How creators reached their first 10, 100, 1,000 paid subscribers

Building a successful paid newsletter doesn’t require hundreds of thousands of subscribers. All you need is a small, passionate group of people who are eager to hear what you have to say. Understanding the needs of your truest believers is key to running a successful media business.

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To build a successful paid newsletter — podcast or niche website — you don’t need hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You need only a small, passionate group of people who are eager to hear what you have to say. These are the people Alan Soon and Rishad Patel of Splice Media call your “truest believers” — also known as your 1,000 truest fans, as Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, wrote back in 2008. As Soon and Patel point out, understanding the needs of your truest believers is key to running a successful media business. But if you are starting a newsletter, podcast, or niche website at zero, attracting 1,000 true believers — or even 10 — who are willing to pay for your newsletter can seem like climbing a mountain. It requires time, patience, a sustained effort and an understanding of your audience. You first need to create a product that serves your target audience. Begin by imagining ideal readers that you aim to serve, and write for those subscribers. Then, work to spread the word about your newsletter. Serving up strong, relevant content, providing attractive add-on content and offering readers other incentives like a private community will help you attract paid subscribers. Newsletter creators Tanmoy Goswami, Alicia Kennedy, Kai Brach, Priti Patnaik and JR Raphael shared with us some of the ways they have been able to build their paid subscription bases through both common practices and sometimes counterintuitive moves.

Key takeaways include:

• Start by inviting your friends and contacts to subscribe. Then branch out. Ask subscribers to share your newsletter.
• Offer a variety of ways for people to sign up for your free newsletter so you can build up readership and convert free subscribers to paid subscribers. You can also offer lead magnets — offering bonus content like a downloadable ebook in exchange for people’s email addresses.
• Convert free email subscribers to paying subscribers by setting up email sequences like a welcome series that explains your value proposition.
• Offer incentives to paid subscribers.
• Make a direct ask for support in your free newsletter.

“As the Passion Economy grows, more people are monetizing what they love. The global adoption of social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the mainstreaming of the influencer model, and the rise of new creator tools has shifted the threshold for success. I believe that creators need to amass only 100 True Fans — not 1,000 — paying them $1,000 a year, not $100. Today, creators can effectively make more money off fewer fans.” — Li Jin

Tanmoy Goswami joined the Correspondent in 2019 as the world’s first sanity correspondent. In late 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, the publication shut down abruptly. Goswami pivoted quickly and founded Sanity by Tanmoy, India’s first independent, reader-funded newsletter dedicated to the politics, economics and culture of mental health. The newsletter became one of the top six paid health-related publications on Substack within 100 days of launch, and was the only non-western title on Substack’s leaderboard. Today, Goswami has his own website and has built a community of nearly 2,500 subscribers globally, with about 500 paid subscribers.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t know anyone else doing this at the time,” Goswami says. Growing his paid subscriber base has been a sustained effort that has required ongoing experimentation and communication with his audience. Some of Goswami’s biggest fans have been ambassadors for the newsletter, sharing their reasons for being paid subscribers to encourage others to subscribe.

Right after Goswami lost his job at the Correspondent, he sent out an email to his readers there saying goodbye and informing them that he was starting a newsletter. He offered the option to become a paid subscriber from the start.

“I had a conversation with the guys from Substack before I launched. They told me it was important to turn on monetization from day one, regardless of whether I believed the product was worth paying for,” Goswami says. He recalls them saying, “You will have imposter syndrome, you will feel like you aren’t really offering anything. It really doesn’t matter. Just turn it on.”

There are more than 1.5 million paid newsletter subscriptions on Substack, according to Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie.

The way they framed it stayed with him. “A lot of people think about turning on monetization as an awkward thing to do. Asking people for money feels a bit icky. How can you send emails, asking strangers to support your work, especially for a journalist who has never done it and always had an employer?” Goswami says.

Substack representatives told him instead to see offering the option to pay as a way of giving people the opportunity to support him. “I’d never heard anybody frame it that way,” he says. “That was quite the game changer for me.”

Many of Goswami’s early paid subscribers were former Correspondent readers who valued his writing. His base became much broader as time went on, and he has supporters from all over the world. All of the content in his newsletter is free, because philosophically Goswami believes it should be. His true believers opt to become paid subscribers because they want to support his work. Paid subscribers are invited to quarterly Zoom meetups and provide input on his editorial agenda. He is considering putting some content behind a paywall in the future to encourage more people to become paid subscribers, but is still working to figure out what kind of content that would be.

