The Ledger
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Denk earns $20,000–$30,000 monthly writing a newsletter five hours a week
“As a side project, I put five hours a week into between 20 and 30,000 dollars a month.”
Denk: Newsletter growth requires compounding eight to ten distinct acquisition channels
“There is no silver bullet from going from zero to 90,000 in a year. It is a compounding of, like, eight to 10 different things, which we'll walk through, that all add, you know, a hundred subscribers a week here, a hundred subscribers a week here, a hundred su…”
Denk: Immediate welcome emails are the best time to drive subscriber actions
“You're also, you have someone's attention who just converted. And you are top of mind for them. It's a perfect place to push them or incentivize them to take an action.”
Denk: Many newsletters earn thousands of dollars passively per week via beehiiv
“That is the boost network, which we'll get further into, but also how a lot of these newsletters are earning thousands of dollars per week passively. They're driving new subscribers, which is good for them in their newsletter. Along the way, one in five people…”
Denk: Morning Brew's referral program drove over one million total subscribers
“I built the referral program back at morning brew that worked extremely well. It led to over a million subscribers from morning brew today.”
Denk: Gating web versions of newsletters creates effortless, recurring lead magnets
“You've already done the hard part of, I've already written the 1500 words to build this post. I've already published it. Now I just want to attract other people who may not have received it because they're not a subscriber yet to come click on this page and pu…”
Denk: Writing online weekly is the highest-leverage career move he has made
“Writing weekly and sharing my thoughts online has probably been the highest leverage thing that I've done in my entire career. It's opened so many doors to angel investing, meeting other founders, meeting people who are doing really cool shit and are either in…”
Denk grew his personal newsletter to 90,000 subscribers in 14 months
“With the case study of it worked for me zero to nine DK in like 14 months.”
Denk: 30% of his 90,000 newsletter subscribers complete an onboarding survey
“I have 22,000 responses to this survey out of 90,000 subscribers. So about a 30% conversion rate of people who sign up for my newsletter do end up completing the survey.”
Denk spends $2,000 to $3,000 monthly acquiring subscribers for his personal newsletter
“I put two to 3000 dollars of, like, budget into this, like, growth machine every month, and I have a 155 publishers who want to promote me”
Denk: beehiiv raised a $1.6M extension because the $2.6M seed wasn't enough
“So we raised 2.6 million and then I realized we didn't raise enough money, so I had to raise more money. This is, like, the deck I made to, like, communicate we needed more money. So we raised 1.6 million off of this deck.”