How I Stacked 5 Growth Levers to Grow My Newsletter to 10,000 Subscribers

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:00]

Let me set the stage for you real quick.

The year is 2023. The month is April. The air in San Francisco is nice and crisp. It has been five months since I launched the First Class Founders podcast and three months since I launched my newsletter.

I take a sip of my Japanese green tea and look as the counter on my newsletter slowly ticks over from 1999 to 2000. Nice. Two thousand newsletter subscribers in three months is pretty good, I tell myself. I take another sip of my green tea and get back to work.

Fast forward to October. Halloween is a couple of weeks away as I write this and, perhaps, a week away as I record this. My wife, our two dogs, and I are finally enjoying the warmer weather in San Francisco, which ironically, happens in October each year. My phone pings. It’s a new email. It's another sponsorship request. Wait, what's this? Do they want to lock me down for A WHOLE YEAR? WHOA. Nice…

Six months ago, I had two thousand subscribers. Today, I am sitting at just over TEN. THOUSAND. SUBSCRIBERS. Assuming steady, linear growth, I should have, at most --two times three, that is-- six thousand subscribers.

But, that's the thing. My growth wasn't linear.

It was exponential.

How did I make that happen? Well, that’s what we’ll dig into today

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:36]

The next generation of successful founders in this digital age of entrepreneurship will leverage their audience to launch, build, and scale their brands. First Class Founders explores this golden intersection of audience-building & company-building with proven strategies to grow both your audience, which is your distribution, and your brand, which is your product.

Because those who can master both will create a category of one.

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped 3 successful businesses from $0 to $20 million over 8 years.

On this podcast, you'll learn timeless lessons from world-class content creators, startup founders, and CEOs. You'll also hear tactical tips & strategies from ME, Yong-Soo Chung!

Are you ready? Then, let’s begin!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:29]

Today's episode of First Class Founders is a SOLO flight.

That is, I'm bringing you my observations from the last nine months of growing my newsletter. I am gonna reveal to you how I grew my newsletter from ZERO to TEN THOUSAND subscribers in just NINE months.

The simple answer? It was a labor of love. I pushed really, REALLY hard to make it happen. It was endless hours of sweat and, at times, screaming in frustration. But, today, as I look at this beautiful five-digit number, the only thought in my head is that it was all worth it.

I recommend that you find somewhere nice and cozy to settle into for the next thirty minutes. Because, on today's episode, I plan to share with you FIVE GROWTH LEVERS that I think were the reason for my newsletter growing exponentially.

And I'm not gonna lie, one of them is VIRALITY, yup.

But the other four? They are nothing but pure, one hundred percent, American-flavor elbow grease. And, without adding any unnecessary suspense or drama here, they are Direct Sales, Partnerships, Organic Content, and Performance Marketing.

These four growth levers, together with an element of constructed virality, helped propel me to TEN THOUSAND subscribers in nine months.

Yup, I said "constructed virality". Did your ears perk up at that phrase? Of course, they did! It sounds too good to be true. But, believe me, it's not and I WILL tell you exactly how and why.

The journey of growing my newsletter - as it does with any digital business - from ZERO to TEN THOUSAND subscribers had clear milestones at various points.

Over the next thirty minutes, we'll visit each one of these milestones and evaluate which growth lever is most effective at that particular stage.

Because the key is to know WHEN to use WHICH growth lever.

At each stage, I'll also share with you how *I* applied the growth lever for my newsletter and what YOU can do with the same growth lever for your own digital business.

And finally, I'll tell you the MOST important thing you need to remember when operating them - so make sure you stick around till the very end!

All of these growth levers and all this tactical advice were tried and tested on my own newsletter and podcast. What I'm sharing with you here is what expert coaches and consultants would probably charge you hundreds and thousands of dollars. Actually, some of this advice WAS ACQUIRED from these coaches and consultants over the course of these nine months...

