My newsletter is making $2,000 per month with 6,500 subscribers - AMA
Hi everyone!
Roughly two years ago when the pandemic had people shifting to a WFH environment, I started a twice-weekly newsletter called Workspaces that gives readers a behind the scenes tour of their favorite entrepreneurs, designers, developers, etc. new desk setups.
Growth has remained consistent week to week, relying on the featured guests Twitter presence to help spread the word.
I have featured 167 workspaces to date (70 more in the backlog) and have grown the newsletter to 6,500 subscribers while maintaining a >50% open rate.
I published the fist 117 editions of the newsletter without a sponsor. I had inbound requests but I was focused on growing the subscriber base as much as possible. With the new year, I shifted this focus slightly and began offering one sponsor slot per newsletter edition.
Since then, the newsletter has been sold out weekly and the price has risen from the initial $150 to $250, earning $2,000 per month from sponsorships.
I think it’s important to note that this was not an immediate cash cow… sending out 117 editions of a newsletter without receiving a dime can be draining. You have to truly enjoy the content you are putting out (I do!).
However, I think this shows that consistency rules and as long as you continue to show up, put out great content and iterate based on feedback you will continue to see your newsletter grow and ultimately the money will come.
Happy to answer any questions around newsletter growth, finding sponsors, etc!
Thanks!
Hi Ryan, This thred of great information started with your success. This is still extremely value over two years later. Coming back to older success stories like yours is as valuable as it was two year's ago. I just wanted to say thank you
What's your most important advice for growing your subscriber base?
For me it has definitely been to produce content that is not only shareable in a social setting (in my case Twitter) but also able to loop in/tag other people and their communities. Leaning on others as a growth lever probably seems like common sense but is often overlooked.
Every time I share a workspace I am able to tag that person on Twitter and ask them to share it with their community which leads to an immediate bump in views and subscribers.
Thanks Ryan for sharing this🙏
Great advice!
Great advice, thanks for the reply :)
Great circular growth tactics and virality built into this. Nice!
Exactly! Earlier on I really looked for guests with larger Twitter followings (I still do but less so now if the workspace itself is great).
All but 5 or so have gone on to RT or share their workspace post in some way after the fact, which makes sense seeing as they took the time to provide all of the content in the first place. :)
Nice work! And thanks for doing an AMA. I've got a fledgling newsletter of my own so I'm thinking a lot about monetization.
Hi James! Thanks for the questions.
Thanks for the info! Re #4, were you posting it anywhere or using tactics like referral rewards, etc., or was it purely consistency?
What would you say is the reason that it got faster and faster? More word of mouth? Or were you doing something differently?
I posted all of the newsletters as a blog post on Twitter as well - tagging all of the featured guests. 99% of them retweeted it or created a tweet of their own to share their space!
Over time, this snowballed and people actually organically started mentioning me in tweets of others spaces to get me to include them in a future edition.
After 100 workspaces being shared consistently each week (never missed a weekend since the start!) all of the mentions, tweets, etc. seem to have just gained momentum together.
I did start the @workspacesxyz Twitter handle around the sponsorship time as well and began tweeting from this vs my personal handle. This account quickly grew to >5,000 followers as well and is now more recognizable for workspace-related content.
doing the same each week for my ReactJS curation newsletter :)
the Twitter thread is my primary acquisition channel, it can grow as much as 200 new subs/week
The format looks really good.
Interesting, thanks for all the info - i appreciate it!
Do you feel like looking for sponsors at the 3,300 subscribers mark was the right time? Or do you think you can do it earlier?
@garyliang I definitely think I could have introduced and booked sponsors earlier than I did. There were 2 main reasons that I continued to wait:
I was really focused on growing the subscriber list and keeping the emails as short and consumable as possible. At the time I had a 60% open rate and I valued this more than anything. The open rate is still >50% so maybe this wasn’t a legit concern after all.
I didn’t want to be chasing lower $ sponsors. I was willing to wait until the money per sponsor would be worth possible back and forth headaches. I introduced sponsorships at $150.
