#292: Chenell Basilio — The state of email in 2026, growing your list without social media, and new predictions.

Jay Clouse [00:00:00]:
I know you're not going to want to answer this, but we're going to do it anyway.

Chenell Basilio [00:00:02]:
Oh, boy.

Jay Clouse [00:00:03]:
Kiss, marry, kill. Okay, Kit, substack and beehive.

Chenell Basilio [00:00:06]:
Oh, boy. Oh, you're not going to make me do this, are you?

Jay Clouse [00:00:10]:
I'll do it if you do it. Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. This week I am joined by my good friend Chanel Basilio. Chanel is the creator of Growth in Reverse, a newsletter that reverse engineers how top creators grow their newsletters from 0 to more than 50,000 email subscribers. She spends 20 to 25 hours per deep dive researching one creator, making her one of the most thorough newsletter analysts in the space. Chanel's writing is great. I believe I was the first subscriber to Growth in Reverse and I will hold on to that as a claim to fame.

Jay Clouse [00:00:59]:
She has a background in paid ads actually since 2012, 2013, and that gives her a really unique data driven lens because she understands both organic and paid growth. So Chanel is definitely one of the voices you should be listening to about email and newsletters. In this episode we give our predictions for what is working and what is to come in email in 2026. We talk about referral programs, recommendations, how you would grow if you do not want to use social media, and some of the biggest opportunities you can grow if you are interested in social media. I also introduced a section into this episode called Unhinged Questions. That's fun. That's towards the end. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I enjoyed recording it.

Jay Clouse [00:01:40]:
If you do enjoy it, feel free to tag me Clouse and let me know. Or if you're on Spotify, leave a comment. I love reading those comments. Watch that full episode with Chanel right after this. I think the most obvious place to start is to ask how it feels to be the reigning champion of our inaugural fantasy football league in the lab.

Chenell Basilio [00:02:02]:
I have the the little trophy right over here too. It's fantastic.

Jay Clouse [00:02:06]:
So good. Oh man, I love that it's in the video frame. That's great.

Chenell Basilio [00:02:10]:
It didn't fully fit on the shelf.

Jay Clouse [00:02:12]:
But I'm not salty about it at all.

Chenell Basilio [00:02:14]:
Yes, you are. But that's okay. You can't win the first league. It would just be too obvious that you were obviously fudging it a little bit.

Jay Clouse [00:02:21]:
Well, let's talk all things email, let's talk all things newsletter. I have a handful of different ways in to talk about this, but we're sitting here at the end of January 2026 and I'd love to just kind of get a vibe check, a pulse check on how you feel about email. Do you think it's growing in importance? Do you think it's shrinking in importance? Where are we in the life cycle or hype cycle of email right now?

Chenell Basilio [00:02:47]:
It's a good question. I think it's maturing for sure. Obviously email's been around forever, so me saying maturing is kind of comical. But like in this newsletter hype cycle, I feel like we're maturing in a way that people are realizing you need more than just like a newsletter to actually build a successful business with it. I mean, there are caveats to this, of course, but I would say for 90% of people it's going to be more than email, whether that's incorporating YouTube or like your own digital products versus just having like a regular newsletter that's you're making money via sponsorships. I think it's definitely maturing in that sense, but I still think email is pretty much king at this point. Of course there are platforms that are also important, but email is very, very up at the top for me.

Jay Clouse [00:03:29]:
I feel like the newsletter, quote unquote, hype has died down a little bit. You know, I mean, email's been a thing for forever, but I feel like there was distinctly a 12 to 24 month period where newsletters in particular were so hot and everyone was starting a beehive or a substack and it was like a big thing. And I don't hear that nearly as much right now, I don't think.

Chenell Basilio [00:03:52]:
Yeah, I'd agree with you. Everyone got really excited about the idea especially. This is funny to think back on. I didn't realize it, but right after the NFT thing kind of died down, people were like newsletters. And so all the AI newsletters came out, NFT newsletters, crypto, all that stuff. And so I think people just kind of stayed and were hoping to build another milk road, for example, but obviously that is not as easy or as common as people probably thought. And so I think a lot of people are kind of jumping to the next thing at this point, which I'm all for because just keep all the people that are consistent with it in the space and go do something else.

Jay Clouse [00:04:27]:
Yeah, it turns out that being consistent and sending a newsletter every week is hard and not that profitable quickly. A lot of times, you know, it's been funny to see the ad networks that have popped up which are I think a net positive on Beehive, on Kit, moving towards like a performance model built in. A cost per click model makes a lot of business sense for them, I believe. But if you are not truly driving clicks, it's not really a profitable endeavor for you to have CPC advertising in your newsletter. And you're not going to drive clicks if your audience doesn't actually trust you and believe in whatever you're recommending or believe that you are recommending something out of a place of actual endorsement and belief.

Chenell Basilio [00:05:16]:
Yeah, totally. And part of me gets a little bitter with those ad networks for the smaller creator because if you think about it, you have maybe like 300 subscribers, 500 subscribers. They might be raving fans of yours, but maybe only three of them. Click one of those things. You've now taken up that space in your newsletter to essentially like take the space away from your content and building that relationship with them for maybe like 15 bucks, 10 bucks, and it's like, is that really worth it? So I don't know. I like those models for, you know, a mid to larger creator, but for the smaller ones, I just don't feel like it's worth it.

Jay Clouse [00:05:52]:
So talk to me about your relationship to your newsletter. Growth in reverse what's on your mind as we enter a new year in terms of how you're leveraging email? What you want to change? I just want to get inside the mind of the actual newsletter operator of the newsletter.