Instead, I'm only gonna charge you thirty minutes of your time in exchange for all this knowledge. Now, doesn't that sound like a no-brainer?

Then, jet-setters, get ready for take-off!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:10]

Before we begin, we teamed up with HyperPods to bring to you a quick 3-min hyper-visual summary of this episode on the five growth levers I used to grow my newsletter, to help you consume faster, understand better, and retain more key ideas and insights.

You can grab the hyper-visual summary for this week’s episode absolutely free at firstclassfounders.com/hypervisuals.

I launched my podcast in November 2022 to a grand total of... ZERO listeners. Well, unless you count my friends and family. And, let's face it, they are only being polite.

Then, in January 2023, I sent out my first newsletter to eighty-eight subscribers. These were an assortment of people from all my circles - friends, family, business, podcast listeners, and so on.

My intent with First Class Founders has always been two-fold. One, I wanted to share my knowledge and expertise as a serial entrepreneur with the world. Two, I also wanted to make it a profitable business while doing it. I consider my newsletter and podcast as very serious digital businesses.

And now, nine months after starting my newsletter, I have found that there are FIVE growth levers to all digital businesses. These are the Organic Content, Partnerships, Virality, Performance Marketing, and Direct Sales.

The first milestone, as you can probably imagine, starts when you have ZERO subscribers. This is where all content creators start. Everyone starts from nothing.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:45]

By the way, since I am talking about my newsletter, I will frequently refer to subscribers or readers. But the principles I am going to discuss are applicable to ALL forms of digital business. So, every time you hear the word subscribers, feel free to replace it in your head with customers, or listeners, or users - or whatever is appropriate for YOUR business.

So, as I was saying, we all start at ZERO.

And, as you can imagine, the easiest growth lever available here is "organic content". Or, in other words, stuff that you can produce without any external help. Stuff you can produce by yourself.

Using Naval Ravikant's idea of permissionless leverage is what will help you get going here. Use media to grow your audience. Use no-code tools to build your product. There are a ton of free tools available out there for you to start your journey - leverage as many of them as you can.

This is often the steepest hill to climb.

Because, most people forget that there are TWO parts to this milestone.

Yes, you have to create a product, but you also have to DISTRIBUTE it. No product is automatically discoverable. You, as the creator, will have to FIND an audience for it and then, CONVINCE that audience that they should give it a chance.

Thankfully, media is permissionless leverage. There are several social platforms out there that you can use to get your message out to your audience without having to pay a single penny.

For example, my choice of platform - at the moment anyway - is 𝕏. I use it almost everyday to make all kinds of noise about my content. I post teasers for my episodes and upcoming newsletters. I plug my newsletter as a followup to every post that gets a fair bit of traction. My newsletter is prominently linked in my 𝕏 bio. I keep a close eye on the pulse of my community and I frequently repost and comment on posts where my audience seems to hangout.

Oh, and I bet you didn't know this, I send out a welcome DM to *all* my new followers - yes, ALL of them. BUT, here's the REAL kicker - about 98% of the time, I get an excited "Thank you!" from them!! From an AUTO-DM! Curious what my Auto-DM template looks like? Here, try it for yourself, follow me on 𝕏 @YongSooChung, and my auto-DM will kick in - go on, try it out.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:02]

Cool, isn't it? If you want to know how and why it works, I wrote an entire newsletter around this auto-DM template and went into a fair bit of detail on how it was constructed - look for the link in the show notes.

Now, here's the flip side of it all, which I'm sure is playing on your mind right now. And, just like you, a lot of people ask me the same thing, "But Yong-Soo, I'm afraid if I post too frequently about my product, my audience will unfollow me."

Look, if your audience doesn't like your product, then you either have the wrong product or the wrong audience and ONE of them needs to change.

Yes, it is incredibly terrifying to watch your follower counts plummet. BUT I like to think of it as cleaning house. You need to clear out your old stuff if you want to bring new stuff in, right?