I think you could realistically introduce sponsorships at ~1,000 subscribers but for a much lower $ amount and increase as the list grows.
Wow 117 emails sent before earning a single dollar, too much respect. How did you approach the first creators featured in the newsletter? Howdid you get them to share photos of their spaces?
saving this! awesome inspiration
Thanks! 🙌
The newsletter business is still an unleashed territory and has enormous potential to grow.
I wrote an issue on"newsletter exits" in my newsletter, showing that it is a serious business so that it is even possible to exit.
@ryangilbert, your story is so inspiring and I've also included yours as a case.
Anyone interested in the article may check out the below link.
https://cilerdemiralp.substack.com/p/digiexamples-01-newsletter-exits
This is amazing! Thank you :)
This is super inspiring! I am trying to build up an email audience at the moment, and it's hard to put in hours curating the content for an email that's going to fewer than 100 people. You're right, you have to enjoy the content you are putting out there to get past that initial hurdle. Keep up the good work! Just subscribed ;)
Thank you!
Yes, I think it's super important to enjoy the content you're putting out early on for that exact reason. Even with interest in the topic it can be discouraging early on when you aren't seeing much growth.
Just remember to stay consistent and to get feedback from your early readers. If the content is useful to them it'll be useful to others... just a matter of getting it in front of them!
Congrats! I've been coming back to this thread for inspiration over the last month and just sold my first newsletter sponsor slot. Thanks for all of the info you provided!
That's awesome! Huge congrats!
It's definitely not easy. However, once you sell more it offers a form of social proof and other sponsorships should be much easier to land going forward :)
Thank you! Definitely feels like the first will be the hardest (I hope!) but it's also been quite fun hunting for relevant opportunities. Thanks again for the advice :D
No problem at all!
Good luck the rest of the way!
Something so simple, yet, something I never knew I wanted to see! Great inspiration for my future desk setup!
Congrats on those last 2 years by the way.
Now, with the list of all the items in the articles, some affiliate links could be the cherry on top of the cake! Get extra sugar each month!
I have a few Amazon affiliate links sprinkled throughout... not a ton though.
love it, Ryan! Big fan here. I have a few questions:
Twitter for growth >>>
Thanks for sharing! This is very inspiring for me because I have very similar project now: I need to gain subscribers for the newsletter.
I'd like to ask you some questions.
Do you think that after a particular amount of newsletter issues some can conclude that the project takes off or fail? Like, I send a monthly newsletter. How many issues should I send before making conclusions about if it's successful or not?
What channels did you use for subscriber acquisition? Just Twitter?
Did you use any paid promotion?
How do you think, what was the key factor of the success?
That totally depends on what your actual goals for the newsletter are (ex. money, followers, becoming an industry expert, etc)
Just Twitter!
Nope!
Everyone works from home in some capacity now
Thanks!
You did great job, I'm really inspired by your post! Thank you for sharing your experience
I used to work at Cisco and the internal comms team regularly featured "what's on your desk" in the company blog. Congrats on monetizing something similar!
I just subscribed to your newsletter. Such a refreshing idea. Loved it. Cant wait for the next one.
Thank you! Coming tomorrow morning!
I love this, I signed up for this newsletter and looking for my own inspiration for my cluttered workspace!
Love to hear that!
Wow, amazing to read about your journey.
Also, 2) how much time does it cost you weekly? 3) And have you checked out ConvertKit’s program to hook up newsletters with sponsors? Curious to hear whether you think that’s helpful or if selling the sponsorship isn’t actually that hard.
Thanks!
It fluctuates a bit. I have pulled back a bit on the cold outreach for new guests since I currently have a 70+ workspace backlog.
Without that back and forth and simply churning through the backlog it probably takes ~4 hours per week? It really depends on the space I’m picking and if the guest provided an intro blurb for me or not - if not I need to do some additional (but nothing crazy) research.
Haven’t looked into ConvertKit too much but I think finding your first sponsors on your own/through your readers is important.
That's awesome work! Have your sponsors asked for much demographic type info before agreeing on a deal, or is it simply "how many on your list and what's the open rate?"