Chenell Basilio [00:06:08]:
I think I'm just trying to get more dialed in on all of the things. So, like having a more robust welcome sequence. Like I get a bunch of recommendation subscribers, but how do we actually turn those people into fans right away versus like, oh, you haven't opened anything in 14 days. Let's kick you off. I feel like that's a huge missed opportunity right now. So that's kind of top of mind for me. So I'm doing some research there to figure out some better ways to kind of onboard those people and make them more, I don't know, more of a quality subscriber when they really are just like a follower, if you will.

Jay Clouse [00:06:38]:
I'm literally thinking about the exact same thing right now, just because I have my shiny objects. And we've had some folks in the lab who have had some success over the last year or so building a paid funnel from Facebook ads to email to a paid product. And I think, ooh, that sounds awesome, I should do that. And then I remember that I have a stream of hundreds of subscribers per week that come from these recommendation networks that I'm really not building a great relationship with because it's a hard thing. And I don't know of anybody that's really solved this and done a good job with creator network subscribers and building them into fans quickly. And that feels like an opportunity. Like, things that are hard and haven't been solved. What a great thing to try and solve.

Jay Clouse [00:07:29]:
So I'm literally thinking about the exact same thing right now of why am I not just solving that? Because if I can solve that, wow, would that be a huge lever in the business right now?

Chenell Basilio [00:07:38]:
Totally. And it's one of those things, like, I've been thinking about this for a while and I'm like, I need to figure this out. Because this just seems like such a waste. Like, all of these people keep coming into my ecosystem and then they're leaving because I'm not doing a good job of explaining why, hey, we might have some things in common. You might want to stick around. And so, yeah, I'm trying to figure that out.

Jay Clouse [00:07:56]:
Yeah. So if I'm reading below the lines here, it sounds like you're saying big on your mind in this coming year is deeper relationships on a per subscriber level.

Chenell Basilio [00:08:07]:
Yeah. And I think so many people for so long have been just so excited about the huge numbers and like, inherent in what I do of like, researching people who have hit 50,000 subscribers. How did they hit that number? And it's like, well, why do they have to have 50,000? Like, there are smaller lists who are making much more money than the people with the larger list. So I am part of the problem, I think. But yes, the quantity piece is not as important as many people used to make it out to be and probably still do. But having a deeper relationship with the people actually on your list is so much more critical at this point.

Jay Clouse [00:08:40]:
Inflation is real too. Because now that I'm in this very slow, plodding, never ending book journey, I spent a lot of time researching the pathways of authors, and I think it'd be hard pressed to find an author who gets more airplay than James Clear and just like anywhere in the creator ecosystem.

Chenell Basilio [00:09:01]:
Right, agreed.

Jay Clouse [00:09:02]:
And what is underspoken about is James's email list when he got the book deal, not when he published when he got the book deal. Do you want to take a swing? Maybe you even know how many subscribers he had when he got his book deal in like 2000. What was it? 12? I think he got it.

Chenell Basilio [00:09:21]:
Wasn't it like 20K?

Jay Clouse [00:09:23]:
No, it was like 250K.

Chenell Basilio [00:09:26]:
Oh, wow.

Jay Clouse [00:09:27]:
He had like over 200,000 subscribers in 2012. What do you think? 200,000 subscribers equates to in 2026.

Chenell Basilio [00:09:36]:
Yeah, I don't know.

Jay Clouse [00:09:38]:
I think that would be equivalent to almost a million subscribers in 2026. Email inflation, you know, it's a huge number. And the question is like, well, how did he get so many subscribers in 2012? And the answer was, I think first accidentally and then very intentionally, he realized that his website was indexing extremely well in search for book summaries. So for a very long time, he was just rolling in search results for, like, book reviews and book summaries on jamesclear.com and it was structured very well. And similarly, Tiago Forte started in a very similar way as well. Yeah, it's just interesting. It's interesting to think about even my numbers now as I'm looking down the book journey and the aspirations I have for it and realizing, man, maybe book.

Chenell Basilio [00:10:29]:
Three, Jay will be atomic habits.

Jay Clouse [00:10:32]:
We are not the same. But I do think it's important to say, okay, but the people that I am reaching, how do I build a stronger relationship? Which brings me back to exactly what you're saying. Because when I talk to somebody today who's kind of getting started in the creator world, the good news, bad news, in my opinion, is it's never been easier to reach somebody with your content on social media, but it's never been harder to sustain a relationship on social media. So really, it's such an opportunity and a gift to get people in email because that is the ability to sustain a relationship for as long as they permit it, as long as they allow it. And right now, you and I are in the privileged position of we're getting recommendations and ultimately not doing a lot with it. It sounds.

Chenell Basilio [00:11:20]:
It's a big opportunity, I think, and I have not found a good example of someone solving this because it's so new. So how would you. But that's the goal. I'll share more when I have it.

Jay Clouse [00:11:31]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll share notes when we. When we try to figure this out. What are some predictions that you have for 2026 in email generally. We've obviously shared what we're thinking about. What else are you hearing or kind of feeling that you think may be on the horizon or changing in the next year?

Chenell Basilio [00:11:50]:
Yeah, on the same token of it maturing, like the space maturing. I just think there's going to be a lot of people that end up quitting this year, and I don't like saying that, but I think with how AI is evolving and people realizing that you need more than just a sponsor here or a sponsor there to actually make a living with this kind of thing. I think a lot of people are going to give up on it, which is kind of stinks, but I think that's going to happen a lot more. You're going to see a lot of people bowing out of the space. Not even just email. I think just like creators in general, I feel like it's getting harder, it's getting more saturated, if you will. So, I mean, I always talk about insanely valuable content. So it's like if you can just create better content, have that rise above the others, like, that's only going to get more important.

Chenell Basilio [00:12:33]:
And that's a hard thing to do. And so I think a lot of people are gonna quit.

