2 builders who never spoke to each other · contested
Feed the newsletter from a channel that gets found
Newsletters and podcasts are almost impossible to discover on their own, so one operator runs a large social account purely as the top of the funnel and treats the owned channels as where a follower becomes someone who actually likes you. The counter-case in this play built a readership in the hundreds of thousands without any social account.
What both sides agree on
- Split channel growth into two jobs: a fixed publishing schedule that gets people into the habit of showing up, and occasional highly shareable pieces that create the jumps.
Where this splits
One builder treats a large social account as a prerequisite for a newsletter being discovered at all, while another grew a daily newsletter past 300,000 subscribers without any social presence.
2 claims against 1
Sahil Bloom
Feed the newsletter from a big social account
- 01Do not expect a newsletter or a podcast to get discovered on its own: feed it from a social account that does the discovery on its behalf.
- 02Run a newsletter and a podcast because you own them outright, and because they are where a follower turns into someone who actually likes you.
A newsletter can grow with no social account
A daily newsletter can reach several hundred thousand subscribers with no social media accounts at all, so treat social as one option rather than a prerequisite.
What it returned
- 500,000
He describes discovery for newsletters and podcasts as extremely hard, and uses his Twitter account, grown to 500,000 followers, as the top of the funnel into both.
- 300,000
Pat Trousdale took The Daily Upside past 300,000 subscribers without any social media presence.
He calls the two parts base and spikes, and says the schedule alone will not grow the channel without the shareable peaks.
Sources
- What I learned from Sahil Bloom about building a creator flywheel – Jakob GreenfeldSahil Bloom · jakobgreenfeld.com · Newsletter + Podcast · 2022-08-07
- S01E05: Growing a daily newsletter to 300k+ subscribers — with Pat Trousdale of The Daily UpsidePat Trousdale · sparkloop.app · undated · dissenting
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
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