Goswami said he has learned to be more intentional about asking people for support. He has also tried other strategies, recently focusing on one-time contributions, as distinct from monthly contributions. This shift drew in a lot of new supporters.

Sometimes, Goswami plays with the language in the newsletter when pitching paid subscriptions to readers. “l do try to customize the ask. I’ve done it a few other times in the past to try and align it with the story itself. I enjoy those particular messages,” he says. A recent newsletter edition featured a story on men talking to their barbers about mental health, Goswami included the following ask:

Goswami says no matter who you are, your subscriber numbers will stabilize and then peak again, but it’s not a reflection of the quality of your work. During plateau periods, it’s easy to get deflated. He focuses instead on communicating with readers about the need for support.

“I’ve learned the hard way that if you don’t ask for support you don’t get it,” he says. “I’ve gotten very intentional and methodical about never forgetting to ask.”

Kai Brach created the newsletter Dense Discovery in 2018 after launching a print magazine about technology called Offscreen in 2012 and an email newsletter called The Modern Desk in 2015. Dense Discovery has more than 38,000 free subscribers. “Growing an audience takes a long time, years in many cases,” Brach says. “Those 38,000 readers were accumulated over seven years, or about 350 weeks of sending out a free newsletter.”

Dense Discovery offers readers the option to become a “friend” and support the newsletter. Brach began offering the option about two years ago. He doesn’t offer more newsletters for paying subscribers, except a short email once a quarter with more personal updates. Paying readers get some handy extra features in the same newsletter everyone receives though, such as a searchable archive and discounts on some items featured in the newsletter. “It’s about supporting my work, not necessarily ‘more bang for bucks’,” Brach says.

He likes creating a more personal connection with readers through his writing. He started doing that with Offscreen when he wrote posts about the mistakes he made during the production of certain issues. “Readers really connected with that. I’ve written long posts about how much of a struggle publishing can be. It gets very personal and I get a lot of heartfelt responses,” he says, adding that those are often worth more than money.

“That’s not everyone’s cup of tea and I’m not sure if it always works, but in my case it certainly helped build that trust and connection,” Brach says. “Instead of going down the conventional sales route where it’s about hard-selling features or value, most of my work is supported by the true fans concept. Give your biggest fans a way to support you and they will — but again, that requires a good amount of time.”

Alicia Kennedy, founder of the newsletter From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, is based in San Juan, Puerto Rico and writes about food, culture, politics, and media. More than 2,250 people are paid subscribers. Kennedy, who has been a freelance writer since 2015, makes most of her living from the newsletter, but it’s also a launch pad for other work, including essays for media outlets, speaking engagements, teaching, and books. She says a consistent newsletter can be good for writers even if they don’t plan to monetize it, because it opens up other opportunities. Concerned about the economy and losing some potential freelance writing opportunities, she decided to start a newsletter at the beginning of 2020. “It was a way of keeping people up to date on what I was thinking and a way to keep myself in editors’ minds,” she says.

A couple of months into writing the newsletter, Kennedy says she developed a voice and a focus on being a food media critic. She wrote about food systems issues after watching an episode of Ugly Delicious that was all about steak. The Black Lives Matter protests led to a reckoning about race in the food media world, and people started looking for alternatives to magazines like Bon Appetit. In less than a year, Kennedy had 10,000 free newsletter subscribers. At the end of the second year she had 17,000 subscribers, and now she has about 23,000 free subscribers. “The growth is slower over time,” she says.

Kennedy, like most of the other newsletter writers we interviewed, eschews growth hack tricks. “It doesn’t work for me because it’s not authentic to who I am. So that’s not what I do,” she says.

Her Monday essays, which she calls the bread and butter of the newsletter, are free. “I’ve talked to other newsletter people who are really concerned about this for their newsletters. They don’t want to put their best work out to free subscribers,” she says. “But that’s exactly what you should be giving your free subscribers. You shouldn’t be hiding your best work behind a paywall.”

It may seem counterintuitive, but Kennedy says sharing your best content for free is a cornerstone of a successful newsletter.

“You should be making sure that the thing that could make the biggest splash is the thing that people are able to share widely,” she says.

“You’re not going to get paid subscribers if you don’t have free subscribers. So if you want a huge base and you want the ability to convert that base, you need to build that base,” she says. “For me the free stuff is more important than the paid stuff.”

Kennedy says it’s important to share work consistently in a voice that makes sense, and to do so authoritatively.