Jay Clouse [00:12:37]:
Say more about that for people who haven't heard this term or this idea.

Chenell Basilio [00:12:41]:
Yeah. So insanely valuable. Through doing all of the research I've done, I've done like 80 deep dives on people who have hit 50,000 or more subscribers. The one thing that I keep coming back to over and over again is that the biggest metric for success, the biggest thing that has an impact, is the level and valuableness, if you will, of their content. So if you look at any of the people who go viral on these platforms and they end up with a bunch of subscribers, it's because the content was very good. Like insanely valuable to the point where people are looking for it, they're excited about it, they want more, they can't help but look for this stuff. And so I think that's just such an important piece. And even in the last six to eight months, I'm realizing this far expands past newsletters and online content.

Chenell Basilio [00:13:27]:
It's everything in the world. Think of the craftsman down the street. You go to that one guy because he does something so specific and he does it so well that you seek that out. And so you want to create something that people are actually going and seeking out versus just another list of articles that's getting sent to your inbox. And so I think that the real growth lever and the thing that really helps people grow and makes all those growth hacks work better is insanely valuable content.

Jay Clouse [00:13:55]:
I love this frame. I think we need it in this moment in time. It's so interesting to me that a lot of the content we saw on social media circa 2023, I would say I'm still seeing that style being posted on social media. And it feels so flat and weird because it just comes across as useless, like there's no value in it. It's the type of thing that, like a confident statement of a belief, but generally doesn't carry anything I can do with, you know, but it was so popular and successful in 2023 by some of the accounts that were growing the fastest. And a lot of us emulated that. And then we realized, like, this isn't really helping anybody. And it just feels so starkly true today when I see it, like, my reaction to it every time I see it is like, okay, but it's not, it's not useful.

Jay Clouse [00:14:52]:
I have like various notes around my workspace now that I'm trying to use to like, metaphorically grab myself by the shoulders and shake me out of bad patterns. One of them is be useful. Because if you're not creating something that is useful to somebody, like, one, it's probably not going to work, but two, it's not useful, it just doesn't do anything. And two, I feel like this is a prediction I would make with the things we can do with AI in terms of learning. It's never been more important to do things and talk about the things that you do. So I have another note that just says, do something. Because I'll sit here and I'll look at my kit broadcast, you know, the classic cursor on a blank screen, thinking, what am I going to write for my newsletter this week? And sometimes I don't have anything to write because I haven't done anything. And I just keep reminding myself, like, you should do something and you should talk about it.

Jay Clouse [00:15:45]:
So that's a prediction from me. Not that you asked, but I'm with you. That valuable, useful content needs a renaissance. And that's hard. That's a hard, time consuming, difficult thing to do. But that's kind of the point, I think, totally.

Chenell Basilio [00:16:02]:
And on the same token, like with AI, it's so good at so many things, but, like writing, maybe one day it will get to a place where you can have the perfect prompt and it just like pulls the words out of your brain. But even if you get to that point, what's the point? Like, writing is such a powerful medium, not because you're getting words on a page, but because you have to go through that process of thinking and refining and like actually coming up with your own ideas and taking one thing from over here and combining it with another idea and just like creating something new out of that. And I think everyone wants to get the shortcut. Even when AI came out, I was the same way. I was like, this is great. I'm just gonna be able to pump out content. And then I was like, hold on. This is not what I really wanted to happen with this.

Chenell Basilio [00:16:46]:
So you have to do something. You have to go out and actually write something. Go out and create, whether writings or Medium or YouTube or any other photography. Go do.

Jay Clouse [00:16:56]:
The thing where I'm struggling right now is I see a lot of people using AI to create their content. I can tell it was written with AI, but it still performs really well. And it's growing their account, it's growing distribution. They are building a brand. And I sit back and I see it. I literally got hit with a video this morning. It was like a green screen style video. Guy was clearly reading off a teleprompter over top of Mr.

Jay Clouse [00:17:22]:
Beast, one of his videos from his new show. But it was good. It was. It was a good video that pulled me in and I was interested. And then towards the end, it had the line of, that's not this, it's this. And I went, oh, that's Claude. Claude's in there. And I looked and this video was still crushing, especially for this creator.

Jay Clouse [00:17:44]:
Like, I looked, I'm like, okay, how is this performing relative to their other videos? And it was doing really well relative to their other videos. So I look at that and I don't know what to make of that. Do I say, is that a permission slip to say, okay, if the content is valued and viewed, is it okay to outsource my thinking and scripting on this? Is it worth it? Is it a trade worth making? And I'm really struggling with this right now. I don't know. I'm resistant to it and I'm trying to articulate why I'm resistant to it. At the core, I definitely want to be a better thinker and I agree with you that writing is like. It's like the lifting of weights. To become a better thinker, it's hard, it's heavy, it doesn't feel great.

Jay Clouse [00:18:28]:
But at the end you're like, wow, I'm glad I did that. If you're not doing that, I think you're going to get weaker long term. But we're also in this moment where I think distribution is never going to get easier to build. It's only going to get harder. So am I making it harder on myself by not using these tools that are at our disposal? Do you think about this all the time?

Chenell Basilio [00:18:54]:
I think, and I struggle with this too, because it's like, all right, well, if I give AI some boundaries to help me create the short form pieces that actually get people to the longer stuff. Is that bad? I don't know. I won't outsource the longer stuff and like, my, you know what excites me and lights me up, but maybe I'll take a piece of that, of what I've already created and dump it into Claude and have it format it in a way that's like that. Do you know what I mean? So, like, taking what you've already created and having Claude make it sexier, if you will.