Also, talking about your product is important because it is a key component of building in public. Building in public is incredibly difficult because it requires that you keep no secrets from your audience. It requires you to strip down to your most vulnerable state and present yourself to your audience.

And, trust me, it works.

Because, people like honesty. People like transparency. People like facts and figures. People like openness.

Sure, they might not reciprocate but I have found that sharing all these so-called "secret numbers" actually helps me get tons of constructive feedback from my audience.

That's why I share all my growth metrics for my newsletter and podcast transparently with you guys. Because, I want to build an audience that is, to put it simply, like ME.

And, once I establish that personal connection with my audience, guess what their next step is likely to be? Yup, they subscribe to my newsletter and podcast!

No, not out of a sense of obligation but out of a sense of camaraderie. Because I’m always working on deepening my trust with my audience. In other words, I’m constantly looking to convert my audience into raving fans.

So, based on this, can you guess what the ONE thing that all digital business owners ABSOLUTELY MUST do to build their own tribes?

Correct. Start collecting email addresses.

Sign up for an email service provider and start collecting emails ASAP. I personally use and highly recommend Beehiiv - no, I am NOT being paid by them to say this. Not yet, anyway. Hey Tyler, are you listening?

But, jokes aside, not having a newsletter sign-up page is the biggest mistake creators make. Start collecting emails from day one - whether or not you have a newsletter.

And, I'm not gonna sugar coat it, getting to a 1000 subscribers is a STEEP hill. And I mean S T E E P. I can't even begin to tell you how many times I felt like it was a lost cause. I almost gave up on it multiple times.

And, the blunt truth is, there is no way to avoid all that pain and suffering. You just have to stick with it. You have to put your nose to the grindstone and keep going.

Keep your eyes on the prize --the 1000 subscriber count-- and JUST. KEEP. GOING.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:59]

Because, believe me, when you reach that magic number, things start to get a LOT easier. To give you an example, it took me about 65 days to reach a thousand subscribers but it took me a little over 40 days to DOUBLE that number!

And I'll tell you exactly what I did to speed up that growth in a little while. And how it can get derailed if you don't make the right choice at the right time.

But before I tell you about any of that, while I have your attention, I want you to join me in saying thanks to my sponsor Castmagic.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:33]

Here's the tool every creator and founder should be using to build their content engine... I even used it for this exact episode you’re listening to right now.

Those excerpts, takeaways, and summaries that you see on the show notes for this episode?

Yeah, those are pulled directly from Castmagic.

Castmagic has the best AI-driven transcription on the market, hands down. Plus, you can use their AI prompts to generate titles, quotes, timestamped overviews, you name it.

Heck, you can even use Castmagic to pull summaries and action items from your coaching calls, sales calls, and customer discovery calls… pretty much any audio content.

Everyone deserves to experience Castmagic at least once to see what they’re missing out on. Trust me, it’ll change the way you work as it did for me.

You can try out Castmagic at Castmagic.io

And to make this an absolute no-brainer, listeners of First Class Founders can take 30% off for the first 3 months of your Castmagic subscription by using code Founders30. Again, I’ll put the link in the show notes, and don’t forget to use code Founders30.

And now, let's get back to our episode with podcaster and workflow-expert Joe Casabona and get straight into his S.M.A.S.H. framework.

And, now, let's get back to today's episode on deconstructing my newsletter growth.

So far, we have discussed the importance of consistently creating organic content and putting in the digital equivalent of elbow grease in growing your digital business from ZERO to a thousand subscribers.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:14]

Now, once you reach a thousand subscribers, you unlock a NEW growth lever called... (pause) Partnerships.

At a thousand subscribers, you are no longer a struggling content-creator. Sure, you are still a long way away from the MKBHDs and Mr. Beasts and the Pat Flynns of the world. But, having a thousand subscribers is a clear indication that not only do you have something USEFUL to say but that you also have people interested in HEARING what you have to say.

And that last little bit forms the basis of this next lever.

