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

This week, I’m taking you inside Newsletter Growth Memo, an invite-only newsletter for leading newsletter operators. Reading time: 3 minutes.

Not a subscriber yet? Sign up here.

‘Mind if I add you?’

Last month Nathan May, founder of The Feed Media, which helps B2B companies and media brands convert readers into revenue through email, reached out to me on LinkedIn:

I almost never say no to another newsletter subscription (how else do you think I write these things?), so I agreed to join his list.

(I also made a deal with him: If you’re a Newsletter Examples subscriber, you too can join his list. Just use this link.)

After reading a bunch of Nathan’s emails, I can confidently say that, if you publish a newsletter, you should be reading this one.

Here are 3 reasons why👇🏻…

#1: It defies convention

Newsletter Growth Memo is not fancy.

It doesn’t have lots of images or graphics.

It doesn’t have a sophisticated design.

It’s just a stream of mostly one-sentence paragraphs (kinda like I’m doing right now haha).

If Nathan’s email had a marketing slogan, it might be: F*ck the fancy sh*t. Just drop the wisdom.

And there’s lots of wisdom, which Nathan has gained by running his own newsletter consulting business, working with clients including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Beehiiv, and The Rundown AI.

Newslettter Growth Memo has three popular formats:

• Reflections (i.e., “Newsletter lessons from a billionaire”)

• Tactics (i.e., “How to stop declining sponsorship performance”)

• Case studies (i.e., “Generating $250k for a 15k-person newsletter”)

Last week, Nathan blended all three of those formats in one issue, reflecting on a prominent newsletter acquisition he had just missed out on while sharing details about how he was planning to monetize the business post-acquisition.

In the piece—“I (almost) acquired The Neuron yesterday”—he shared behind-the-scenes details of his attempt to buy one of the leading AI newsletters, a business his company had been working with for a year and a half.

He also described his step-by-step playbook for how he planned to get his money back on the investment (and more).

Among his ideas:

1) Optimizing ads to users who click (not just open), a “huge unlock” for sponsor performance

2) Partnering with The Rundown, a big competitor of The Neuron’s, to encourage Neuron subscribers to join The Rundown’s paid “university” community.

3) Running the Industry Dive playbook

The best media companies aren't marketing channels, Nathan wrote—they're marketing partners.

And Industry Dive's playbook is the gold standard of partnership:

• They’re laser focused on an ideal customer profile of niche, B2B decision-makers

• And they monetize through high-end webinars, white papers, and co-branded lead magnets that turn loyal readers into buyers

“I’ll be real with you - I’d feel a lot cooler building an AI community vs. webinar playbook,” Nathan said. “But you have to know your lane.”

Speaking of partnerships, how about this one: The founder of the company that acquired The Neuron, Rob Bellenfant, just became a reader of Newsletter Growth Memo.

And his company, TechnologyAdvice, is now a client of Nathan’s.

If you put your ideas out there, you never know what will turn into business.

#2: It trades on exclusivity

Lots of newsletters name drop the places their readers come from. It’s rare to see a newsletter actually call out their readers by name:

Explicitly naming the people who just signed up for your newsletter reinforces that you’re in a select group (and if they’re reading this newsletter, you should be too!).

“I want to always reinforce the idea this is premium,” Nathan told me. “I want people to see highlights of those joining, show examples from the biggest newsletters, especially the ones we work with, talk about some of the inside baseball.”

As Nathan sees it, Newsletter Growth Memo is neither a media company nor an information product company.

They’re part of a third bucket of highly profitable newsletters: founder-led, focused on serving B2B businesses.

Nathan talks about this approach in a forthcoming Beehiiv video titled “Unlock $1M ARR with a Founder-Led Newsletter.” (Here’s an early cut of the video, which is still in production.)

He has also done (or is planning) other Beehiiv videos organized around similar themes:

What I like about Nathan’s model is that any founder can (and should) do a version of this type of newsletter to drive more growth for their business:

• Write a regular email sharing insights and takeaways of your work, and send it to clients or prospective clients

• Keep it simple, without the bells and whistles of a fancy email (one email Nathan sent had just 10 sentences, counting the P.S.)

• Use it to build in public, but for a reserved audience

#3: It’s inspiring

If you click on one link in this email, make it this one.

It’s a story of six media founders who have inspired Nathan, building or selling some of the world’s best newsletters in their early 20s.

The piece not only shows who they are but how they’ve been successful, including:

• One guy who didn’t start learning about AI until 2022. Two years later, at age 24, he had built one of the biggest AI newsletters

• Another guy who sold 7 figures of newsletter ads while he was still in college

Nathan’s own story is inspiring, having scaled his newsletter consulting business to $1M+ in annual recurring revenue in less than a year.

I’m excited to see where he takes his business—I think it has a lot of lessons for all of us.

💎 This week’s gems 

A few of my favorite finds this week:

• The coolest newsletter redesign I’ve seen in a while (CFO Secrets)

• The 6 best tools for AI newsletter growth (Newsletter Growth Memo)

• A banger interview with Academy Award-nominated actor, comedian, and writer John C. Reilly (Perfectly Imperfect)

• The greatest prompt ever for writing good job descriptions (Sublime)

Hope you enjoyed this week’s issue. See ya next week!

☮️ -Brad

P.S. Will you be in Austin for the Newsletter Marketing Summit this week? Come find me, or stop by my table at the “lunch and learn” on Thursday, right after my panel with Kendall Baker!

ICYMI: Links to recent issues

💁 How Polina Pompliano reinvented The Profile
🦋 Want to design a Morning Brew-style newsletter? Here’s a cheat sheet
🔮 6 newsletter predictions for 2025
📧 What I learned taking Sam Parr’s email copywriting course
📨 The 5 coolest things I saw in newsletters in 2024