Jay Clouse [00:19:28]:
This is the first thing I've practiced with claudebot was I said, okay, Jay's new obsession. Way back. Yeah, way back in the beginning of. Way back in January 2025, Nat Eliason put out his like, build your own apps course, teaching you, like, here's how you can use cursor to build stuff with code. It was like an early Vibe coding thing. And I Vibe coded an app to help me repurpose short form, but that was so clunky because now I had like a locally running web app where the prompt to actually derive short form form, long form, I had to like, really write and sweat over. But now it's way easier than that. And so I was like, okay, let's see if I can text my claudebot virtual assistant to do this and sync it up with Notion.

Jay Clouse [00:20:11]:
Way, way better. And so now I literally have a job running every week that, hey, on Tuesday I publish a new podcast episode, go into Dropbox, pull down the latest transcript, pull out short form ideas structured for LinkedIn X and Instagram, and put it into Notion. And it's like, pretty good. And it's at least something I can react to. You know, I can react to, I can edit it, I can update. Does feel like, okay, well, this gives me time back to do long form writing, to read, which fuels the tank for long form writing to spend more time with my family, which is especially important once snow prevents us from having childcare out of the house this week. But I still feel, like, dirty or guilty about it. I don't know if it's saying this is against your values or if it's a story that is no longer serving me or useful, because I'm just holding on to this belief that this is too far.

Jay Clouse [00:21:03]:
This is where the line has just gone too far for me personally. Everyone has a line. But is this where my line should be? I don't know. I don't know.

Chenell Basilio [00:21:11]:
As you're saying that, I'm thinking, like, if you were a business with like 20 employees, you would probably have someone taking your writing and Creating forms from it. So it's the same thing.

Jay Clouse [00:21:23]:
And also, if I was not a content creator, serving content creators, if I was just a business owner, I was like, man, we got to be on social media. I would 1000% be using this. 1000%. So why is it that I feel like my particular position puts me in a place where I do not have the same permission? I don't know if that's actually serving me. And ultimately I don't know if it's serving other people. Because if I cannot explode my long form ideas into short form formats where people have shown they want to consume, is that serving me? I don't think so, but something about it, I just can't quite get over the hump.

Chenell Basilio [00:22:00]:
No, I'm with you. But it sounds like we both need to just kind of like take our foot off the gas with it a little bit. Because just think of it like an employee. They would be writing some weird version of. It's not this, it's that or.

Jay Clouse [00:22:13]:
Right. I think the greatest fear for me is like, if people think I've broken a promise to them.

Chenell Basilio [00:22:18]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:22:19]:
And so it almost feels like I've made promises that somehow I need to just like revise with people. And I don't know how to do that effectively, but, like, the last thing I want to do is make people feel like I betrayed their trust in some way. And there's just a part of me that's like, is this doing that? I'd love to hear from listeners of this. Tag me, write me, let me know what you guys think about this.

Chenell Basilio [00:22:41]:
I want to hear what people say too. Because one of the things that, like, I think as a creator, we have built these brands of, like, people come to know us and like, what we're talking about and how we think. And so it's like, if you outsource that thinking in a way, it's like, well, are you kind of going back on what you promised when I signed up for this thing?

Jay Clouse [00:22:59]:
Let's keep going with some predictions and thoughts about the coming year. What do you think is no longer relevant? What was common advice or things people were doing that you think is no longer useful? No longer working, no longer relevant.

Chenell Basilio [00:23:15]:
Before the last two weeks, I was so burned out on recommendations, I was like, this is pointless. I just feel like they're lowering the quality of my list. Deliverability is going to go down because they're not opening. And now I've reframed that. So I was honestly for a while thinking about just like turning off all recommendations. And I was like, this is not. There's no point.

Jay Clouse [00:23:33]:
Reframed it. How? Reframed it. Why?

Chenell Basilio [00:23:35]:
Because I'm realizing that it's not a recommendations problem. It's a my systems problem of like, hey, these aren't actual subscribers yet, so let's turn them into subscribers. But because they're on my email list. You think they are. Do you know what I mean?

Jay Clouse [00:23:47]:
That's what you're saying when you say they're essentially followers and not subscribers.

Chenell Basilio [00:23:51]:
It's like someone following you on social media versus like, actually entering their email address into a form, because in a way, that's what they're doing. And I think Nathan actually said this at your IRL event. Yeah, that's what we're calling it, right? Irl?

Jay Clouse [00:24:03]:
Yeah, Offline.

Chenell Basilio [00:24:04]:
Offline, that's right.

Jay Clouse [00:24:06]:
Started irl. And I'm like, man, it's really hard to say IRL verbally. Yeah, I can get behind this. What do you think about referrals? Are referral programs dead? Are they coming back ever?

Chenell Basilio [00:24:18]:
I don't think they're dead. I think it's another. Another thing of, like, make sure you're actually giving people what they want. Like, I just did a post recently on the Dink. It's a pickleball newsletter, and they have a referral program where they actually give you pickleballs and like pickleball paddles and like, things that you can use. So it's super functional. And I think that is the kind of referral program that I can get behind. But if you're just giving away a random PDF of something, like, I don't think that's gonna work.

Jay Clouse [00:24:46]:
What do you think is underrated in the world of newsletters right now?

Chenell Basilio [00:24:50]:
YouTube to email.

Jay Clouse [00:24:51]:
Okay, say more.

Chenell Basilio [00:24:53]:
I think there are so many YouTube channels and people on YouTube who have built these big audiences and they're not successfully transferring them over to email. I did this actually recently, two weeks ago with an interview on my channel. And I said, okay, four minutes into the video, I, like, cut it. And I was like, wait, did he just say that? And I had this little lead magnet come up and. And it's converting at like 2 to 3% views. So my channel does not get the views, yours does. But I think I've gotten like 75 email subscribers out of like 1100 views and some hundred podcast listens. So it's converting.

