#147: Chenell Basilio – How the best newsletter operators grow to 50K+ subscribers

May 02, 2023

#147: Chenell Basilio – How the best newsletter operators grow to 50K+ subscribers
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Chenell Basilio is the creator of Growth In Reverse where she studies how creators like Justin Welsh, Packy McCormick, Lenny Rachitsky, and Codie Sanchez grew their newsletter.

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Chenell is the writer of Growth In Reverse, a weekly newsletter where she reverse engineers how a top creator grew from 0 to 50k+ subscribers.

Chenell has done deep dives on Justin Welsh, Codie Sanchez, Lenny Rachitsky, Harry Dry, and many more.

I read it every week and think it’s incredibly well-done. The premise is super clear, and as a result, Chenell has seen her OWN newsletter grow very quickly – nearing 10,000 subscribers in just about four months.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • The common patterns between these newsletter operators
  • Some of the most effective growth tactics she’s uncovered
  • And what’s working for HER right now

Full transcript and show notes

Follow Chenell on Twitter / LinkedIn

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Transcript

Jay Clouse  00:00

Hello, my friend. I've been doing some work behind the scenes to revamp my email strategy and make it a lot more robust. That's why I spoke with Matt McGarry in episode number 145 of the show and why I'm speaking with today's guest Chenell Basilio. Chenell is the writer of Growth in Reverse, a weekly newsletter where she reverse engineers how a top creator grew from 0 to 50,000 email subscribers. She's also a member of The Lab. Chenell has done deep dives on Justin Welsh, Cody Sanchez, Lenny Rucinski, Harry Dry, and many more. This is a newsletter that I genuinely read every single week and I think it's incredibly well done. The premise is super clear. And as a result, Chenell has seen her own newsletter, Growth in Reverse, grow very quickly. She's getting close to 10,000 subscribers in just about four months. So in this episode, we are nerding out on some very creator sciency things. Chenell shares with us the common patterns between these newsletter creators that she has studied, some of the most effective growth tactics that she's uncovered. And there's some really interesting ones, and what's working for her right now with her own newsletter. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. As you listen, just tag me on twitter or instagram @jayclouse. Say hello, let me know that you're listening. And now let's dive in. Let's talk with Chenell.

 

Jay Clouse  01:31

All right, Chenell, we're doing it, we're making it happen. So glad to have some time to pick your brain and learn all about what you've been learning with Growth in Reverse. But before we dive into that, I actually don't know the origin of why you started this newsletter in the first place. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for Growth in Reverse?

 

Chenell Basilio  01:48

Yeah, sure. So I have been helping clients with paid ads since about 2017. And I've been able to help them like grow their newsletter with paid stuff. But I've always been curious, like how people did that without paid ads, like organically just or social, that kind of thing. But I know emails important, like I've seen people send one email out and make like 10s of 1000s of dollars overnight. So I was like, what, and then I started hearing about people like Mario Gabrielli with the generalists. And he had over 50,000 subscribers, he was making, like, $300,000 a year. And I was like, how are people doing this? Like, it just didn't make sense. So I really wanted to kind of reverse engineer how they do that. Why reverse engineer in public versus just do it, you know, in your quiet time, in the off hours. It felt like a lot of work. And I didn't see anyone else doing it. So I thought it would be something cool to share with the world.

 

Jay Clouse  02:42

Yeah, really good stuff, one of the newsletters that I read every week. So let's dive in. Let's talk about some of the things that you have reverse engineered. And I'm really interested the patterns, I think, I think what not enough people value are the individuals who go broad and who and what they study so that they can distill that into patterns, a lot of times you get stuck on kind of like a one track one Creator mind. So I'm excited to nerd out and just hear you know, across this, this group of newsletter operators, what you've learned, let's talk about some of the some of the things they have in common. What are some of the trends that you're seeing across these, these creators.

 

Chenell Basilio  03:17

So some of them are kind of boring. The main one is like it takes two to three years minimum, like End of story, unless you have this massive following and you start a newsletter today, you might be able to grow it that fast, but it's just gonna take time. And I know people don't want to hear that. But it's just what I've seen across all of these, even if you have paid ads, so.

 

Jay Clouse  03:37

Two to three years to hit 50,000 subscribers, is that you're saying?

 

Chenell Basilio  03:40

Yeah, 50,000 or like a meaningful income of over two to three years.

 

Jay Clouse  03:44

Okay.

 

Chenell Basilio  03:45

So that's kind of the big one. I mean, Justin Walsh was able to do it faster. But he was growing his LinkedIn audience for, you know, two, three years before he even started his newsletter so there are some outliers, but it's kind of like, if you look at the back end, like there's no real overnight success, as we know, anyway.

 

Jay Clouse  04:01

Totally. Okay, so two to three years, that makes sense. In my case, it's like six years. So if you're slower than two, three years, don't feel bad. What else?

