✍️ A newsletter about newsletters (we know)

Today’s newsletter is about newsletters.

Which feels a little like a snake eating its own tail — but with better open rates.

More specifically, it’s about newsletter subscribers. Which means … congrats, you’re the main character!

(And if you wanted to forward this to 5 friends to help us test a theory, we wouldn’t stop you.)

Let’s get into it.

Most newsletters don’t stall because the content is bad.

They stall because the math doesn’t work.

Matt McGarry, founder of GrowLetter, has seen this exact pattern play out across dozens of newsletters. He helped scale Milk Road from 10,000 to 250,000 subscribers in under a year. Before that, he helped grow The Hustle to 2.5 million.

His takeaway is simple: Every growth decision is a guess if you don’t know what a subscriber is worth.

Because everything else starts to click into place once you know that number. You know whether spending $2 to acquire a subscriber is smart or reckless. You know which channels are worth testing, and which ones you can ignore entirely. You know how aggressively you can scale without breaking the business.

For most newsletters, that lifetime value lands somewhere between $5 and $25 per subscriber. In B2B, it can be much higher. But the exact number matters less than the fact that you have one.

Without it, growth is just a series of bets.

“Before we even talk about getting more subscribers onto your list, I would focus on, 'How do we increase the revenue per subscriber for your existing list?” says Matt.

But the distribution problem makes it worse.

“Newsletters are not discoverable, but social media content is,” he says. “Blog posts via SEO are. You have to be posting to channels where people can discover your content and share your content.”

They don’t live in feeds or rank in search. They live in inboxes, which means something else has to bring people in. And if nothing is feeding the top of the funnel, growth flatlines, no matter how consistent the publishing cadence is.

The system behind newsletter growth

The newsletters that actually scale don’t grow randomly. They follow a system, and more importantly, they follow it in the right order.

It looks like this:

Understand subscriber economics → prove content-market fit → scale paid distribution → build infrastructure → repeat

Each step feeds the next.

→ You understand what a subscriber is worth, so you know what you can afford to spend.
→ You prove your content works somewhere people can actually find it, usually on social. 
→ You scale a single paid channel where the math holds, instead of spreading yourself thin. 
→ You build just enough infrastructure — landing pages, onboarding, reporting — to keep everything from breaking as you grow.

→ → Then you run it again, with a bigger audience and better data.

Done right, this becomes a flywheel (y’all know we love a good flywheel around here).

Where most teams get stuck

Most teams fail because they are doing the steps out of order. Not because they’re doing the wrong steps.

They try to grow before they understand what a subscriber is worth. They publish more instead of building distribution. They test multiple channels at once and end up with just enough data to be confused, but not enough to make a decision.

So when growth stalls, they assume the problem is the content.

It usually isn’t.

More subscribers won't fix a 30% open rate. They'll just give you more low-engagement readers. And if the product doesn't convert at 5,000, it won't convert at 50,000 either.

The issue is that the system underneath it isn’t working yet.

The shift

Growth is a system problem. 

• Subscribers need to be worth something, 

• the right people need to be able to find you, and 

• your distribution needs to hold up when you push on it.

In practice, that means proving your content works on social before you spend money, hitting real engagement benchmarks — think ~50%+ open rates — before you try to accelerate, and focusing on one channel long enough to understand the math before you expand.

Once the math works, you stop guessing.

If this tracked, we tapped Matt for more on subscriber value, the benchmarks that matter, and what it actually takes to scale without wasting spend and energy. Read the full playbook here.

Campaigns that got us talking: This Connor Storrie Verizon campaign. No, this Hudson Williams Peloton campaign. (But for those of us who can’t hire a Heated Rivalry star, there’s still hope for staying culturally relevant in campaigns.)

AI spotlight: Harvard on AI and the future of marketing makes the big case for automation, personalization, and scale. The part most teams are still figuring out is execution. That gap showed up everywhere in our AI report.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: Writing advice from someone who says they’re a “bad writer” — and built a $2M business anyway. One takeaway we can’t stop thinking about: You don’t get better by writing, you get better by publishing.

We’ve been spending a lot of time in newsletters lately.

The kind people actually open. And click. And reply to.

Here are a few we keep coming back to (in no particular order):

• ByteSize from Experts Exchange — your weekly dose of IT intelligence

• Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment — the latest on women’s sports business

• Giant Spoon — media ideas that actually stir things up

They all have one thing in common: People read them.

Open rates in the 50–60% range. CTRs around 3–5%. For context, most B2B newsletters land closer to ~40% opens and ~2% CTR.

Oh — and yes, this one’s in the mix too.

The Standard — still doing what it does.

Our team's current stress-relief tactic: cataloging the content marketing decisions that make us stare at the ceiling at night. This week’s offender:

Gated content that, once you hand over your email address, turns out to be a 3-page PDF that says, “it depends.”

Geez. Appreciate it.

We have thoughts on gates and forms if you’re interested.

We know, we know — a newsletter about newsletters that also includes references to Schitt’s Creek and Legally Blonde. How will we ever top this?

Same way any good newsletter grows: figure out what’s working, double down, and run it back.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

Oh! And another thing... 

Before beehiiv. Before Substack. Before email.

There was Acta Diurna, a daily newsletter in ancient Rome, published as early as 131 BC. News, military updates, court decisions. Turns out “what you need to know” has always been a thing.