Because, your audience is not exclusive to you. There are other creators who are also hoping to reach your audience - some bigger than you, some about the same as you or smaller.

I hope I don't have to explain the logic of why partnerships can be an incredibly useful growth lever at this stage. Even if you look at it purely mathematically, the potential audience for your content is in the millions and you have reached only a thousand of them. Therefore, the odds are incredibly huge that another creator with a similar or larger audience size can help you reach a newer group of people.

So, on the basis of math alone, you SHOULD be partnering up.

So, why not do it right at the beginning? Because you don't have any credibility. Face it, now that you have a thousand subscribers, would you partner with a creator who has ZERO subs? No! Every creator needs to climb the 1000-subscriber hill to get a seat at the partnership-bargaining table.

Now, once you sit at this table, here's what's on the menu... You can do Giveaways, or Cross Promotions, or Swap Recommendations.

Each of these has its own pros and cons.

Giveaways are when you offer some kind of reward for your subscribers to sign up for your newsletter. Usually, this is some kind of a digital freebie - a free guide or a report or a tool or a coupon code. For example, I offered a free 3-month subscription for the premium membership of First Class Founders, which by the way, you can join at FirstClassFounders.com/join.

Personally, I have found giveaways to a hit-or-miss. Because, the subscribers you get through giveaways aren't always 'invested' in your journey. I did one the other week and got 100 subscribers who aren't the best quality but it’s still worth trying.

Cross promotions are when you mention other newsletters in your posts and they do the same for you. This requires a lot of coordination and careful planning to ensure that your content semi-overlaps the newsletter you are trying to cross-promote. Because, otherwise, it looks odd and out of place.

And for the same reason, I feel that cross-promotions are also a hit-or-miss. I've had mixed success with these but, hey, they brought me a good chunk of my subscribers post the 1000-subscriber milestone. And, growth is growth, right?

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:53]

The biggest growth for me and my newsletter, however, came from swapping recommendations. And, the HUGE mistake that most creators make at this point is aiming TOO high or, strangely, TOO low.

If you are swapping recommendations, it doesn't matter HOW MANY subscribers you have. What matters is how FAST you are growing. A newsletter with a large subscriber base that is growing slowly is nice for an ego-boost but terrible for a subscriber-boost. That's the key here - you want to look for partners with a high growth rate, not a big user-base.

And, on that note, if your newsletter is getting 100+ subscribers per day on Beehiiv, let's swap recommendations! Send me a DM - look for the link in the show notes.

There's also an arbitrage play here with Beehiiv Boosts, for those of you who are more adventurous and want to try a more advanced strategy to grow your newsletter. I did a full tactical breakdown on this in the premium segment of this podcast, back in episode 35, titled "Newsletter Growth Secrets: Don't Make These Costly Mistakes."

That’s episode 35, in case you want to queue that one up next! I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Okay, so you clawed your way to your first 1000 subscribers. Then partnered up with like-minded creators and digital business owners to slowly grow your audience to, say, five thousand or so...

This is where you want to go viral.

No, I'm not saying I have a magic formula to go viral. Far from it.

But, hear me out…

When you post something and your subscribers share it, you are benefiting from something called Earned Media - as in, you have earned media exposure because of the quality of your work. And, if you kept chugging along creating good content consistently, you would continue to benefit from this earned media and continue to grow.

Using the same logic, if you improve the quality of your content, your work gets exposed to newer and larger audiences. Then, one day, something you created really resonates with a HUGE audience.

That is virality.

That's why, at the beginning of the episode, I used the phrase, constructed virality. Because, I genuinely believe that virality is not a matter of luck but a matter of time. The law of averages all but ensures that your content WILL go viral at some point.

Quick note, by the same token, some of your content will also fail horribly and you will be left questioning your entire existence but we won't dwell on the negatives at this point, all right? We'll focus only on the positive for now...