“As a subscriber to other newsletters, I hate it when writers aren’t consistent when it comes to publishing,” Kennedy says. “I like knowing when a newsletter is coming. I would never want to surprise my own audience with the newsletter when they’re not expecting it. On Mondays at 7 a.m., people know they’ll wake up on the day of the week that sucks the most and at least they’ll have an email in their inbox that starts them thinking about something, or makes them laugh, or inspires a moment of joy in their day.”

Kennedy gets frustrated with writers who say it doesn’t matter how often you post or whether you follow a regular publishing schedule. ‘I would never disrespect my audience in that way,” she says. “I will give 100% or I just wouldn’t do it. That’s how I approach consistency and I think that it works in terms of growth.”

Priti Patnaik is the founder of Geneva Health Files, a Substack newsletter with hundreds of paid subscribers that tracks international health policy as it unfolds in Geneva, Switzerland, the capital of global health. She also cites consistency as one of her most successful tactics for growing her paid subscriber audience. Patnaik has published a newsletter almost every week since she launched Geneva Health Files in April 2020. She has been successful in providing information and analyses to healthcare policy experts in a timely manner that no one else provides.

Experts depend on her newsletter to provide them with information. “That’s why readers want to pay, because it directly feeds into their work, especially in a fast-moving news cycle amidst the pandemic,” Patnaik says.

Patnaik notes that unfortunately, email service providers can’t control who or how many people forward the paid version of the newsletter to others. She says her attempts to sell subscriptions to institutions failed, as did offering annual or seasonal discounts.

“This is a slow, organic business. So it is difficult to be patient with the growth of paid subscribers. But because the free list grows healthily, I believe this has potential for the growth of paid subscriptions,” Patnaik says. “I also need to market the newsletter more. Cold calling for institutional subscriptions is not so easy, especially when you are also the reporter, editor and publisher,” she says.

Patnaik’s articles are longform and investigative. She is strategic about what to put behind the paywall. “While some of the best work is free, the details are behind the paywall,” she says. The main incentive for people to become paid subscribers is the specialized content that is behind the paywall. Free subscribers receive a monthly curated primer. Paid subscribers receive newsletters every Friday, access to the archives, and interviews with experts.

When Kennedy began to offer a paid subscription tier for her newsletter, subscribers received podcast interviews as an incentive. That was easy for her because she had done podcasts in the past. But near the end of 2021, she needed to finish the first draft of a book. The podcasting interviews took a lot of energy, and she had to pay a transcriber too. She decided to pivot. Having owned a vegan microbakery in 2012, she had developed all sorts of recipes. So she tried publishing holiday recipes for her paid subscribers. They were a big hit.

“My subscribers grew by the hundreds because of that,” Kennedy says. “It was a market demand situation. It wasn’t my burning desire to do recipes, but I have a bigger audience because of it, not just in terms of paid subscriptions, but also on social media. I think people like to see food writers making food.”

Simon Owens, publisher of the newsletter Simon Owens Media Newsletter, estimates that when it comes to converting free subscribers to paid subscribers, a good conversion rate is 5%.

Free subscribers see a note at the beginning of each Monday newsletter essay about becoming a paid subscriber. After her essay she mentions what recipe will be coming on Friday, and includes a subscribe button.

Kennedy says she doesn’t push paid subscriptions much other than in the newsletter itself. She will sometimes mention them on social media, and sometimes she will write an essay about how difficult creative work can be, and more people subscribe. She doesn’t focus too much on promoting her newsletter via social media. “Maybe I could grow more if I did, just because it’s more important to me to grow organically and sustainably, and to not be annoying,” she says. “I just find the ‘please read and subscribe’ vibe unappealing.” She says as a reader she would rather hear about a newsletter writer’s work and the behind-the-scenes work.

JR Raphael has been writing a column for Computerworld about the Android operating system since 2010. In 2016 the name of the column was changed to Android Intelligence, and he founded a newsletter by the same name in 2018. He started it as an experiment because he liked the idea of having a direct connection with readers.

“I started it on a whim. I thought, ‘well, this will be an interesting little side project and who knows what will come of it?’ Four-plus years later, it’s my primary focus, and it’s really grown into its own standalone business,” Raphael says. Android Intelligence has about 35,000 free subscribers. Raphael says his conversion rate for paid subscribers is in line with newsletter industry averages.