Simply list size + avg open rate and click rate.
They are also aware that while the sponsor slot was for the newsletter that the posts were also shared via the https://twitter.com/workspacesxyz Twitter account and some of the posts take off and receive an additional >50,000 impressions there.
Brilliant thanks. Sick logo by the way.
How did you found the people who show you their workspace?
Great and inspiring story! You just gotta keep at it.
Thank you!
Consistency >
Thanks for sharing! I love workspaces <3
thanks for sharing!
Nice work.... 👍
Super inspiring! Glad that you found success after your hard work
Thats a nice inspiration, I fully agree with you, my first business didn't bring a single cent until a year after a lunch.
Honestly i think most of the business would turn out to be success if people just had the resources to continue working on it for prolonged time.
What was your approach to getting your very first subscribers?
I've heard about a lot of Indie Hackers brute forcing their first subs via cold outreach on Twitter, etc. Did you start out doing something similar?
Who are you selling sponsorships to and how are you getting them? I ask because I have over 11,000 subscribers now and am not finding any interest from companies. Audience is women ages 30-55.
I sold the majority of my sponsorships to readers of my newsletter without needing to do any actual selling. They either ran or worked for companies that fit the market of the newsletter.
When should I monetize my newsletter?
My newsletter is about Product management and I have 600 organic subscribers.
And the average open rate is 40%.
Rabbit Hole- https://itsrabbithole.substack.com/
Do you reach out to all the guests and then hope they share their posts on Twitter?
6500 subscribers for an email newsletter is really good! Especially if you don't have those large 50k-100k+ followings!
What I am learning from your story is that you need to be patient in order to achieve success. It is a good reminder that if you are doing something that you like, even if it is for free, after a certain amount of time you will get paid for it, no matter what. Good job!
Patience (alongside consistently turning up is critical). I have been sending out my newsletter for over 2 years now and it's only just now gradually gaining some momentum. But I have had to promote, promote, promote.
Inspiring article! Thanks for sharing.
Very cool. Just checked out all the workspaces and that's a lot of people using apple keyboards. No one use g915 tkl?!
Super! Congratulation to you, mate. Start by building your own audiences and rolling the stone from there is the right approach in almost every situation.
Just subscribed!
Thank you! 🙏
You monetize only through sponsors? Any plans for paid subscriptions?
nope!
Great job and thanks for sharing.
Great job, I appreciate you sharing this. What hosting did you go with?
Webflow for the website and https://loops.so/?ref=workspacesxyz for the emails.
Hi,
Sounds very interesting. We also started our newsletter lately but except emailing to everyone to get more subscribers, pop-up in our website, it seems we're stuck to make visitors / users engage more with the newsletter and the value we bring. The open rate is also low too. Do you have any suggestions for this to increase recipient's engagement?
If the open rate is low and users aren't engaging in any meaningful way I'd take a step back and evaluate if you are truly providing your audience the value you intend to or think you are.
Thank you for sharing! This looks great! I have a question. How do you get people (entrepreneurs, designers, developers) to share their workspaces design etc? Did you provide them with incentives to do so?
I've answered this throughout the AMA :)
Thank you Ryan! I have read through the AMA but would like to still understand what motivates people to willingly share their workspaces design especially for those who are not currently sharing publicly. Wondering what kind of pitch did you managed to convinced them to share? :)
The main incentive is the large audience that they get to plug whatever they want in front of.
Other than that, they simply enjoy sharing info about themselves and how they work.
Thank you Ryan for sharing! My challenges is not having a good number of subscribers yet hence some people are not that willing to share with me due to perhaps lack of credibility and branding. Wondering how you managed to build that in the first place and overcome the cold start problem.
What sort of newsletter are you trying to start?
Education. Difficult to get schools onboard. :S
How did you grab your first 100 subscribers?
Twitter
My questions for you are — did sponsors start coming to you? Did you reach out? Is there a third party who handles finding the ads?