 

Chenell Basilio  04:11

One of the big things is just kind of starting with great content. I know, again, sounds kind of boring. But if you don't have something good to talk about, and there are like five things that I've pulled out of this, but if you don't have something good to talk about, like people aren't going to share it, you're not gonna be able to use all these like growth tactics that you hear about. So the five things that I've seen our unique content, so you have somebody like cat Norton, who combined Excel with like Tic Toc, and nobody was doing that at the time. So that's kind of a unique aspect, where you have Cody Sanchez, who had like all these really cool life experiences of like buying these boring businesses, but she was able to start sharing those with people online, and that was kind of different. So that's the unique angle. The next one is something that takes time so like Lenny Richard ski is one that I've done recently and he But his biggest thing is he said, forget all of the growth hacks, the best pieces of content that I have, like the ones that went viral are the ones that he spent the most time on. So it's something that takes time. And I'm seeing this with growth and reverse. Like, every day, I hear people saying, like, your contents amazing, I'm like, but it takes 20 to 25 hours every week to put these together.

 

Jay Clouse  05:21

Oh, my gosh, I want to pause on this for a second, because I think about this all the time. And it's actually really frustrating to me, because I show up on YouTube, I show up in audio, I show up an email, I show up on Twitter, on LinkedIn, not to mention, you know, all the conversations, we're having the lab. And so it just doesn't leave a lot of space on a weekly basis, to go that deep. And I really want to, you know, like, that's something that especially as, as you grow as a creator, I think you start to really crave is like, Alright, I want to go deeper, I want to I want to use my advantage of an audience and some comfort and some time to now just make assets make content that other people can't or won't, because it's just harder and more in depth. And so something I wish I would have known earlier on is to exercise restraint and all the places I'm showing up so that I can reserve more time to put towards the main thing, you know, and that's, that is what's so great about growth universe is it's so in depth, it's very clear that you spent a lot of time on this. And that's difficult to, you know, compete with if other people see Oh, I like this. I can do that, too.

 

Chenell Basilio  06:26

Yeah, no, but I mean, at the same time, you're creating that value. It's kind of like behind closed doors, but not really like I know people see it, it's just not in the way that you would see like Lenny's posts or that kind of thing. Sorry, just different.

 

Jay Clouse  06:39

Okay, so so far we have it takes two to three years, it needs to be great content, which means that it's either unique, or it takes a lot of time.

 

Chenell Basilio  06:46

The other one is that it can save you time. So like Mario Gabrielli had a lot of his audience is like tech focused VC type people. And when new companies or startups are trying to go public, they have to put out this thing called an S one report, which I didn't know what this was at the time. But learning about it, I'm like, This is so smart. So he knew that all of his audience was or a lot of his audience was going through and digging through these s one reports and learning about these companies before they were going to invest or decide not to invest. So what he did is, as soon as those reports come out, he digs in to all the data, all the information, and he puts out like a quick summary so that all these people that were spending 510 20 hours on this, we're now saving all that time. And I don't know that he still does this, but he did it for a while. And I know it was a really big success.

 

Jay Clouse  07:38

That's also a trend that I see though, is a lot of times the things that people do that get them to a certain level of success. They end up discontinuing in favor of something else. But like it was so fundamental, and sometimes it feels like an opportunity to like pick back up. Yeah, as a quick aside, there was this story I read about software development. And they're given the example of Atlassian. And their product Jira, this is a weird start, but stick with me. So for people who aren't familiar with JIRA, JIRA is this software tool that basically product development teams use, they can keep track of feature requests, things that they're working on to make the product better bug tickets, bug reports in the software, things like that. As companies mature and time goes on, you know, Atlassian, they are improving their products all day, every day. And As years pass, that means that the product is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and better and more full featured, what happens is you end up with a part of the market who says actually don't want this really robust, really heavy thing that's usually higher priced, I just want something really simple. And so Atlassian came in and bought Trello. Because Trello was now filling this part of the market where it's just as really simple product management software, because they had gone out of that market, there was an XY graph that I looked at where it shows like time and product complexity and JIRA had gone up into the right leading up a whole new market of not complex, not expensive, and Trello came in and filled that. Anyway, as you see creators who are doing things successfully and growing, and now they're on to something else. They might vacate a spot in the market for you to use a similar strategy like maybe Mario's not doing these last ones anymore. And that's a spot for someone else to come in and say, well, let me kickstart my thing doing this then.

 

Chenell Basilio  09:28

100%. I think it's with across every industry. It's like the unbundling of things like these companies start out really small and knit a niche and then they grow too big to be able to even fill that need anymore. So they just, people can come in and kind of restart where they were.

 

Jay Clouse  09:42

Anything else that you're seeing of commonalities across these successful newsletters?

 

Chenell Basilio  09:47

Yeah, I mean, you're gonna love this one community, all of them, or at least a majority of them have been part of some kind of community. And whether you create your own community or you join somebody else's community. I mean, they're all part of something. The biggest one that I've actually found out more recently, I did a deep dive on Polina Pompliano, for trends. And I found out that she was part of type house which was like Nathan bashes is like, hit 40 person kind of iteration of some like tick tock group, right. But they he did it for newsletter writers. And so that was like Lenny was in there Paki McCormick, David Pro, like a bunch of huge names.

 

Jay Clouse  10:26

So you're saying, community and they are a part of a supportive community of other peers or that they're creating a community of their own?

 

Chenell Basilio  10:34

Either one, so like Dickie Bush created his own, but these other ones were just part of somebody else's.

