Nathan BarryFounder and CEO, Kit · Founder and CEO at Kit

Make Your Audience Addicted to Your Emails

1 May 2026 · 0 min

Watch on YouTube

0:14

In this interview excerpt, Nathan Barry and a co‑host discuss effective tactics for scaling email newsletters. They highlight cross‑pollination and newsletter swaps as primary growth levers, citing Sean Devlin’s track record as a concrete example. Devlin grew Nice News to 800,000 subscribers before its acquisition by Encyclopedia Britannica, and his current newsletter All Healthy now boasts 1.3 million subscribers with a 52 % open rate, illustrating how strategic partnerships and compelling content can drive massive audience expansion.

All Healthy has over a million subscribers. What's worked the best for driving growth?
In terms of what's worked really well for us, I always recommend—
Sean Devlin spent years at Optimism helping build a portfolio of email-first brands to millions of readers before founding his own.
A lot of our initial growth came from cross-pollination from other newsletters, and obviously you could do this in swaps with other newsletters too.
He built Nice News to over 800,000 subscribers before it was acquired by Encyclopedia Britannica. In his latest newsletter, All Healthy, 1.3 million subscribers and an incredible 52% open rate.
It's important to determine what it is that your goals are for the newsletter to start. And if we want to group it into 3 categories, we can group it into engagement, monetization, and retention. If you have an email list and you want people to actually look forward to opening it, you're going to want to stick around for this one. What works best for monetization? For monetization, for us, we're—