Chenell Basilio [00:25:32]:
And I think that there's just like this intentionality that you need to implement, especially hearing from people like Pat Walls and some other Folks who have completely had either getting strikes on their channels or having them not banned, but they can't upload for a while. So I think that being able to take your subscribers over to email is such an underrated thing right now.

Jay Clouse [00:25:54]:
Are you tagging these folks as coming from YouTube? Because I think down the line it would be so interesting to see, okay, the people who did come from YouTube. What's the life cycle and the lifetime value of the subscribers coming from that channel?

Chenell Basilio [00:26:05]:
Yeah, I am. And I'm also recognizing like I clicked into each one and I'd say like 20% of them are already subscribers. And so I'm like, wait a second, you're already on my email list but you thought this thing was interesting enough? And I was like, okay, cool. So now I'm like tagging those people as essentially like raving fans because they're on two channels, they're already on the email list and they're coming through YouTube as well. So I think those are like the people that I would say are higher signal on my list, if you will.

Jay Clouse [00:26:30]:
This is an upcoming experiment that I'm going to run because I see this opportunity as well. And actually we had it as a, an explicit strategy for the channel last year and successfully ran it on like maybe two videos. But the idea that every video you make should have some clear, obvious, useful resource tied to it that is gated by email, slam dunk, huge win should work. It's the creating of the resource alongside creating a video that feels challenging because it's extra time, it's extra effort to do that. Another area where I feel like AI could certainly do a lot of the legwork. Say here's the transcript. What are some ideas that have some obvious follow up questions or teaching that I could do? Let's pull from it, let's make a resource. I think you could probably do 50 to 80% of the lift there two things.

Chenell Basilio [00:27:19]:
So I did actually do that. I threw the transcript into. Actually I think I just used day like the not DIA is the browser I'm using and I had the transcript pulled up and I was like, pull out like five ideas that could be interesting. Because I am one of those people. I go through the episode, I'm like, yeah, that was cool. I think this one thing was interesting. But then you have AI look at it and you're like, oh my God, he did say that. That was so interesting.

Chenell Basilio [00:27:42]:
I forgot that happened. And so I had them pull the idea and then I wrote the actual thing, had the screenshots and all the thing, but getting the idea for it was super effective. I think that was a great use of AI. Another thing though is that I think we often overcomplicate this too. One thing that keeps coming back to mind, we interviewed Sam Vanderweelen on our podcast recently on Instagram. She started teasing out podcast episodes and she would just say like if you want the link, like click here. And it was just a manychatbot. And so she's getting their email address and giving them the link to the podcast episode.

Chenell Basilio [00:28:16]:
And I'm like, it's not YouTube, but short form videos. Close enough.

Jay Clouse [00:28:19]:
Totally. This is where I see most people in the lab right now just killing it with email acquisition is Instagram to manychat. And it's a big part of why Instagram is like a huge part of our strategy this year. Hopefully. I mean, I mean we're putting a lot more effort into it than we used to, to middling levels of success. But this is where I'm seeing a lot of email acquisition right now, personally.

Chenell Basilio [00:28:40]:
Agreed. So I think that's another thing for this year is just like video is going to be so much more useful and impactful in terms of gaining email subscribers. Or maybe that's just where I'm interested. I don't know. Could just be that.

Jay Clouse [00:28:54]:
After a quick break for our sponsors, we'll be right back to my conversation with Chanel Basilio of Growth and in Reverse. We had a question come up in a Q and A in the community recently and he asked how can I grow my email list if I don't want to do any discovery platforms? So social media or YouTube? Provocative question that I think a lot of people would say, ooh, if I could figure that out. Pretty into that. So where's your head go with that question?

Chenell Basilio [00:29:25]:
A couple things up front. Why no social? Yes, it can be detrimental, but I don't think every platform is as impactful on people as others. So yes, I feel this too. I get this question all the time. But I think that there is a thing of you have to recognize you're going to grow a lot slower unless you're putting money behind it, unless you're doing paid ads or something. That is definitely one way you can grow without doing organic social. But it's definitely going to take a lot longer if you don't use social media. I think 90 something percent of the people that I've studied went super hard on just one channel to grow their newsletter and then a lot of them expanded into others.

Chenell Basilio [00:30:04]:
But if you can Try and do one, that's great. If not, fine. There are some ways we can talk through, but I would just kind of think through, like, why am I handicapping my growth a little bit? Is it a real reason? Or is it just like, I don't want to do the thing?

Jay Clouse [00:30:18]:
I will say, okay, I'm gonna put on the hat of the listener here. Maybe they just want to put all of their time into writing the best long form they possibly can.

Chenell Basilio [00:30:29]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:30:30]:
Or at least that's the story they're telling themselves. So if that is the case, what is the advice?

Chenell Basilio [00:30:35]:
Okay, so you mentioned, I was gonna ask, is YouTube social media? And it sounds like, yes, YouTube is out. Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:30:41]:
YouTube is acknowledged. We talked about it. YouTube has opportunity. But for the sake of this question, off the table.

Chenell Basilio [00:30:47]:
Yeah. Okay. The second thing is making sure it's like really, really good because that's how you're going to have the best chance of actually having these things work. But it sounds like if they're going to spend all their time writing the long form, it should hypothetically be insanely valuable.

Jay Clouse [00:31:02]:
I think we should hang out here a little bit more, though. I think this is worth pointing out because Are you familiar with Orin on Social Orin John? He had a tweet recently where he said his team has started referring to a lot of content that they think or can tell is created by AI as mid slop. It's not so overtly an obvious AI, where it's like ring camera footage of a cat beating up a deer that came through the screen door, but it's probably made with AI. So he called this mid slop. And when I think about it, I think a lot of content that wasn't created with AI is mid slope. Because what we've seen or what I've seen, because so many creator brands are individuals. We see people like a Cody Sanchez, where it's like, wow, she's everywhere. And it's all great.

