Adam scaled a newsletter business from 15,000 to over 100,000 subscribers after acquiring AutoGPT in December 2023. A spreadsheet revealed the business was failing despite growth. His rule: momentum matters more than absolute position. Small upward movement, sustained, beats standing still.
Chapters
I said to him, we used to have all these dreams. We used to like believe we were gonna be successful. When is that gonna start? So I, I told Matt to come over. I lived in a small two-up two-down house and I'd built an office at the end of the garden. It was 2 meters by 2 meters. I locked the door. I said, we'll open the door when we started a business. December 2023, we acquired another newsletter. It's called AutoGPT. This was a huge moment for us. We'd grown to about 15,000 subscribers and this acquisition took us to over 100,000. And we were building this, this huge spreadsheet with like all of our revenue, all of our subscribers, all of our sources of new subscribers, just like the master brain of the business we were trying to build. And the number at the end was just telling us that basically the business was eating itself. It was just destined to die. We just persuaded Mattitz to come join us on this journey. We just couldn't make it work. I imagine a stock ticker for everything in life. You're either going up or you're going down. There's no staying the same. You're the best tennis player in the world one year, and the next year you're the second best, you're losing. Whereas if you're the 100th and you become the 99th, you're winning. And that's why momentum is more important than where you are.