 

Jay Clouse  10:41

I think about this a lot too, because as a community builder, it's a strength of mine is something I can do effectively, something has benefited me. But there are also times during my life during my day where I'm like, I want to be a member of something that I'm not driving the bus on, you know, so it's really nice to define a community of people, that it's just a good fit for you. And you can tap in when you want to and not feel obligated, not to when you don't.

 

Chenell Basilio  11:05

Right. And again, like a lot of these people are growing their newsletters via social media. So having the community to like, like and comment on their posts like that helps to even just to bounce ideas off as well. So totally, I think the other the other piece of this is like start niche, and then you can go bigger. So a lot of people think that they need to start really broad. But if you pick something small, like you know, Daphne Gomez, she went just on teacher like helping teachers, or Nathan ball started with a sports newsletter, and then he decided he was going to expand into like storytelling altogether later on. So if you start smaller and kind of figure out what's working, you know, find your voice, start getting subscribers, and then you can kind of play around in these other fields.

 

Jay Clouse  11:49

I agree with that. Anecdotally, what I what I'm seeing, I'd love to get your take on this, it seems like if you want to grow a newsletter, you really need to think of the newsletter as a product itself. Right? Like this is this is a thing I'm making, it just so happens that it's free, or most of these things are free. But what I see from a lot of people who want to grow their email list is it's so secondary, and you know, their call to action is like, subscribe to my newsletter. And that's like, literally it and the brand is under their name. And it's like why? Why would I do that? So I think what you're saying about starting niche, it really helps to define the product. You know, what it what is this thing? What can I expect from it? Who is it for? When you are more narrow in, in what the job to be done of that product is it's more compelling and actually calls out to the people who fit that market.

 

Chenell Basilio  12:41

100% Yeah, and I know, Jesse Anderson, who ADHD, Jessie is when he goes by, he talked about this on one of his podcast episodes, that once he switched to a paid subscription model, it was much easier for his brain to recognize it as a product, like you were saying. So it's kind of like taking it from something like, oh, I'm just creating this for fun to await the sound getting paid. Now, I need to take this seriously.

 

Jay Clouse  13:06

I caught up with James Clear recently, a lot of people asked me, How do you get James clear as the second episode of your podcast? Well, it's because we had a pre existing relationship. So James and I know each other because he lives here in Columbus, Ohio. And we met up recently, and he reminded me he was like, I think of myself as an entrepreneur. He's like, my writing is a product, but it's because I saw that as an opportunity. You know, like he thinks of himself as an entrepreneur. And the product is his newsletter, and his book. And I think that's a really healthy way to think about your newsletter, honestly, is to think like, Okay, I'm an entrepreneur, and this is the product. And this has to serve a role for somebody, and people will have to feel like they would regret it if it wasn't here. And it might be something that they want to pay for. So I love that frame of thinking, just a quick break for our sponsors. And we'll be right back to the show. And now back to the show. Do you have some tactical ideas and some of the takeaways you've had of like, okay, here are true tactically, what these creators are doing that some of us can emulate.

 

Chenell Basilio  14:04

Yeah, so some of these are kind of unique, in a sense. And then some are kind of I've seen across a couple of different peoples. So one of the more fun ones was like, What the Just it's a women focused sports newsletter. So it's kind of very niche, but not really, it's half the population. They had an in person launch party. So they they lived in somewhere in Canada, I think, was Montreal, probably getting this wrong. But anyway, their local Shopify store, they reached out to them and they were like, Hey, can we use your space? So they got free space, they got a bunch of local businesses to sponsor like goodie bags, and all the food was included as well. And your ticket to get in was just your email address. So Wow. Yeah. So they had 250 people show up. It was like this fun party. They all wear their sports jerseys. And then they asked everyone to refer three to five friends. So they said like after that they got up to 1000 Subscribe. Reverse like overnight. Wow, I, I had never heard of anyone doing that before. So I thought that was really unique.

 

Jay Clouse  15:05

I feel like in person marketing like that is wildly underrated. I mean, it's slower. You hear like a similar story, actually with the morning brew, guys. You haven't done a growth reverse on Morning brew yet, have you now? Okay, I want to come back to that and talk about why not. But that's kind of what they did like they were in college, and they would literally first go to classes and kind of illegally get people to give them their email address and sign them up. And then then they hired like ambassadors brand ambassadors to do that same thing, but at scale, both at their university and other universities. Wildly underrated.

 

Chenell Basilio  15:41

I agree. Did they hold on to it?

 

Jay Clouse  15:43

Did they incentivize the sharing? Does it just incentivize the referring or was it just goodwill?

 

Chenell Basilio  15:47

I think it was just goodwill.

 

Jay Clouse  15:49

Wow, I need to earn 50 friends who would refer three friends.

 

Chenell Basilio  15:52

I mean, I think if you get to go to a free party with like, free alcohol, free drinks, free food. Yeah. The next one that I think is probably the most fun. Cody Sanchez actually, sticking in line with her whole business buying businesses, she actually bought a couple of newsletters. And instead of just like doing a whole rebrand and adding all the subscribers to her newsletter, she took, then she bought the newsletter. And then she started changing the content a little bit. So she would leave most of it but put her country and thinking as like a cross promotion or like a sponsored by. And she did this for I don't know, probably 90 days or so. And then she would like keep growing it on the side. And then she eventually sold it again.

