Taking his broad-appeal newsletter and making it super niche earned this creator $125k+

Dylan Redekop started a marketing newsletter before newsletters were cool. Then he niched down hard, pivoting to a newsletter about newsletters — Growth Currency.

While that resulted in a few lost subscribers in the beginning, it — along with some savvy partnerships — was responsible for accelerating his growth to 5.5k subscribers and $125k+ in total earnings.

Here's Dylan on how he did it — and how you can too. 👇

Just start the thing

You don’t have to have everything all figured out before you start.

Just start the thing. 

I didn’t have a following, an email list, a website, or even a refined niche when I started. Had I waited to figure all that out before starting Growth Currency, I never would have gotten to where I am now, with 5.5k subscribers and over $25k in side-hustle income.

And remember, the value of a newsletter goes beyond the sponsorship income. By the far the biggest for me came through the opportunities it’s brought my way, with over $100k+ in earnings from contract work and even a short stint of full-time employment, all of which came through Growth Currency.

Starting a marketing newsletter

In 2020, I noticed people on Twitter going on and on about starting a Substack newsletter. As a professional marketer by day, I understood the value of building an email list. Social media audiences are rented land; an email list is owned distribution.

So I started a curated newsletter with thoughts, opinions, reviews on the latest marketing content, tech, personal finance, and other things that caught my interest. I really had no niche focus in the beginning. 

Working remotely allowed me to spend a few hours during the day, when necessary, to work on the newsletter without having to sacrifice my evenings and weekends. 

My costs were pretty low. I only had to pay for my Webflow site, hosting, and my ConvertKit account. I tried to use as much of the newsletter revenue as possible to cover expenses. 

Niching down to a newsletter about newsletters

These days, it isn't a broad marketing newsletter. It's a newsletter about newsletters.

Newsletters have exploded in popularity over the past 3-4 years, so I share my journey and lessons learned publishing, growing, and monetizing my newsletter.

The decision to niche down came from Jay Clouse’s ‘The Lab’ community.

He and other members of the community said I needed to focus on a niche. And they recommended I focus on writing about newsletters. At that point, I only had about 1,000 subscribers and I had made about $1k in ad sales.

Niching Growth Currency down to focus on newsletters was scary at first. I obviously didn't want to lose subscribers and narrow my audience. But when I announced my newsletter was changing (read here), I had even more content ideas, more positive feedback, and very few unsubscribed as a result. 

It gave me the focus I needed to hone my ad sales pitch and increase ad revenue. It also made pitching and promoting my newsletter way easier, as I had a clear reader avatar I was trying to reach: anyone who was interested in starting or improving their newsletter.

I'm looking forward to niching down even more in the coming months.

Finding the right newsletter stack

The first newsletter platform I tried was Substack. I liked the turn-key approach to starting a newsletter. But back in 2021, features were limited, the analytics were poor, and several subscribers informed me they’d stopped receiving my newsletter entirely. 

So I made the switch to Kit (back then, ConvertKit) and never looked back. The team migrated my small account with care and I was reassured my deliverability would be solid. After moving over to Kit, my open rates went from ~43% to ~55%. I’ve tried most of the “big” ESPs, including Mailchimp and beehiiv, but Kit is by far the best.

I also curate a lot of content for readers in my ‘start’, ‘grow’, ‘improve’, and ‘monetize’ sections of my newsletter. So to keep organized, I use Airtable along with its web clipper extension to save links, categorize them, and mark them as ‘featured’ once they’d been used. I also use Airtable to manage cross-promos and paid sponsorships. 

How to start a newsletter

Running a newsletter can be quite profitable. But before you start publishing, you need to have a plan for revenue — and ideally, multiple revenue streams — as this should guide your content and publishing rhythm. 

For content, there’s no room for middle-ground topics or niches, in my opinion. For example, a generic “AI” newsletter that touches on everything in the space likely isn’t going to be niche enough. At least not if you want to grow reasonably quickly and drive revenue. 

You’re better off going hyper-niche, like an AI Prompt newsletter for marketers, for example. Or if you go broad, you should go for very broad appeal, like The Hustle or Morning Brew.

One of the other major mistakes I see is the onboarding experience. Subscribers can sign up for newsletters in a multitude of ways, and from multiple channels. That means you need to onboard them differently and specifically depending on how they got on your email list.

For example, if they subscribed to your newsletter from a pop-up co-reg widget like Upscribe or beehiiv’s Recommendations, then they’ll likely need to be A) reminded why they’re receiving your newsletter, and B) given the option to unsubscribe immediately in case it was a mistake. Failure to do this will only confuse the new subscriber and leave them wondering why they’re getting your newsletter. And that can lead to them reporting it as ‘spam’. Which would suck. 