I launched a space newsletter this month that's gained 3,000 subs so far. Was thinking about waiting until 15K-20K subs before monetizing, but sounds like earlier may be the move!
All sponsors came to me :)
Persistence, perseverance, patience and knowing when to back off are important in both business and in life. I am so happy to read about your success with your newsletter. I am trying to create a newsletter for ecommerce businesses or people who wanted to start their own ecommerce business. I am going to start out with substack. Do you have any advice for me ?
Outside of the advice already given here I'd need more specific questions to noodle on! I'm not too too familiar with ecommerce to be honest so would need to brainstorm a bit. :)
It's a good article.
Awesome example of persistency paying off, thanks for the write-up, Ryan!
I am working on the sponsorship for my newsletter as well (weekly, 42% open rate, 4300 subs).
What did you find sponsors look for the most? Did they just want exposure to your audience or did they emphasize CTAs with trackable links?
Cheers & keep up the great work!
This is so inspiring. It also reminds me that I need to get off my butt and get some work done. it's been frustrating for me honestly. I started the whoile online thing many years ago but haven't really been able to put my full weight into it.
Family stuff, money problems, juggling jobs and contracts and also trying to grow an online business, it's been tough.
The thing is I KNOW I provide content (courses, plugins, workshops etc..) that people want, I've been told that my courses are the best in my topic (electronic music production).
But I really have not been able to find my rhythm, and stories like this give me some comfort, but also sort of make me angry at myself if that makes sense, because I feel like I should be doing more.
I feel like I'm behind.
So, in that light, what do you think about using Facebook or Instagram ads to grow? I have experience using them and have a lot of good content mostly in video form. Do you think that would help me make up for lost time? Also, do you think it would help reduce the time and effort spent producing tons of content (which for me is rather draining)?
Thank you!
Hi Ryan -- thanks for sharing! Sounds like you've built a great product. I have a few questions about your journey:
What did you do to get your initial few followers?
Was there a noticeable inflection point when growth took off? If so, what do you think caused it / around how many users was it?
Related to the first question, did you already have a following on any other platforms that you found useful for promoting your newsletter?
Hey there... the rest of the AMA covers pretty much all of this :)
Did you start with Substack? If not, what tools are you using for your newsletter? I'm building content to start one for my product.
Yep, Substack.
Recently moved to Webflow for the site and Loops for the emails.
First off, congratulations.
Secondly, I'm just planning to start a newsletter for sansnote.com, and had the following questions:
RATES
1.
(a) Did you base your sponsorship rates on some market rate / CPMs?
(b) Do you remember the readership at $150 and what was it when you changed to $250?
TIMING
2. Is there any particular day of week / time (timezone) that you schedule your newsletter to be sent? And how did you arrive at that time?
OTHER CHANNELS
3. Do you plan to expand / repurpose your content to YouTube?
4. TikTok?
5. Instagram? As your content is quite visual.
I've answered these questions throughout the rest of the AMA from a month ago :)
Hey, great stuff!
I write a newsletter focused on investing and we just crossed 1,500 subscribers. We monetise only by paid subscription at the moment but ads are on the table for the future.
Newsletters are never an immediate cash cow, and the more unknown you are in the beginning, the less cash they make. The whole journey is until people discover you, and trust you. All this while you produce quality content consistently over time..
Absolutely the content one produces has to come from the heart - there is no faking this!
Thanks for sharing your experience. I am glad that I found out about such an inspiring and very beautiful newsletter. I wish you good luck with this project!
Thanks for sharing!
What a brilliant idea. I come across Workspaces from a comment on Twitter, it is really a cool idea to feature workspaces of creatives. I look forward to your newsletter every weekend now.
Great progress! Congrats! Do you mind me asking if you are also earning from the affiliate links you include in the newsletter? Thanks!
A little bit where it makes sense! I've only been using Amazon for this.
I like this story. Thanks.
Congratulations! This is awesome, we got like 24K subs and we still havent monetized it, may be its about time
who can help me figure this out? our niche is digital health
These are newsletter goals! @ryangilbert
Congratulations on the milestone. I have close to 1000 subs on my newsletter that I started 2 years ago. Haven’t monetized yet, but I think it’s time to start and see how it works.