Having an existing platform as a writer who has covered Android for so long helped Raphael get free subscribers to sign up for his newsletter in the early days. “I had a fair number of people who were paying attention in various places, and that certainly helped a lot,” he says. “But it wasn’t an instant win. The truth is, as anyone who does anything online can tell you, it’s hard to get anyone to commit to anything, even if you’re offering free information that they will enjoy. You are competing for attention. As is the truth with anything, if what you’re doing doesn’t resonate with people, no one is going to stick around. It was still a slow climb and a very slow, organic build up.”

Early on, readers wanted to support Raphael so he set up a Patreon page. In late 2018, he began offering a more formal paid platinum subscriber program and switched to a more customizable membership platform called Memberful.

In the pitch for the Android Intelligence platinum program on his WordPress website, Raphael emphasizes the value of the resources. Paid subscribers can save time, get answers to Android issues on demand, and save money.

Raphael offers several incentives to paid subscribers, including a virtual help desk, a database of tipsheets, in-depth guide books, a platinum newsletter, a community forum, podcasts, a referral perks program, and free or discounted access to premium apps, tools, and services for Android users. The forum is a more recent addition to his perks. “One thing I heard from the people who were platinum members all along was how great it would be to have some manner of actual forum as a community gathering place where they could interact with other members,” Raphael says. “I’ve always been looking for ways to expand the platinum program and make the membership a little more meaningful and valuable for people, and that came up as a cool way to do it.”

Another key to Raphael’s success building his paid subscriber community is the welcome series he sends new free subscribers. Raphael actually has three distinct welcome series. These are all automated emails sent to new subscribers based on their interests. His main newsletter sign-up form asks the new subscriber to pick one topic they are interested in, from a list of three choices.He then sends the subscriber three bonus tips on the subject they select. His email service provider, ConvertKit, makes setting up these automated email welcome series easy. The emails are sent at set intervals.

“At some point in their welcoming sequence, they get a formal introduction to the platinum program and what it offers and why it is valuable,” Raphael says. He also mentions the platinum program in his Friday newsletters.

“Beyond that, periodically, I’ll do some kind of promotion that results in some standalone emails going out to the free subscribers,” he says. “I try to do that sparingly. I don’t want to be spamming people. So it’s always a fine balance. And I think coming from a more journalistic background, I’m probably hypersensitive to that just because it’s not in my nature to be a salesperson and I don’t want to disrupt people. I’ve learned to establish my own lines and boundaries.”

According to Campaign Monitor, welcome email read rates are 42% higher than the average email.

An Android Intelligence email welcome series

Android Intelligence welcome email series, email №1: https://bit.ly/welcomeemailone

Android Intelligence welcome email series, email №2: https://bit.ly/welcomeemailtwo

Android Intelligence welcome email series, email №3: https://bit.ly/welcomeemailthree

Referral programs

Raphael and other creators are starting to experiment with programs like SparkLoop that offer incentives for paid subscribers to share his newsletter with others.

Referral programs offer people who share your newsletter incentives like free bonus content, swag, or discounts for sharing the newsletter.

Morning Brew was one of the first newsletters to have an ambassador referral program.

It will take time to determine whether referral programs are effective for newsletters that don’t have massive audiences, but such programs could be promising.

More on creating a welcome series, plus copies of basic templates you can customize for your audience are available here: Templates for creating a welcome series for new newsletter subscribers.

Leverage relationships and connections to reach 100 subscribers. Create lead magnets and engage with others on niche community sites to grow as well. Add your newsletter to directories, and use a social media channel your community uses most to reach more people. Ghost shared these and other such tips.

A welcome series can provide readers with important information about your newsletter and the ways to connect, while also promoting your paid subscriptions or membership program. 15 things you can include in an email welcome series.

A lead magnet offers the reader value in exchange for their email address. The team at Ghost compiled 20 different lead magnets you can use.

Alan Soon and Rishad Patel of Splice Media discuss how to build an audience with your 1,000 truest believers in their podcast.

Scalawag’s in-person and virtual events are helping introduce people in the community who are more likely to become paying members to the local news website. Scalawag executive director Cierra Hinton explains how in a LION News Guest podcast episode hosted by Candace Fortman.

This is one of six case studies — launched by J+, the professional development arm of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY — that aims to provide journalism creators building their own newsletters, podcasts, and other niche projects with in-depth analyses of what works and what doesn’t in the journalism creator ecosystem. This case study was supported by funding from the Meta Journalism Project and was written by Krystal Knapp, an Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program alumna.