Jokes aside, I was completely serious about virality being a matter of time, not luck. Because I genuinely believe that if you keep consistently creating good content, the only result is that you WILL get better and better at it!

But, here's the thing. If you think about it carefully, you will realize that some amount of virality can be catalyzed through gamification.

Let me give you an example.

Suppose you have exactly five thousand subscribers. Suppose, every week, 100 of them share your newsletter, which adds 10 new subscribers each week.

These 100 subscribers are doing it for free. But, can you tell me what would happen if you were to offer them a dollar --or something worth a dollar-- for every new subscriber they brought in? Would they still bring in 10 new subscribers? Or would that number see a significant jump?

More importantly, isn't that what we just described as virality?

What I just described here is a basic referral program, in which you reward your readers for sharing your newsletter. Beehiiv, the email service provider I use, has this feature built-in. For example, referring just one friend to my own newsletter unlocks all my weekly journal entries that I write each week exclusively for my newsletter subscribers.

Incentivising your subscribers to bring in more subscribers is a great way to rapidly increase your subscriber numbers. What I would recommend is that you carefully experiment with different rewards and tiers to see what works well for your audience.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:20:41]

Another thing you could do at this stage to achieve constructed-virality is feature a large creator in your newsletter. Say, you 'interview' them. If they like your interview, they will be automatically incentivized to share YOUR newsletter with THEIR audience!

Or as it happened in my case with my podcast and Arvid Kahl.

“I don't usually broadcast interviews of myself on the show, but this one blew me away so much when I listened to it That I really wanted to share it with you here. The production quality of this podcast is so good, and it lays out my whole old founder history, my whole journey, and even my current workflow so well that I couldn't help rebroadcasting this. So here it is, my chat With Yong Soo Chung on 1st Class Founders. Enjoy.”

Yeah, Arvid dropped an entire episode of First Class Founders into his podcast feed!

Another example would be Clint Murphy sharing the twitter thread accompanying a link to his podcast episode on MY podcast to HIS Twitter-slash-X account which had THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY THOUSAND followers at the time!

Now, both Clint and Arvid shared my podcasts because they were impressed with the quality of its content and production values.

But, from a purely results perspective, it acted as constructed-virality for me and THIS podcast!

In other words, I was able to achieve some amount of quote-unquote virality for my podcast by creating quality content that two of the biggest content creators BOTH found compelling enough to share with THEIR audience, which was significantly larger than my own at the time.

At the end of the day, virality or not, the ultimate goal remains the same - to get your content in front of new audiences and to convert those audiences into loyal members of your tribe.

The bottom line is this: Make your content so good that people will share it with their audience freely.

The growth of my podcast then translated to my newsletter because I kept referring people to my newsletter first instead of asking them to subscribe to their podcast. Why? Because, as Jeremy Enns explained in episode 28, it is easier to ask someone for an email than to ask them to follow your podcast:

EPISODE 28 - Jeremy Enns (09:44)
    "I think when what you're asking people if your main call to action on social media is subscribe to a newsletter. That's There's way less friction there. And then once they're on your email list, then you can like keep promoting the podcasts on, you know, however often you want to do that as long as they stay subscribed."

...and that, essentially, how I doubled the number of subscribers to the First Class Founders newsletter from five thousand subscribers to ten thousand subscribers - constructed virality.

Now, what? Where do I go from here?

Because, ten thousand is just another milestone. I don't want to stop here. I want to go from ten to fifteen, fifteen to twenty thousand subscribers, then to a hundred thousand, maybe a million subscribers - why not! How am I going to get there?

Well, I do have a plan and I plan on sharing that plan completely and transparently with you. I love building in public, remember? I don't hold anything back! I'm gonna share all my ideas - good, bad, ugly, beautiful - with you!

It is how I built all 3 of my businesses - UrbanEDC, SpottedByHumphrey, and GrowthJet - wait, have I told you about GrowthJet? Lemme take this opportunity to tell you about my company GrowthJet!

