Hey guys,

I've been saying this for at least five years and it still makes people twinge.

If your newsletter exists to generate pipeline, and you wake up in twelve months with 50,000 subscribers, you did something terribly wrong.

Every few weeks someone asks me how big their list needs to get before it "works." Wrong question. The right one is who needs to be on it, and for most high-ticket businesses, that number is shockingly small. It’s easy to see newsletter X with 1M subscribers and think “I want to be just like that!”

Most of you probably don’t want to be just like that. Your TAM (total addressable market) is likely much, much smaller than that. And if it’s not, you might need to dial in on your ICP a bit further. Describe EXACTLY who the ideal reader is for your newsletter, and determine how many of that very specific person exist. That’s your TAM.

If you're new here: I was beehiiv's first sales hire and built the GTM team that helped grow the company to over $30M ARR. I now host Moneywise, where I ask nine and ten figure founders questions most people are too polite to ask. I've built newsletters, podcasts, and local media companies from scratch, mostly at night, with two kids in the house (soon to be three!). I’ve built a lot of cool things, and now I help other people build cool things.

Say you sell something that costs $100k a year. Consulting, agency retainer, enterprise software, whatever.

You launch a newsletter and get 200 subscribers. Not 200 random people, but 200 operators who actually hold the budget for what you sell.

Over twelve months, 10 of them become clients. That's $1M in new revenue from a list so small you'd be embarrassed to put the number in a LinkedIn post.

Now run it the other way. You hit 50,000 using the standard playbook: paid acquisition, subscriber co-registration, giveaways, a lead magnet broad enough to appeal to everyone. Your open rate is 32%. Maybe 400 real buyers are buried in there somewhere and you have no idea which 400. Your deliverability is sagging because you're mailing thousands of people who wanted a free template and then forgot you existed.

Which list would you rather own?

Anyone with a credit card can buy subscribers. It's the easiest thing to do in this entire industry. What you cannot buy is an audience that believes you, trusts you, rely on you, and actually do what you say to do.

Build an audience of people who actually care about what you bring to the table. Write to them, speak to them. They trust you. You can’t buy that (not easily).

I watched this play out from inside beehiiv for four years. Tyler Denk writes Big Desk Energy from the founder's chair, and it consistently outperformed anything sent from the beehiiv brand account, even though the company list was bigger and packed with paying customers. Some of our largest customers came through that newsletter. Every issue reads like an exclusive interview with Tyler, because that perspective doesn't exist anywhere else on the internet.

The Hustle is the same story. When Sam Parr was the face of it, it hit differently than it does now.

Look at Link in Bio. Rachel Karten writes about working in social media and has built it past 100,000 subscribers into one of the top business newsletters on Substack, while consulting for brands like Google, CAVA, and west elm. Her readers didn't subscribe to a media property. They subscribed to Rachel.

When a recommendation comes from a person, the reader processes it as someone I trust told me about this. When it comes from a brand account, it's an ad. I've watched identical offers land completely differently based on nothing but whose name was in the from-line.

Put a name and a face on it. Yours, or someone you'd hand the keys to.

1. Make the signup an application. When someone subscribes at danielberk.com, they hit a survey. Do you have a podcast? A newsletter? What's your skill set? What brought you here? I want that data, because I want to know exactly who's on my list and how to talk to a seller differently than an engineer.

You can push harder than I do. Frame it as an application: we're highly selective about who we let subscribe. That one line changes the psychology of the entire thing. If your business only takes on a client or two a month, an exclusive list is on-brand, not arrogant.

2. Auto-purge the wrong people. Build one automation and never touch it again. Right answers stay subscribed. Wrong answers get unsubscribed immediately. Sounds insane until you remember every wrong subscriber costs you deliverability and gives you no conversion opportunity.

3. Score your list against a persona. Write down the exact person you want reading you (title, company size, budget authority, etc.) Then grade everyone: this one's a 90% buyer, this one's an 80%, this one's a 50%. Your metric becomes what percentage of your list is a 90+.

We analyzed close to 20 billion emails at beehiiv last year. Revenue per audience member in email came in around 3x what you could attribute 1:1 on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. Conversions that happen from an email newsletter consistently render higher revenue dollars for companies who do this right.

Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, has said follower count is the metric that misleads creators most. He's right, and it's just as true in email.

An email address is a direct line to a human who let you into the one place they still check every day. Treat it like a precious jewel.

Until next time,
Daniel

P.S. Want me to look at your actual funnel and tell you who shouldn't be on your list? Grab a consulting call. Or just reply with your subscriber count and your ICP. I'll tell you if the two match.