 

Jay Clouse  16:37

What, that's real? She did that?

 

Chenell Basilio  16:40

She did that.

 

Jay Clouse  16:40

How many, how many newsletters?

 

Jay Clouse  16:42

Really?

 

Chenell Basilio  16:42

I don't know. She mentioned it on one podcast. And she had said she had done it twice. But she could have done it more since then.

 

Chenell Basilio  16:42

I thought that was fascinating.

 

Jay Clouse  16:50

It's fascinating, the continuing to grow and then resell the asset is the fascinating part about this. Wow.

 

Chenell Basilio  16:59

That is right up her end goal, right?

 

Jay Clouse  17:01

Totally.

 

Chenell Basilio  17:01

Like she totally sells businesses.

 

Jay Clouse  17:03

Totally and then that becomes content. Like I'm sure she if she hasn't written about that, I'm very surprised about it. But I haven't heard her say that before.

 

Chenell Basilio  17:10

I hadn't either.

 

Jay Clouse  17:11

And that's so brilliant.

 

Chenell Basilio  17:12

She mentioned on like one podcast, and I was like what?

 

Jay Clouse  17:15

Oh, my goodness.

 

Chenell Basilio  17:16

Yeah.

 

Jay Clouse  17:17

My next move, I'm gonna buy your newsletter, Chenell. And I'm gonna keep growing it.

 

Chenell Basilio  17:22

Sell it back.

 

Jay Clouse  17:23

Sell it back to you. Okay, these are amazing tactics. Let's keep going.

 

Chenell Basilio  17:30

The next one was a little different. And it's actually one that I copied. So the referral program. So Ali, who runs first 1000 Dotco, where he kind of like, does growth reverse, but for startups on how they got their first 1000 customers. So he instead of just giving away like morning brew shards and stuff like that, he would say like, if you refer five people, you get your name in this little section. And for him, he said he got over 2500 subscribers in one year doing this, which is awesome. Mine has not seen that success, but it's doing okay.

 

Jay Clouse  18:02

I've seen you doing this. And I was just messaging you about this because I'm I guess maybe envious, but also just like curious. I'm like, I could do that as good as can be really nice. Maybe you want to share this on the record, maybe you don't? How, how much do you see in terms of click traffic from readers to the names of the people who get recognized?

 

Chenell Basilio  18:19

Tons.

 

Jay Clouse  18:20

Really?

 

Chenell Basilio  18:21

Yeah, it's, it's a lot. I'm almost thinking of making that part like, adding like a little sponsor part to it because, I mean, a lot of people come back and they're like, whoa, I gave you only 10 subscribers and you gave me like 40, so.

 

Jay Clouse  18:34

Wild.

 

Chenell Basilio  18:35

Yeah.

 

Jay Clouse  18:36

Wild, okay.

 

Chenell Basilio  18:37

Yeah.

 

Jay Clouse  18:37

Good to know.

 

Chenell Basilio  18:38

So that mean that one it's, it's a hit or miss for me, like I've had one day where some guy was like, Hey, I'm gonna share this my huge newsletter and I got like 120 subscribers from it. But then every other day, I'm probably getting like two or three, which again, not bad.

 

Jay Clouse  18:52

What's wonder about with things like this in the design of the email template itself. I wonder at what point does it almost just blend in like a footer and thinking about mostly like the the referral area of the newsletter, not the let me show you the names that people have referred to because that's visibly different each week, since there are different people there. But I think what happened with me when I was initially using Spark lube is in the beginning, you put it there, it's new, it calls that attention because people haven't seen it before. If they're interested, they take in, they take action. But then after a couple of months, it just felt like it blended in, like the footer of my email, and people didn't even think about it anymore. And so I feel like if and when I bring it back, I'm going to do it very intermittently, you know, where it's like, I'm going to put this out for a couple of weeks and then when to take it away. I'm going to bring it back and maybe the incentive will be different. But I think that's how I would do it. What how are you thinking about it so far?

 

Chenell Basilio  19:48

Yeah, I mean, I've I've noticed I think it kind of blends into the bottom and a lot of people don't get all the way to the bottom of an email anyway, so who knows if they actually see it, but people definitely see it. I just probably could call it out better in the middle of the newsletter.

 

Jay Clouse  20:02

But that's something to think about too. Like, I like visually blocking things in a newsletter. So it's very clear delineation between sections. You know, like, this is one idea. This is another idea, this is another idea. And I like coloring some of those sections. So it makes sense to color like the sponsor section of the newsletter. And what I see from other newsletters is they don't do that, it probably drives more results. The design snob and me doesn't like that. But I recognize that it's probably like, the better business case to go with making like different colored call outs, do you see any patterns with colors and design in these newsletters?

 

Chenell Basilio  20:40

I think they're all over the place, like some of them are on substack. And you don't really have too much control over that. Some of them have I mean, they all really have their own like, unique look. But I think with you, I think if you changed it up a little bit, maybe had some more contrasting colors for those blocks, it could work.

 

Jay Clouse  20:58

Okay, so recapping the tactic so far, we got in person launch party, love it, buying other newsletters, love it even more referral program, love it, but a little bit less than buying other newsletters. What else is on your list?