How to grow your subscriber count

Year 1

I published edition #1 in January 2021. I certainly didn’t have any kind of intentional launch. It was published on Substack to zero subscribers. I had a modest Twitter following of ~300 people at the time. 

But through persistent tweeting about my newsletter, sharing the content in threads, and being relentless with DMs and other messaging, I was able to grow the newsletter slowly but consistently over a few years. 

I got my first 100 subscribers in 100 days from Edition #1. 

Then I launched my first lead magnet and my subscribers 7x’d over the next ~3 months. 

By the end of 2021, I had reached 1k subscribers 100% organically, meaning no paid subscriber acquisition strategies. 

It’s also worth noting that I didn’t have a website during this whole period. 

Year 2

By May of 2022 — a whole 16 months after my first newsletter was published on Substack — I finally paid for a Webflow build. Up to that point, I was just using ConvertKit’s landing pages and Creator Profile page for the newsletter archive (it’s still live here). It’s not ideal, but it did the job.

By the end of 2022, I had 1.6x’d growth to 2.6k subscribers and was earning over $1k per month with ads and sponsorships.

My growth was due to a combination of social media content & promotion, newsletter cross-promos, the 1KS Roadmap lead magnet, and earned media (getting my content featured in other newsletters or websites).

For social media, I would repurpose my newsletter content as a Twitter thread. I’d also add CTAs at the end to subscribe to my newsletter. And I'd tag other Twitter accounts if I was featuring their content in my curated links section. Sometimes this would result in a retweet, but it would often at least get a comment and/or a like. All of which are very helpful in getting the post picked up by social algorithms.  

Lastly, I was lucky to get started a little bit before the newsletter boom that we’ve seen in the last two years. That equated to lower inbox competition

How to grow your revenue

Ad spots

I started running ad spots with only ~600 subscribers. Back then I used Swapstack (bought by beehiiv) and earned $25 for ads that were getting zero clicks. Things got better though. I developed a partnership with another creator who asked to sponsor 10 issues of the newsletter. That earned another $600. I continued to use a combination of Swapstack, Paved, and my own outbound efforts to get sponsors until I eventually joined the ConvertKit Sponsor Network in summer of 2022. 

That was a huge revenue boost. They took care of booking my weekly ad spots for a 20% commission on the ad revenue. Up to that point I was managing all of my own ads which was a lot of work. I didn’t mind paying the 20% fee given all I had to do was approve the ad and paste it into my newsletter. Not to mention I was making almost 2x per ad spot through CKSN than I was getting on my own.

Consulting

The bulk of my revenue has been from ads but I have earned close to $5k doing some one-off consults and a few small newsletter projects. 

Affiliate

I’ve earned around $2,000 with affiliate sales, primarily promoting Kit (ConvertKit) in my newsletter, on Medium, and on social media as my go-to ESP of choice.

Digital products

I didn't create a digital product, but I wish I would have. A paid digital product brings in more revenue and makes it so you don't have to rely so much on ad revenue.

Monetization advice

The best advice I can give anyone looking to build a business through a newsletter is to diversify your revenue streams.

When I was working at SparkLoop, I interviewed a lot of newsletter operators and the most successful ones had at least two revenue streams, but more often they’d have three or even five different ways they were making money. That could be a combo of sponsorships, affiliates, subscriptions, product sales, and services.

Also, start monetizing early!

Starting up again after a hiatus

I had put my newsletter on hiatus after getting hired at SparkLoop in Spring, 2023. I was busy with work and burnt out. But I wish I’d kept publishing, even if that meant republishing older (evergreen) editions. 

I recently fired it back up and started to bring in some revenue through ads in Q3 and Q4. But only about $500/mo — nothing like I was earning in 2022 and 2023.

I don’t have any goals for the future. I hate setting goals because I find them oddly de-motivating. As soon as I set them, I lose interest.

Instead, I go by feeling and emotion. 

If I’m still excited to publish the newsletter, I’m going to keep publishing it!

Newsletter resources

Personally, I learned a lot from other newsletter operators like Josh Spector, Jay Clouse, and Katelyn Bourgoin, to name a few.

I was also fortunate to get hired at SparkLoop and learn a ton about paid newsletter recommendations, referral programs, newsletter onboarding, podcasting, and a lot of other stuff. 

But one of the best resources for learning how newsletters grow is Chenell Basilio’s newsletter Growth In Reverse. It’s free and documents how the biggest newsletters in the world have grown from 0 to 50k subscribers and beyond. 

And, of course, there's Growth Currency. Check out my newsletter at growthcurrency.net, and you can check out my articles at growthcurrency.net/articles.

And follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Threads.