👋🏻 Welcome to Newsletter Examples, where I highlight cool sh*t I’m seeing in newsletters that you can borrow for your newsletter.

Today, I’m sharing 7 takeaways from last week’s Newsletter Marketing Summit, where I spoke about making 🔥 content—and hung out with amazing Newsletter Examples readers like Chenell Basilio, Brian Morrissey, and Alex Lieberman.

Lesson #1: Spend your time on things people will remember

Where I learned it: Jay Clouse / Founder, Creator Science

The first speaker of the conference was one of the best, sharing smart frameworks for producing and distributing content.

Two of my biggest takeaways:

• Pick your spots — Choose one “discovery” platform (i.e., LinkedIn) and one “relationship” platform (i.e., your newsletter) where you can be world-class.

• Build on owned land — Prioritize trust (building owned relationships) over attention (trying to be discovered on social media).

Bonus lessons:

• Spend less time on short-form content; create enduring, long-term assets

  • Write long essays

  • Produce in-depth YouTube videos

  • Develop courses

“They’re harder to get attention to,” Jay said, “But that attention more quickly converts to trust.”

Here was my favorite slide from Jay’s talk, in which he encouraged people to do more of the stuff at the top (and in purple) and less of the stuff at the bottom (and in green):

Lesson #2: ‘Beg, beg, beg for feedback’

Where I learned it: Tim Huelskamp / Cofounder & CEO, 1440

You might think that 1440, one of the country’s fastest-growing newsletters (4.4M subscribers, with 300k new readers added every month) would be content to rest on its laurels.

But one of the secrets to 1440’s success is how intentionally it asks for—and responds to—reader feedback.

The “first work task” every day is answering reader emails, Tim said. The exercise helps build audience loyalty—and readers regularly share ideas that make the email better.

Bonus lesson: How to get 5-figure clicks on your ads.

“Mark Zuckerberg makes it incredibly easy for brands to invest their entire budget on Meta,” Tim said. As a newsletter operator, you must make your ads perform better than Facebook’s.

How does 1440 do that?

• By constantly experimenting, looking for ways to differentiate its ads from ones you see on social networks.

  • One I liked: Yesterday, in an issue previewing the Academy Awards, they cleverly aligned a sponsor’s message to the Oscars👇️

Lesson #3: Flywheels are business drivers

Where I learned it: Nathan Barry / Founder, Kit

As Nathan put it, flywheels take what would otherwise be separate activities and combine them into systems that run with minimal effort.

Among other things, they free you up from busywork and help make your business more profitable.

My favorite example: Lean on your audience to produce content for your newsletter. He suggested doing this by:

• Asking every new subscriber to tell you about their biggest pain point (which you can turn into issues of your newsletter).

• You can also use their answers to attract more readers (i.e., knowing your audience’s pain points can help you market to prospective subscribers better).

💥 Let’s test this out: Reply to this email with one pain point you’re dealing with, and I’ll see what we can spin out of it.

Lesson #4: To make great ads, borrow from the best

Where I learned it: Alex Cooper / Cofounder, Adcrate

The first thing Alex does when making new ads is NOT make new ads, he said.

Instead, he looks for winning formulas, searching Meta’s library and studying what works best for other newsletters:

He also studies clients’ newsletters, using AI to find out what makes them unique:

He analyzes review sites, looking for reader language that he can use for Facebook ads:

He also showed how to use AI to create ads like these…

…along with a prompt to help you:

Lesson #5: Great content isn’t enough. It has to be ‘insanely valuable’…

Where I learned it: Chenell Basilio / Founder, Growth in Reverse

My new pal Chenell dropped some 🔥 takes in her talk, including this crazy stat: There are 4,351,852 emails sent every second.

To stand out, you must find ways to truly differentiate yourself. You can do that by helping people do any (or all) of the following:

One example she called out was Mario Gabriele, founder of The Generalist, who I’ve written about here and here.

Mario is not a trained journalist, but he has the instincts of one. The below example shows how he deeply researched a company and positioned it in front of a news event to draw more attention to his newsletter:

Chenell also highlighted Yossi Levi, author of Car Dealership Guy. Yossi is a trusted source of information for 91k+ subscribers (riches in niches baby!), and regularly gets people to help him break news:

Ten hours later, the layoffs happened, and Yossi encouraged the displaced workers to use his industry job board to look for work:

Lesson #6: Use subreddits to find out what your audience cares about

Where I learned it: Steph Smith / Founder, Internet Pipes

Steph was one of the first analysts I hired at Trends. She’s book smart and street smart (and plays a mean game of chess). But her smartest moves come from knowing how to find information on the internet.

Among the nuggets she shared:

You can find incredible audience insights in subreddits. She recommended using a tool called GummySearch to search for growing subreddits in your area (in this case, AI):

You can also use GummySearch to surface interesting information in those subreddits:

Lesson #7: Create for a ‘market of one’

Where I learned it: Alex Lieberman / Cofounder, Morning Brew

I could have written a whole email based on Alex’s talk (“Morning Brew in 36 pictures”). I tweeted more about it here, but here are a few of his better ideas:

1) Pretend you’re writing your email to one person (AKA the “market of one”)

For Morning Brew, that person was a 28-year-old finance professional who worked in private equity. He even had a name: Justin Levine.

As Alex put it, “Our job was to help Justin Levine avoid looking like a schmuck in front of his boss at Ernst & Young by keeping him informed on business and tech.”

2) Focus ruthlessly.

In its pitch deck for investors, Morning Brew had wild ambitions:

After that, Morning Brew only did one thing for four years: write a daily newsletter. Which is probably why that newsletter has 4.5M subscribers today.

3) Expand strategically.

Below are Morning Brew’s 3 criteria for launching new newsletters:

• What are the most popular verticals where our readers already are?

• Is there enough news flow to sustain a 3-4x/week newsletter?

• Is there enough advertiser depth (25 minimum advertisers) for companies that want to get in front this audience?

Here are some areas where they have expanded:

4) Make it personal.

Morning Brew’s referral program is the gold standard of referral programs.

And in the early days, Alex used to hand write notes to the newsletter’s biggest referrers:

5) Be patient.

Morning Brew tests potential new concepts on existing channels, and only launches new products when they know something is going to be a hit.

They did that with Dan Toomey, testing his satirical investigative journalism content on their flagship YouTube channel.

When they saw it connect, they gave him his own channel, Good Work, which now has nearly 1M subscribers (more than 2X the main Brew channel).

They also give creators upside in the business (i.e., a percentage of ad revenue), persuading their talent to stick around. It’s probably why some of their best people (like Neal Freyman) have been there forever.

Hope you enjoyed this week’s examples. I’ll be back next week with another set!

☮️ -Brad

P.S. Shoutout to all the wonderful Newsletter Examples readers I met at the Newsletter Marketing Summit. There are too many of you to name here, but I want to give a special shout to my friend Adam Gilad, who gave me one of the strangest compliments ever…