 

Chenell Basilio  21:10

So going back to this ally story like so he stopped doing that. And now he does, he changes it up to a different lead magnet of sorts every month. So within a month, you have to get 20 or however many he has a month to subscribe. So as soon as the first of the month, it's it resets to zero. And you're kind of missed that one. So that's what he's been at, since he switched it from there. And it seems to be working.

 

Jay Clouse  21:35

Sounds like so much work.

 

Chenell Basilio  21:37

So much work.

 

Jay Clouse  21:38

Sounds like so much work. It sounds like if I took the same amount of effort to run that program, and just instead found other newsletters to cross promote with or build a system for another means of distribution. But I don't know, I mean, as the newsletter grows, if you have 10% of people who are actively trying to pursue that incentive every month as an arbitrary number, but whatever percent it is, as a newsletter grows, that's significantly more people every month who are sending the same number of referrals, you know, 10%, higher, or whatever it is. That could be interesting. I could see that.

 

Chenell Basilio  22:10

Yeah, me too. But also in the end, like the flip side of it. I feel like a lot of people have success with like, here's something if you refer one or two people, because a lot of the especially if you're you have a newsletter, where it's not people who have larger audiences, like where are you going to find 25 people to refer something like that, too.

 

Jay Clouse  22:27

Yeah.

 

Chenell Basilio  22:27

So

 

Jay Clouse  22:28

That's what a louia spark loop would recommend. He's that he's actively recommended that to me before, which is like, have something that is so easy that anybody can do it. But you end up with like a lot of people who are just like, here's my second burner email address, right, which is annoying.

 

Chenell Basilio  22:44

It's very annoying. I've gotten that too. And I'm like, really?

 

Jay Clouse  22:47

Yeah, yeah, it's a little a little harder to do that when you need three referrals. But I feel like when you have one or two, it's very easy to be like, Alright, here's my, and then there are people who are really, who are really smart and sophisticated, like, okay, so I'm gonna be j plus creator at Jay clouse.com. J plus creator to Jay clouse.com. And just use like the Gmail plus game, if you don't want to talk about good, I don't want you to sign up my email list sometimes.

 

Chenell Basilio  23:12

I had someone do that. And I just didn't add them. I was like, this is silly.

 

Jay Clouse  23:16

You should, there should be some terms of service against that.

 

Chenell Basilio  23:19

Right. So another one that a lot of them use, but I don't know how effective it is anymore. But I think I'm going to test it out is a product launch. So so like Paki McCormick did this, he saw a pretty good success. Ali from first 1000 We're just talking about Harry dry did it. But the most successful one was drew Riley from trends.vc. He said that in a matter of days from his product launch, he went from 7,000 subscribers to 25,000.

 

Jay Clouse  23:48

I think he might have said that on on this podcast, too. But a lot of familiar names and faces here. Yeah, I agree. So I've always thought about this as a strategy. And what I don't understand, because I just haven't done the small amount of work to to explore this. But I think you have, what does the campaign on Product Hunt look like? Like how do you market a newsletter and make it seem like you're not just doing an email grab to an audience that I think is probably kind of allergic to that type of behavior?

 

Chenell Basilio  24:16

Yeah, that's a great question. A lot of them put in a ton of research into figuring out like all the tips and hacks you can do on the back end, and I have not done that yet. But I want to just to test it out and see how it goes nowadays. But it's getting harder and harder to get on, like, product of the day or anything. So that's, I don't know, we'll see.

 

Jay Clouse  24:36

It seems it seems really tough to walk that line. And it seems like if you are going to do a product launch that you want to be wildly successful. From an email perspective, it probably helps to like bring your own people to it, you know, like instead of having it be the the strategy you use when you're at, you know, starting and launching and zero subscribers. It's something that you do when you have a couple 1000 And you come to your own email list and said, hey, we're on Product Hunt, you know, if you if you're a product user, come on over check it out. Yeah, interesting.

 

Chenell Basilio  25:09

Yeah. So I think one of the bigger things that you're supposed to do is like send an email as soon as it goes live, like even if it's at 1am their time, so that if somebody is awake, and they're there, they can start like interacting with your product on page.

 

Jay Clouse  25:21

I did an interview with Corey Haynes. So if you're watching this or listening to this, and you're like, I want to learn more about Product Hunt, go back, find my Corey Haynes intro, we dive into how to do Product Hunt well, so that should walk us through this. There's a guy taking us off track just a little bit. There's a guy who runs the blog workspaces dot XYZ, XYZ. And he told me that he did a similar strategy, but it wasn't Product Hunt, it was Hacker News. So he said that he did an AMA on Hacker News, talking about like, Hey, I have this newsletter. We grew it to this many subscribers AMA. And he said that AMA, I don't remember he said he doubled it. But it was a huge amount of growth that he told me that he had. And the AMA wasn't like, and here's the URL like just by hosting the AMA not talking about the newsletter. People got curious, searched it out. They said he had a huge debt. And I think he's done the product on it saying sense because I'm looking at his website right now. And it has featured on Product Hunt with 743 upvotes. That's a lot. So maybe, maybe a Product Hunt is a big opportunity, because most people who are launching products on Product Hunt, don't have audiences. If you're a newsletter, operator, you probably have a leg up in terms of the number of people who would go to bat for you.

 

Chenell Basilio  26:36

Yeah.