Jay Clouse [00:31:53]:
I can do that too. If Cody can do it, I can do it. But we don't have, like full awareness of what the team behind that actually looks like. I actually just refound this note I had from craft and commerce 2024 where Cody said that in 2024 she spent $2.9 million on her content team. So that is how you have non mid slap content on every platform. But I think the pursuit of trying to be everywhere as an individual or even a small team results in mid content everywhere. So I think it's important to say if you are telling yourself the story that I don't want to be on social because I want to make the best long form writing that I can. That you're actually doing that and not just saying it.

Chenell Basilio [00:32:43]:
100% agree. I like this mid thing. I haven't heard that. I know who Oren is, but I haven't heard that phrase yet.

Jay Clouse [00:32:49]:
I looked at it. This is in the same time period where I'm asking myself like, okay, well these short form bits from my long form that my claudebot put together, they're like better than not posting it is from my stuff. It might not perform super high, but it's something. And I saw that. I'm like, yeah, this would be probably mid slop. And then I thought to myself, but so is a lot of my writing that I'm just doing, honestly. So I think in 2026 you need to hire and resource or reduce the scope of what you're trying to do. I think is the recipe for success in content.

Jay Clouse [00:33:24]:
Because we're just seeing more competition than ever before and it's difficult to compete in that landscape if you're trying to compete on a bunch of different playing fields.

Chenell Basilio [00:33:34]:
You can't write the best possible thing and create the best possible short form video and do all the other things as well. So you have to kind of choose. But yeah, I would definitely lean more towards creating a better piece of your overarching long form content than the short form. But there is a place for both.

Jay Clouse [00:33:54]:
So to go back to the question of growing your newsletter or your email list in 2026 without social. We've mentioned a couple things so far. Paid spend, which I agree with you is like, this actually seems underrated right now. Seems like opportunity referral program that we talked about. If you have good referrals, I think that makes sense in this world. And writing extremely valuable, insanely valuable long form content. I have a couple of other ideas, but anything else you want to add to this list?

Chenell Basilio [00:34:23]:
Yeah, I always go back to not to date myself too much, but I got started in the space in 2013 and I go back to what was working then because these things always come back around at some point. They worked because of how human nature works, how humans work together. So my biggest thing that I always tell people, especially when they're just getting started, is try and figure out a way that you can help another creator create something for their audience. So like guest posting used to do super well. I still think there is a room for this. I actually think there's probably a bigger hole for this than there used to be because so many people moved away from it that now there's probably space for it. So if you can go find, like, go through someone's back catalog and see, like, hey, you've never actually written about this one topic. I know this super well.

Chenell Basilio [00:35:11]:
I would love to, like, write a piece for you or create something for you that you could give to your audience for free. Like, I don't need anything. Just put my name on it somewhere. I think that could do super well. Still on the same token, like get on someone's podcast. Get on their podcast and help their audience in the specific way that you have experience. Like what is your niche, your expertise, and how could you help their audience? So I think it's really just like collaborating and trying to figure out how you can give value without necessarily having an audience of your own.

Jay Clouse [00:35:42]:
Lenny Ryczycki is so good at this. Actually, Lenny's just good at everything he does. Lenny is an amazing example that I feel is super high integrity, super high quality, really good dude. Love seeing him win. Wish we were friends. And the way he platforms other people and gives them the ability to guest post and they do it at a very high level, I think is really inspiring. And it's something that I want to emulate in the Creator Science brand through the lens of experiments. Because more and more I just think that the best thing I can do is do and then show less teaching.

Jay Clouse [00:36:17]:
It's teaching in its own way, I suppose. But I think in this moment, if I'm teaching content, it just has to be so tightly coupled to something I've tried in the very recent past. And so I'm thinking that I would love to build a process to facilitate the sharing of experiments from other creators in the Creator Science audience in real time through the newsletter. And I think this is a big opportunity. I agree with you. Cross promotions and collaborations was one of the items on my list too.

Chenell Basilio [00:36:47]:
Yeah, that's a big one. I found this. This woman named Maya Voye who was doing this and I just like stumbled across her because I was doing a deep dive on this guy named Akash Gupta. And she had written, well, co collaborated a piece. So they wrote this article together and it was like a super long article, crazy involved. And I was like, who is this person? And she had like 3,000 subscribers at the time, I think. And then looking back at her year in review recently, she did this like six or seven times. And she explicitly called out that this was the one main way that she grew her newsletter.

Chenell Basilio [00:37:18]:
And I Think she's now at like 25,000. I was like, yeah, it works. And like, I'm sure there were other things involved, recommendations over time, but like, I'm pretty sure that even just doing those articles gets you on the radar of so many other creators that then are like, hey, do you want to refer each other? Do you want to come do this thing? It just opens so many doors.

Jay Clouse [00:37:37]:
Totally. Yeah. The difference of doing that strategy versus starting from zero and only posting through your own channels with these crazy in depth things, the amount of leverage if you are able to collaborate with somebody and get in front of their existing audience is just huge. And somebody like you or I, who already have a platform, what could we do with that strategy? We're going out and writing newsletters to our audience, which hugely valuable. But imagine if we go to someone else who's like more loosely connected or a little bit outside of our existing orbit and said, let's try to get in front of their audience with something that we write. Probably a step function higher in growth if we went there than just continue to only go through our own channels.

Chenell Basilio [00:38:23]:
Yeah. And at the same point, maybe that's something we should be looking at. How can we give other people the space to post something or share what they're doing? Kind of experiments? Like you said, I've done this a few times, but not nearly enough. It takes all of the work away from me. I just have to go through and make sure it's actually decent and makes sense. Although if you hear from the people who have done a Lenny Ryczycki guest post, it's a very rigorous process.

