especially with the WP fiasco lately, I can’t recommend it enough. I like owning and hosting everything myself.

It used to be that you needed some knowledge of HTML and JS. But now, with LLM-powered editors, there’s no excuse. This really is the best time to start.

Beyond that, you can get a free tier and free things almost everywhere. Vercel gets dunked on quite a bit, but the reality is that it’s great when you’re at the idea stage. Very few people will ever have breakout traffic. 

To start, I'll repeat what many people have said: Just make the MVP and start charging for it. Sales seems like a dirty word and concept, but people want to pay for their problems to be solved and to be entertained. 

If you are trying to scale something big, I think the Microsoft for Startups Founder Hub is the best deal on the internet. Dealing with Azure sucks, but free is free. If you want OpenAI models at zero cost, this is your current opportunity, especially now that OpenAI has paused their own startup credits program, which used to be $2.5k for free.

At the end of the day, there are two tradeoffs that you have to balance: ergonomics and economics. In the beginning, you should find the cheapest setup that doesn’t make you hate your life. Then, once you scale, find how to dial in quality of life at a lower cost.

What's next

I spend most of my time building Klu.ai with my cofounder today. I love working with AI models and helping customers build really unique use cases. Internally, I also developed a suite of evals called QUAKE and I’ll probably spend time making this more robust.

From time to time, I think about distilling the workshop content into videos for people to watch, but that’s a 2025 task, I think.

You can find me online on X, my newsletter, or use Klu to evaluate your LLM-powered apps.