$1000 a month would legit cover my living expenses. So it’s time to double down now.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Good luck! Let me know if there is anything that I can help with :)
amazing and inspirational , your story has really motivated me . Keep sharing the good things
What a great story! Thanks for sharing and do you use any tools for twitter specifically and for analytics of who views your tweets, and also to track newsletter analytics?
Thank you!
I track next to nothing related to Twitter. The only thing I track for the newsletter are the growth rate and then making sure the open rate is consistently ~50% with a decent click rate.
If I publish an edition that has significantly less clicks than the average I will take a look and see why that might be (less interesting items in the space, less links overall, etc?)
Hi Ryan - Thank you for sharing your story. I have been working in Tech Sales since 2016 but recently started looking into copywriting. Lots of learning to do but stories like yours is definitely an inspiration!
Saoud
Hey! I have been meaning to start a blog since I don't enjoy my coding life. Any suggestions
Congratulations!
This is a really inspiring story!
Oh dang, my newsletter just passed 4k. I think I need to start charging more for sponsor slots.
@ryangilbert why were you hesitant to accept sponsors at first? What changed?
I just didn't want to introduce sponsorships until I was sure I could sell most of them out. I didn't want to have one sponsor followed by a month of none (I felt this would indicate to others that it might not be worth it).
That makes sense.
I built up my emailing list for a long time before ever releasing a newsletter. People joined to access the Indie Worldwide community.
Started publishing only because someone offered to sponsor it!
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Each new partner I ask for a bit more.
Awesome work! I love this content.
Question:
How did you go about deep diving for this content? Did you reach out to them first and ask for pictures or just find people who had posted their setups on the internet already.
A mix of both!
Thanks for the insight. I've had some ideas around a newsletter and you've given me the inspiration to do it!
Good luck! Let me know if there is anything I can help with :)
Just starting to build a newsletter myself and this is really interesting. As are many of the questions you've answered in the comments.
I might have missed it but did you use a lead magnet or freebie at a time to encourage sign up?
Nope!
Curious to hear what you think of your newsletter platform, Substack. Do you recommend it, or if you started over would you choose a different platform?
Congratulations!
I'm seeing similar numbers with my newsletter. Can you elaborate on how you handle sponsorships? Any tools / templates you'd be ready to share? I am doing all of this very manually, and it gets hard to manage.
Thank you!
Mostly handling sponsorships via email without any special tools. The only tool I use is a Notion doc for marking who's sponsoring which dates on a calendar.
It definitely is getting tough to manage manually but it's been nice that the avg sponsor for me is booking 3-4 slots at a time. If it ever transitioned into more one-off buys with more hand holding I don't think this current system would be fun or efficient.
Then we are exactly at the same stage with that as well :D
The tools out there like Sponsy are way too expensive. Let's see how far we can go with emails and Notion. Please let me know —and every other operator out there as well— if you ever find something!
Would you pay $29 a year to get 10% more signup rates on your newsletter's landing page?
I'm making Socialscribe that does just that.
Congratulations, keeping the consistency and focus for a publication is super hard. It is a marathon, not a sprint 🏃♀️
I do have a question actually: do you have something in place to manage sponsorships? If so, what would you improve?
Definitely a marathon!
Re sponsorships… I actually manage all of the communication/copy in email. I use a simple Notion calendar to remind myself who’s sponsoring each edition and then I dive back into the email to grab everything that I need.
Maybe not the best process but with only 2 editions per week and the majority of sponsors booking multiple slots this has been manageable so far.
Love to hear about your success!
How long have you been running your newsletter?
The first edition went out April 5, 2020!
Wow that's great progress! Huge props! I'm subbed haha.
Appreciate it! :)
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How can I help you get there quicker?
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
Twitter! There's a very active and growing no-code community on Twitter that you could tap into.
Start by following + replying to their tweets and eventually craft content specifically for them to grow their own no-code businesses.