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:13]

E-commerce fulfillment is a pain. One time, one of my customers emailed me asking me why we had shipped them an empty box. It turns out the 3PL had stolen the $1,000 product and shipped an empty box to my customer. Yeah, that was not fun.


So, I launched GrowthJet, a Climate-Neutral Certified third-party logistics company for e-commerce brands.

We can pick, pack, and ship your orders from our warehouse in Brisbane, California While having direct access to our team on-site, we take great pride in our customer experience. Just ask our current partners. They absolutely love us.

GrowthJet is the 3PL that I wish I had when I launched my own brand, Urban EDC.
If you have an e-commerce shop, check out GrowthJet and hit me up!

Okay, let's get back to our episode about growing my newsletter --or in your case, YOUR digital business-- from zero to BEYOND ten thousand subscribers.

So far, we've looked at three growth levers - organic content for acquiring the first thousand subscribers. Partnerships to grow from a thousand to five thousand subscribers, and carefully constructed virality to reach the blessed ten thousand subscriber mark.

The next milestone to achieve is fifteen thousand subscribers and the first step in that direction is called "Performance Marketing."

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:48]

Quick note, this part of the plan involves spending your own money, and I do NOT recommend it until you reach at least ten thousand subscribers.

What makes ten thousand such an important milestone?

Well, there's no mathematical formula by which I arrived at the ten-thousand figure. In fact, some people might put this number much higher, say a hundred thousand, and they would not be wrong. But, I feel, ten thousand is the minimum number of subscribers you need before you can make a financial commitment to growing your business.

And, it's not just me who says this, newsletter growth expert Matt McGarry recommends the same!

EPISODE 44 - MATT MCGARRY  (21:44)
    "Yong-Soo: Once you reach ten thousand subscribers though, things start to get pretty serious. Because this is where the next level of user-acquisitions comes into the picture.
    Matt McGarry: So, first of all, keep doing all the above that we just talked about. Twitter, LinkedIn, cross promotions, recommendations, et cetera. Do those now. You can add in a referral program. This is when someone basically shares your newsletter in exchange for a reward or a prize. You can also start to add in paid ads here."

But, the crux of that conversation, and what I'm essentially planning to do with MY newsletter is the same. Now that I KNOW for sure that I have a good product, I am planning to SPEND some money to reach wider audiences.

Remember, the entire goal of this exercise is to keep expanding the reach of your audience. Think of your first ten thousand subscribers as basically a test to see if there are takers for your content. You don't NEED to use money to grow your reach but it is, without doubt, one of the MOST effective catalysts you can use to supercharge your growth.

But, where do you deploy your money? And how do you deploy it smartly?

Well, the first trick there is to identify where your audience hangs out and focus your initial investments there. Do NOT choose a platform simply because YOU are comfortable with it. Choose the platform where YOUR audience is. Or, as Colin Chung said, choose the RIGHT ROOM.

Then, test the waters by promoting some of your existing content - perhaps, something that already did well organically? On text-based platforms such as Twitter, (sorry, X!) Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn this would be "promoted" or "sponsored" posts. For newsletters like Beehiiv and ConvertKit, this would mean taking advantage of Boosts and SparkLoop respectively. Or it could be leveraging something like re:find to advertise your own newsletter.

But wait, there's something you need to do FIRST. You need to be ABSOLUTELY sure that you have found your content-market fit before you pour money into paid ads.

Because, if you don't have content-market fit, then you won't get any consistency in your results. You will find yourself pouring money into a "leaky bucket"- that is, you will be spending money to acquire users, who won't feel compelled to stick around because your product isn't ready yet.

But, when you DO find content market fit, make sure that ALL your content reflects it and then start testing the waters. I’ve been testing paid ads myself and I'm currently paying between $1.75-$2 per subscriber. It's not too high and not too low but, most importantly, it works for ME.

Then, once you have figured out an amount you are comfortable spending on a regular basis, make sure you test out different ad formats and placements to see what works best for you and your content/product.