 

Jay Clouse  26:36

But you really got to

 

Chenell Basilio  26:37

I heard most people doing it recently. And they've gotten it like 2000 to 3000 minimum email subscribers.

 

Jay Clouse  26:42

Why am I not doing this? Why have I not done it yet, Chenell?

 

Chenell Basilio  26:45

I don't know.

 

Jay Clouse  26:45

I need to, I need to do the research here to see how people frame this. So I don't feel dirty. Like I need to feel like this is interesting as a product. And frame it that way. Because it won't be interesting for everybody probably like it probably needs to be ancillary to attack or business for this strategy to work, I would guess, but I don't know.

 

Chenell Basilio  27:06

I think it could do well, maybe you can launch like your lab light, or whatever you're calling it now.

 

Jay Clouse  27:10

And oh, maybe maybe just a quick break for our sponsors. And we'll be right back to the show. And now back to the show. Okay, so we've got product, launch anything else tactically that you've seen.

 

Chenell Basilio  27:24

More of just like optimizing stuff, like Harry dri is a master with like conversion rate optimization, and just trying to figure out how to convert the traffic that you're getting into email subscribers. So his big thing is always like, you can have 10,000 people come to your website, and 1% of them convert, you'll have 100 subscribers. But if you have 5000 people come in, it converts 2%, you have the same number of subscribers, so you need less people to come to your website. So he's all about like, trying to find ways that you can improve that so that you don't need as many people to come.

 

Jay Clouse  27:57

How many of the people that you I was gonna say talk to you do such deep research where you hear them talking in interviews? And I don't know, do you do any firsthand conversations with people before you publish?

 

Chenell Basilio  28:08

Not yet? The only one I did was Pat was I had to ask him because because his newsletter went from like, 240,000 people to 85. And I was like, something's wrong, I need to ask why this happened. Interesting.

 

Jay Clouse  28:20

Well, I'm sure it's gonna become more of a part of your process as you build leverage because your own audience is growing. But how often do they talk very analytically? And from a data perspective?

 

Chenell Basilio  28:30

Yeah, I mean, some of them do. A lot of them don't. So I'm realizing that a lot of the people that are on like the indie hackers, community or Product Hunt themselves, like Harry dry Pat walls, Drew Reilly, they all talked about it, because they're kind of building in public, if you will. So they're like, Hey, I did this. And I was able to improve my conversion rate. So some of them do, but a lot of people don't. But you can kind of tell based on like, I don't know, if they keep changing stuff or testing things out.

 

Jay Clouse  28:58

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm getting at. Like, even if they don't talk about it publicly. Do you get the sense that most of the people who are hitting these high number of subscribers or earning a lot from their list? Do you think that they're thinking about it analytically?

 

Chenell Basilio  29:10

I think most of them are, after a point like in the beginning, I don't know that it's worth it necessarily. Like it could be but once you have like a flywheel going of people coming to your site, like it's more and more important to be able to convert those people.

 

Jay Clouse  29:25

Okay, optimizing stuff, optimizing traffic, optimizing conversion, that makes a lot of sense.

 

Chenell Basilio  29:31

So like Drew Riley, I found almost 20 iterations of his homepage in the first year. I was like, what?

 

Jay Clouse  29:38

How did you find them? Do you do the Wayback Machine?

 

Chenell Basilio  29:40

Yeah, it's the best thing on the internet.

 

Jay Clouse  29:42

Interesting. So you did the Wayback Machine to find 20 different iterations of it. And what what did you learn from looking at 20 different iterations of trends to be see?

 

Chenell Basilio  29:51

Be more specific of like what people are getting? So in the beginning, his big headline just said, trends.bc it's like, Okay, what does that mean? And then after a while, he eventually changed it to like join 20,000 People getting the top trends in their inbox every week or something. And then he started adding, like subscriber count and that kind of thing. So, I mean, most of it's minimal. So like, you don't have a ton of pictures or like testimonials, like they're just giving you their email, they're not buying something, you don't need all of that in the beginning. So that's kind of how my homepage came about was just looking at his.

 

Jay Clouse  30:26

Have you noticed how many newsletter products, we'll call them? Use the word smarter as the like the selling point. A lot of them. It's wild. I don't know. I don't know if this is a situation where like, somebody had an insight and it was working and everyone followed suit, or somebody thought it'd be a good idea. And everyone assumed it was working. So they also followed suit.

 

Chenell Basilio  30:47

Yeah, I don't know. I think it's almost a mix of both like, oh, my, my thing makes you smarter. And then you see somebody else saying it in a different niche. So you just kind of copy it.

 

Jay Clouse  30:56

And now I'm saying it works. I mean, it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to frame this anyway, but saying like, okay, creator science, no matter what platform we're on, we're helping you be a smarter creator. I was like that, that fits, that's good. But, you know, it was like, literally when I when I was doing this research, I saw that the CTA for morning brew and the hustle, were exactly the same. They were exactly the same. And it was using that language. And there was a third then that I saw, right that okay, three makes a trend. Well, big decision.

 

Chenell Basilio  31:23

I love that. I love that you just took it ran with it.

 

Jay Clouse  31:25

Yeah, yeah, I did. That's a great, fine, but different audience.