Jay Clouse [00:38:49]:
Good. Again, that's why Lenny's stuff is so good. He doesn't half ass any of this. It's not because he's lazy. It's all like super well done and he really respects his audience's time and attention.

Chenell Basilio [00:39:03]:
You can just tell, yeah, he's great.

Jay Clouse [00:39:06]:
Okay, I have one more idea here on the Growth Without Social Media Train. I can't stop thinking about this idea of public homework. So an example here would be like 75 hard. This workout challenge by Andy Frisella. He has a setup where anyone can sign up for 75 hard. It's 75 days of an intense physical challenge. And each day has a series of gosh, I want to say it's like six or eight checkboxes of things you have to do to be able to say, yep, I did my challenge today and one of those checkboxes is to share your workout on your social media. It's like you have to do two workouts a day.

Jay Clouse [00:39:50]:
One of them has to be outside. You have to read 20 pages of a book. You gotta get up at this time and it's like this crazy stuff. But then it's like you need to take a photo of your progress and publish it with the hashtag 75hard. So I think there are icky ways to do this and non icky ways to do this. If the public homework functions in a way that creates a positive tension so the person is more likely to complete the challenge, that's positive if it's purely for your own growth. Flywheel. That feels a little more icky to me, but I can see where it's like, okay, if I'm doing this very hard physical challenge that makes me want to quit every day.

Jay Clouse [00:40:28]:
But I've posted about it publicly that I'm doing it, and I've done it now five days in a row. I would feel a little bit itchy to publish on the sixth day, which is going to make me do the thing. I think everybody wins in that way. But I've been thinking to myself, I mean, when I did the tweet 100 challenge years ago, that was the fastest email growth I've ever done. And there was a world where before Elon bought Twitter and Destroyed the X API, I could have just done tweet 100 for like 2 years really hard and probably have twice as many email subscribers as I do today.

Chenell Basilio [00:41:04]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:41:04]:
Cause it was like such a. A wonderful, beautiful flywheel of Somebody would tweet, they would tag tweet at 100, because that's what I had to have to make the leaderboard work. And anybody seeing that it's like, what's Tweet100? And then they go and they sign up@tweet100.com and now they're in the challenge. It was an amazing flywheel. So I think about this a lot in terms of what is a way that I can introduce a challenge that positively moves people towards their goals and also self perpetuates itself to new people.

Chenell Basilio [00:41:33]:
It reminds me of ship 30 too. I was gonna bring up tweet 100, but you did as well. Ship 30 did the same thing and now it's like huge. I don't even think you had to tag ship 30. You just had like the ship in your headline on Twitter and people just knew that if you saw that one type of post, it was from that program.

Jay Clouse [00:41:51]:
I feel like that program had so much potential. I know they still Run it from time to time. So it's not like dead dead, but even the brand itself. I reached out to Dickie once and I was like, this doesn't have to just be writing. You could do ship 30 for video, for YouTube, for podcasting, for anything that you are shipping. You could do a 30 day challenge and this would crush.

Chenell Basilio [00:42:11]:
This is random. But didn't Seth Godin have something like this?

Jay Clouse [00:42:14]:
I'm not sure. I do think that he used the term shipping before anybody else. That was something that I feel like he coined or at least popularized first.

Chenell Basilio [00:42:24]:
Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:42:24]:
Any more ideas on this before we move into a section I call Unhinged Questions?

Chenell Basilio [00:42:29]:
Ooh. I mean, I think there's some other ones, like in person events. Obviously you don't have to go the full morning brew route of like, going in front of a college classroom and, like handing out a clipboard. But there is a newsletter called Payload. They're in the space industry, which is super B2B. Very, very small. But they actually just go to industry conferences with the clipboard and like, hand it out and be like, hey, we have this newsletter if you want to sign up. It's free.

Chenell Basilio [00:42:55]:
They grow that. I know, like Naptown Scoop. Ryan Sneddon does like local events and he'll have, like, you can sign up for the newsletter that way. So I think a lot of the times we're thinking through, like, how do we get the most subscribers? And it's really just like, how do we get the 100 or the 1,000 that are actually going to help me share and share this thing for me? Authors always say you have to sell your own first 1000 books, and then after that it should spread by itself. So it's kind of the same. Same token, how can you get those raving fans up front who will help share your message?

Jay Clouse [00:43:27]:
Okay, Unhinged questions. Okay, I know you're not going to want to answer this, but we're going to do it anyway.

Chenell Basilio [00:43:31]:
Oh, boy.

Jay Clouse [00:43:32]:
I'm going to make this question rated about fantasy football. No, I'm going to make this question rated PG 13 rather than rated R. Kiss, Marry, Kill.

Chenell Basilio [00:43:42]:
Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:43:43]:
Kit, Substack and Beehive.

Chenell Basilio [00:43:45]:
Oh, boy. Oh, you're not gonna make me do this, are you?

Jay Clouse [00:43:50]:
I'll do it if you do it.

Chenell Basilio [00:43:51]:
I mean, I would probably. I'd probably say kiss. Kit. No, I don't know. Hmm. Cause they all have such good use cases.

Jay Clouse [00:44:03]:
Everybody's got good qualities, but you can only marry one.

Chenell Basilio [00:44:07]:
I guess I'll marry Kit because they have been around Longer. And there's just like, I don't know, inherent value in that stability. Kiss Beehive, Kill substack.

Jay Clouse [00:44:18]:
Interesting. I think I would also marry Kit. Probably not a surprise. I think in this season I would Kiss substack, Kill Beehive.

Chenell Basilio [00:44:28]:
Okay.

Jay Clouse [00:44:29]:
And I don't think we even have to say more than that. These are just our hot takes.