In fact, in my episode with Matt McGarry, he went into the nitty-gritty details of how exactly he crafts Twitter and Meta campaigns for his clients. He spoke about his frontline experiences doing paid customer acquisitions for several large newsletters and broke down his strategy in detail during the episode. It's episode 44 of this podcast and I highly recommend that you queue it up in your podcast player next - I consider it one of my BEST episodes yet!

Go on, queue it up. I'll play some music while you do that...

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:30]

Done? Excellent. I won't keep you for too long because we only have one more growth lever that I want to talk about in this episode and, after that, I'll tell you about the biggest hurdle you will face when implementing any and all of these growth levers.

But first, let's quickly talk about the final growth lever - "Direct Sales".

Put simply, the "direct sales" growth lever essentially involves talking to potential sponsors directly and negotiating a deal with them, thus generating a sale for you. Direct sales, get it?

But, how does that help me grow, Yong-Soo? Won't the audience be turned off by sponsors?

Well, not quite. Or, rather, not in my case at least.

My audience - and by that I mean you - is primarily a B2B audience. Most of you are entrepreneurs, creators, and founders. And what that means is that you understand why I need to accept sponsorships for my podcast and newsletter.

In fact, having sponsors is actually an indicator that people beyond the podcast and newsletter have taken notice of my growth and want to invest in its future because they see it growing even further. It is, strangely, a massive validation of me AND my content.

But more importantly, getting sponsors for the show kickstarts a flywheel of growth. How? Because sponsorship brings in money. And you can use that money in performance marketing, which then brings in more sponsors…

So, yeah, if you get a chance to bring on sponsors for your podcast or newsletter or any other digital product, I'd say - go for it! 

In fact, for products with high-value (B2B) audiences, you can even start sooner, like I did. And, once you start getting regular requests for sponsorship, you can adjust your CPM rates depending on your audience quality.

For instance, as of recording this podcast episode, I charge $100 CPM for my audience of founders, creators, SMB owners, and entrepreneurs. But, even at this high CPM, my inbox is FLOODED with sponsorship requests - could it be that I'm NOT charging high enough? Believe it or not, some people have actually told me that I need to charge higher.

Maybe I'll have to give my friend Justin Moore a call one of these days and get him to explain how to navigate all these sponsorship opportunities. What do you think? Would that be an episode you would be excited about? Let me know - drop me a DM or record your thoughts directly on the firstclassfounders.com homepage by clicking on the mic icon.

And while you are on the firstclassfounders.com homepage, how about signing up for the premium membership? Because, if you do, you will be able to access the special segment that I have crafted exclusively for THIS episode.

In this episode, the premium members are being treated to a tactical outline of how to design and deploy a flywheel combining performance marketing and direct sales such that it results in constant and non-stop growth for your digital businesses.

Sign up for the premium membership at firstclassfounders.com/join

Yong-Soo Chung [00:32:17]

But, then again, these are problems that *I* will have to contend with at some later stage in the future. As of this moment, I have just crossed the magic number of ten thousand subscribers. So right now, my immediate focus is designing and deploying the flywheel that combines performance marketing and direct sales for my content.

If you are at the same stage as I am, this is the PERFECT time to check out episode 44 titled "From Zero to 100K Subscribers: How to Grow Your Newsletter like a Pro with Newsletter Growth Expert Matt McGarry."

In fact, I would highly recommend that you sign up for the First Class Founders membership and then listen to the PREMIUM version of Matt's episode. I say this because, in the premium episode, he went into extensive detail on HOW he sets up ad-campaigns for user acquisition and gave extremely specific examples of how to scale your ads as you grow your ad budgets.

Matt actually charges several hundreds of dollars in consulting fees for the exact type of information you can get for just $9 per month. I mean, I’m a bit biased here but that just screams like a no-brainer deal to me.

Sign up for the premium membership at firstclassfounders.com/join - look for the link in the show notes!