 

Chenell Basilio  31:28

I would say the one other thing that's really cool is most people like you think you should drive all of your traffic just to the newsletter. So you know, LinkedIn, tick tock, whatever, Twitter, whatever platforms you're on, you're sending people to the newsletter, and that is good. But Harry dry, does something really cool where he, instead of sending everything to the newsletter, he actually starts sending like his newsletter, people back to Twitter, because that's his number one, opt in platform. So the people that are on his email list, like they're already interested in the content, they see that he posted a thread recently, and they'll go in and, like interact with it, and then it boosts up the thread and then more people subscribe. And it's just like this really cool growth loop that he has going.

 

Jay Clouse  32:11

This is pretty next level, I've been thinking about this, too, of how do you use timeliness to cross platform, boost your posts in the eyes of the algorithm? It's really hard to do. Because optimally, he would be posting a thread and then setting an email Moments later, you know, which is, I mean, the hard thing is like, like I use hype theory for posting a thread to Twitter. So I could schedule that for 11am and then schedule an email for 1105. What I wouldn't have in that email right away is a link to the tweet. So as he is he posting it live on Twitter, and then grabbing that link and going over to email.

 

Chenell Basilio  32:46

Yeah, he said, he gets the email like 80% ready to go. And then he writes the, the tweet or the thread or whatever he's gonna promote, and then he'll publish the tweet and then immediately send the email. And so they both got the same time. It's a it sounds like a lot. And I don't think he does it anymore, because it's a lot of work. But he was doing that for a long time.

 

Jay Clouse  33:04

It didn't sound like that much work, though. And actually sounds okay. You know, it sounds sounds aren't that bad, I would have to look and see how he is teeing up that thread, because what he's probably not doing is embedding the whole tweet in his email maybe is if it's a thread, I guess, you see the hook and you want to read the rest. But you wouldn't be able to do that with just a single tweet, because then no one will click off.

 

Chenell Basilio  33:23

And I think he kind of, I don't know, I started doing this too. So at the bottom of the email, he'll say like, these take me 10 hours to create, it'll take you 10 seconds to go like this tweet. And so like, he kind of uses that to his advantage. So I do that in mind, too. I'm like, okay, it takes me 20 hours,

 

Jay Clouse  33:39

it's a call to action. It's it is it's not like, it's not even just like, hey, let me see if people enjoy it. It's like, let me let me actually ask, like, please go support this. Yeah. All right. Well, you've spent hundreds of hours now doing these, I see the immediate implications in your own newsletter from a lot of these. Let's, let's talk about some of that. What, what are some of the things that are working for you right now? Because you've grown? And don't be modest about this? Like, how, how long have you been doing this? And what's the growth been like for you so far?

 

Chenell Basilio  34:10

Yeah. So I published the first issue of the newsletter on December 4 of 2022. So it's been four months, four and a half months, and your 6500.

 

Jay Clouse  34:21

Incredible, huge base, you know, that's more than 1000 per month, which I just started reaching fairly recently. And again, six years over here. So this is awesome. Tell us tell us what you've implemented. That's working for you.

 

Chenell Basilio  34:35

Yeah, so like I was talking about before the referral program does okay. I think that's driven me like 380 people cross promotions on an ongoing basis. I'll do those. The big thing with those are sometimes it's like a hit or miss like, I had this one. I was like, I'm gonna get so many subscribers from this, and it literally drove me zero was and I was like, do they really have that many people on their list? Gosh, shocked.

 

Jay Clouse  35:00

Oh my gosh.

 

Chenell Basilio  35:02

Yeah. So some of them can be hit or miss. So I have zero hopes for any of these. And then I'm pleasantly surprised. So I mean, you can get 50 to 100 from one, but that one was very interesting day.

 

Jay Clouse  35:14

So you said cross promotions, you said, referral program. What else?

 

Chenell Basilio  35:20

So you were talking about Spark loop that one has been massive, having people refer their newsletter, folks to me, as well as me doing the same. And it's kind of like, a little way to get on someone's radar to like, if you add their newsletter to your recommendations, or like, Who's this that's referring me? It's kind of cool. I really like that.

 

Jay Clouse  35:40

Especially if you start driving some volume. It's like what is Who is this? What is happening? And you're doing you're doing just the free side of it. You haven't started doing any? The paid on it yet? Have you? I have a couple of the paid ones in there as well that you recommend or but you you're not paying to acquire? Yeah.

 

Chenell Basilio  35:55

Oh, no, I'm not paying to acquire yet. Okay. Yeah, I need to figure out monetization first.

 

Jay Clouse  36:00

What you wanna, you want to earn money back before you start throwing 1000s of dollars and email subscribers?

 

Chenell Basilio  36:05

Yes. Spark loop has been awesome. And then I would say, I did a giveaway with a couple other creators this past week or two, where we each put in $100. And we were giving away $500 prize to one random lucky winner. And they essentially signed up for all of our email newsletters at once. But I sent out like a an email that said, like, hey, remember, you sign up for this? Here's, like, why you're getting this email and only 25 or so unsubscribed. So so far, that's done pretty well?

 

Jay Clouse  36:37

Do you have them cohorted in a way that you can measure opens for that group of people?

 

Chenell Basilio  36:42

I do. But I've only sent like one newsletter since.