Chenell Basilio [00:44:32]:
There you go.

Jay Clouse [00:44:33]:
What is something that you have? A hunch or a belief, Something that you are operating because you believe this, but you don't have the data to support yet?

Chenell Basilio [00:44:44]:
Well, I think inherently the insanely valuable content idea is like, I don't have data. There's no data that a reader loves this one thing because I spent 20 more hours on it than somebody else. But the hunch is definitely there. And I'm pretty sure that that is a thing. So I think that's the one that I don't have data around. That's not something that's easy to experiment with or showcase in a way. But the more time you put into something, the more people can feel the time and the effort and the sweat and blood and tears and everything than if you didn't do that. But again, no data.

Jay Clouse [00:45:21]:
What is your least favorite or least satisfied part of your own newsletter? What do you hate the most about your own newsletter?

Chenell Basilio [00:45:31]:
Right now that I'm not doing deep dives every week.

Jay Clouse [00:45:34]:
Say more. Why aren't you doing deep dives every week?

Chenell Basilio [00:45:36]:
Because I don't have the time anymore. Where to go, Podcasts, all this other stuff. Community.

Jay Clouse [00:45:42]:
Worth it.

Chenell Basilio [00:45:43]:
It's worth it. It's different. I often think back of like, should I just kill everything and go back to just doing a weekly deep dive and I'll figure it out? And it's like, yes. And there is also something to read or burnout of. Getting this 4,000 word article in your inbox every week is kind of insane. I think there is a way to do something similar, which is what I've been doing of pulling out this one growth lever and going deep on that instead of a full deep dive. So I'm trying to bring back that in a sense because it was just I'm spending 40 or 50 hours just researching these people and then I have to spend the time to actually write the thing. It's just not sustainable every week.

Chenell Basilio [00:46:21]:
So if I can kind of scale that back, I think that's going to be more exciting for me because I'm still doing the nerdy research side of it. But yeah, if I could just research and write, I probably would.

Jay Clouse [00:46:33]:
How much mileage do you get out of your back catalog of deep dives?

Chenell Basilio [00:46:36]:
Not enough. I purposefully don't. Well, not purposefully. I don't repurpose enough. Part of it is like, okay, Justin Walsh grew this way back in 2023, but now it's 2026. Like, is that still interesting? Probably a little bit, but I don't know that it's as interesting as it was when I published it initially.

Jay Clouse [00:46:56]:
Do you get search traffic to it?

Chenell Basilio [00:46:58]:
I do get search traffic to some of them. Yeah.

Jay Clouse [00:47:00]:
I wonder what that will look like in the future because I know it's not like easy to even get to your deep dives because I'm changing it. Okay.

Chenell Basilio [00:47:11]:
Yeah, so I have a link at the top right corner now on my homepage where you can go read. Yeah. People were signing up with expletive email addresses. So I was like, okay, fine. I think that style of landing page served me well in the early days and now I'm like, well, you know, it's time to have like a more robust homepage and I can create something similar to this that I share on social or whatever where I want people to actually go subscribe.

Jay Clouse [00:47:37]:
Last thing I want to get your take on. I feel like a lot of us have kind of been pulled by the gravity of a format of our newsletters where we have like this multi block approach of like up here is like a greeting. And now we've got like an endless episode and now we got an ad block and now we got the essay and now we got a like last thing before you go. I have a hunch that this is just not a good format and we're all doing it. Like, I have a hunch that this is not what leads to deep reading or even taking action. Because a lot of times each of these blocks has their own call to action. What's your take on this?

Chenell Basilio [00:48:14]:
I tried experimenting with this couple weeks ago and I just, I didn't have like an intro and that that week I didn't have a sponsor. So it's perfect. So I just put like the full article in the email. It did get clipped at the bottom. So frustrating. Like I just. There's this balance between getting clipped on Gmail of like not having the full email show up in your inbox and then they have to click over it can hurt like your open rates, deliverability, whatever. But so I experimented with this with just like trying to send out the full thing and not have anything else.

Chenell Basilio [00:48:46]:
I don't see any numbers to say that it did better or worse. I actually ran it as a kit test because you can test the content of your emails now and it lost. But they only go based on clicks, so I don't know that that's really a good test.

Jay Clouse [00:49:01]:
Whenever I've tested this. Not even close. More clicks on an email that does not have more calls to action. There's definitely a benefit to having the essay hosted on your website because there's like all kinds of fun embeds and it can look nice and it's way more shareable, way more referable. But it was always so depressing to me to kind of like give the preview of the article and then the button and then to see like, okay, this had a 40% open rate. 24,000 people clicked open this email. But then only like 1 to 2000 of those people actually went and read the essay.

Chenell Basilio [00:49:37]:
So depressing.

Jay Clouse [00:49:37]:
But they didn't unsubscribe. Like, what are you doing? What do you want from this? Yeah, so I don't know. I guess maybe it feels better to not know and just put the whole essay in the body for me.

Chenell Basilio [00:49:49]:
Yeah, I mean, if it fits, I think you probably should. And just make sure you have a link so that if somebody does want to go share it, they can. But yeah, I don't know. It's one of those things you just want to, like, like I said, burn it all down and start over.

Jay Clouse [00:50:02]:
Yeah. The urge. The urge is strong. Foreign. Hey, thanks for listening to this episode with Chanel Basilio. If you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts. It goes so far. I want to get to 500.

Jay Clouse [00:50:21]:
It's what I want so badly. More than anything else in this world, I want to get to 500 ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts. So if you are listening on Apple and you have not done so, please consider going and doing so. If you want to learn more about Chanel, links to her website and her social media are in the show notes. You can subscribe to Growth in reverse@growthinreverse.com Otherwise, thank you for listening and I'll talk to you next week.