 

Jay Clouse  36:46

I don't even need that. My suspicion, I haven't done a giveaway is because basically like the the story I hear from people who did a lot was like, you're gonna get a lot of not fit subscribers, who, in the best case, unsubscribe, in the worst case, just stay subscribed, it never open and are a big bummer. So I would if I ran that I would want to cohort just so I can measure that over time and see if that is true. Or if you are reaching the right audience also with the giveaways?

 

Chenell Basilio  37:15

Yeah, I know it's a hit or miss. So TBD on that one. But Twitter threads every week, I will write a Twitter thread about that person that I did a deep dive on. In a good week, though. Read retweeted or comment like it. And that does really well, to get more subscribers as well.

 

Jay Clouse  37:32

That's awesome. I need to do a better job with that. With my newsletter with the podcasts. I don't talk about it at all, really.

 

Chenell Basilio  37:34

Yeah, I agree. That was one of the things I was going to tell you to do.

 

Jay Clouse  37:42

Good. Okay. Noted, I get it. I get it.

 

Chenell Basilio  37:46

The other thing that you should be doing that does really well for me is teasing the newsletter the day before? That actually does like it sends me 100 to 150 subscribers every week. Really? Yeah. And you have more volume than I do.

 

Jay Clouse  38:00

That's what I'm doing I really should do that. The problem is sometimes I write it the day before. I need you. But you know the topic sometimes I don't even know the topic until I start writing it. Yeah, yeah, I know. I see Justin doing it. He tells me I'm crazy for not doing it. I'm like it's not. It's not intentional. It's not that I'm intentionally not doing it. But that's that's a good idea to use the newsletter the day before.

 

Chenell Basilio  38:22

Yeah, his method of doing like a mini thread. So like, you know, you have a hook of like, what the topic is get people interested. And then you're like, here's how they did it. And then the next one's like, oh, by the way, I'm sending out the full story tomorrow. Definitely listen to him. This is my little trick. And it's not that revolutionary, but people don't do it at all. So I signed up for a ton of newsletters, a because I reverse engineer people who have them. But so it's nice for me to like keep tabs on stuff. But the really crazy thing that I do is I reply to those people. So nobody does this. Even I have a newsletter. No one does it. So I'll reply, and I'll be like, hey, saw you, this is your 100th edition, congrats, you know, and then in that email, I have my email signature. So it's my profile picture, the same one as Twitter, and LinkedIn. And then I have like, my name little blurb about growth reverse and like subscribe here, but it's like hidden as an email signature. So but I've actually seen a lot of success with tha.

 

Jay Clouse  39:22

Interesting, successful form of they reach back out you build a relationship.

 

Chenell Basilio  39:26

Yeah, so it's not a volume play. But it's a if you want to get in front of like a really big name. That's my trick there.

 

Jay Clouse  39:34

Totally agree with that. Please reply to more of my emails. Anything else that comes to mind?

 

Chenell Basilio  39:40

That's probably the biggest one and then I don't know I started using pop ups because Harry dry said to do it. And it does pretty well.

 

Jay Clouse  39:47

It does pretty well. The exit intent popup does better than you expect this very surprising. I don't want it to work, but it does. I know not my favorite user experience, but it's really not that bad. I think I think exit intent is much better than like you've gone idle Let me now make it much harder for you to get back into the session because that's a miserable user experience, in my opinion. Alright, well, I have two more quick questions for you Chennel.

 

Chenell Basilio  40:10

Okay.

 

Jay Clouse  40:10

The first one being, is there anybody you really want to reverse engineer, but you actually feel afraid to do it?

 

Chenell Basilio  40:18

Not afraid. But I do want to reverse engineer, Jack butcher. But he actually doesn't really run his newsletter anymore. So I feel like it kind of doesn't align as much as I want it to.

 

Jay Clouse  40:30

All right, Chennel doesn't get intimidated. I will have to

 

Chenell Basilio  40:34

Well, it's easy to not get intimidated when you're just like sitting at your computer looking at this stuff.

 

Jay Clouse  40:40

For my last rapid fire question. Is there anything that you have anything that you believe to be true, but do not yet have the data to support when it comes to email growth?

 

Chenell Basilio  40:50

Oh, that's a good one. I guess I would say that even if you do a bad job every week, if you put yourself out there people are going to notice and like the people who see what you're doing is going to be more valuable than you being scared to publish that week.

 

Jay Clouse  41:08

Well, this has been awesome. This has been super insightful. Thank you for doing the hard work of reverse engineering these things and thank you for bringing us the contextualized synthesized summary of that.

 

Chenell Basilio  41:20

Thanks for having me.

 

Jay Clouse  41:27

I hope this conversation with Chenell has given you some ideas that you can apply to your own email newsletter and its growth. If you wanna learn more about Chenell, you can visit her website at growthinreverse.com or find her on Twitter @chenellco. Links to both of those things are in the show notes. Thanks to Chenell for being on the show. Thank you to Emily Clouse for making the artwork for this episode. Thanks to Nathan Todhunter for mixing the show and Brian Skeel for creating our music. If you like this episode, you can tweet @jayclouse and let me know and if you really want to say thank you, if you really want to make my day, please leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. I see every one of them come in it makes a big difference. Thanks for listening,and I'll talk to you next week.