What Newsletter Creators Are Doing Differently To Grow To 50,000 Subscribers (feat. Chenell Basilio)

Hello everybody, welcome to the Build in Public podcast. I'm your host KP, and today I am joined by an incredibly special guest, Chanel Basilio. Welcome to the show, Chanel.

Thanks for having me, KP. This will be fun.

Chanel, you are a rising star in the scene, the newsletter creator scene. I'm sure you've, you know, you felt this. There's been a tremendous amount of positive reaction and feedback, and I feel like a sense of cult-like status for your newsletter called the Growth in Reverse. I want to get into the backstory of how that came about, a little bit about your career, what brought you to writing a newsletter full-time, and this obsession around research. I saw that you do about 40 hours for each edition, which blows my mind. The only other person that I know who does this level of research is Drew Riley, who's a close friend of mine for Trends.VC. Shout out, Drew. But we want to cover all of that. And then there's a couple of questions from the audience that I want to unpack. I mean, get your thoughts on, you know, based on my tweet, but I'm really, really excited to do this episode with you.

Yeah, me too.

Okay. So let's start with the Growth in Reverse newsletter, right? Tell us the origin story. How did that come about?

Yeah. So I was working, helping clients with paid ads, and I saw people with email lists and they were able to make like tens of thousands of dollars overnight selling a course or a product. product. And I always thought that was really cool. And then I started hearing about people like Drew and Mario Gabrieli who were making like $300,000 a year as a solo creator. And I was like, how are they building these audiences? And so I just had to kind of reverse engineer it and figure it out for myself. So that kind of is how I got started. And then I—

This started in what, 7 months ago, correct?

Like 6 months ago. Yep. In December.

In December 2022. Oh, which is Interesting. That's exactly when I went full-time as a founder as well. So we have almost the same starting point.

Nice.

One question I have about, so for anyone who may have not heard about Growth in Reverse, how would you describe it? How would you pitch it? What's the elevator pitch of the newsletter?

Yeah, so I look for creators who have 50,000+ email subscribers, and then I go and reverse engineer how they got there. I try to focus on people who got started in the last like 3 to 5 years because I don't want to do like the Tim Ferrisses who, you know, they got started way back when and those won't really work for creators today necessarily. So I'll go through and I'll dive into all the research, any episodes they've done, like podcast episodes they've done, interviews, that kind of thing, and just kind of figure out how they grew their email list. And then I write these really in-depth posts and send them out to my newsletter every week.

I also have to say that not only the writing, which was very clear, and I feel like it flows very naturally, I also love your visual, you know, aspect in the newsletter, which I think is a little bit unique about the way you do it. What is the secret there? Like, did you take a graphic design course in college or something? Or like, it feels like you have a bit of an aesthetic sense.

I did actually. I took— Really?

Okay, so my money was right. That's good.

Yeah, I took a grad school course online through the University of Florida. That's awesome. Back in like 2013 or something.

Well, that's actually a great segue for us to talk about your sort of background, you know. So today, 2023, June 1st, um, you're, you said full-time newsletter creator, but also you have a business, right? You're running a business. Walk us through sort of starting from today to chronologically reverse, you know, as you love reverse, to all the way to college. What were some inflection points if you look back in your, in your career?

I guess I'll start in college. I went to Arizona State, graduated.

We have to start reverse chronological though, so you have to start from today.

Okay. All right. So today. So, okay. So today was actually my 6-year mark of leaving my day job.

Wow. Congrats.

Thank you. Thank you. So yeah.

Are you a solopreneur? Are you? Would you be? Would you be called a solopreneur? Yeah. Or do you have a founding team?

No, just me.

Nice.

Yeah. So, all right. So today is 6 years. So 2017 was when I left my day job. I was working at AAA, like the towing company. I was helping run paid ads for

them. I love AAA. It's great.

It's a good company. And so, yeah, so I was— oh, this is hard to go back this far.

What were you doing at AAA by the time you left?

By the time I left, I was running paid ads for them. So Google Ads. So for like—

and in the last 6 years through your business, you know, the, uh, was it a, a service style business where people would pay you, you know, for X number of hours a month, or was it more of a productized service where, you know, uh, you would have 4 or 5 clients but they get like a set retainer style thing? Or how would you describe the last 6 years of your business?

Yeah, I worked with clients monthly ongoing, so it's more of a retainer type of deal, um, helping them optimize their campaigns and that kind of thing.

Right.

Yeah.

Awesome. And then so, and you were doing a pretty much almost similar, something similar at AAA as well, you said?

Yep, exactly. Yep. Running Google Ads for them.

And what before that? Um, you,

yeah. So before that I was working at AAA, but I was actually in their travel call center. So people would call in and book car rentals and hotels. Uh, and I actually got that job because I had a degree in geography from Arizona State and they thought that I would know everything about travel. So they just like hired me.

Were they right or were they wrong?

Very wrong. I had no idea. Very wrong. But it was funny because I actually graduated college in 2009. So it was during like the recession and I was working at a Red Robin, like waiting tables. And my mom was very nervous that I wasn't going to get a job. So she submitted my application or my resume to like hundreds of companies. So when I went to do the interview with AAA, I honestly had no clue what the job was for because she had just been like haphazardly throwing it out there.

Right.

And so I just made up— they're like, oh, why do you— yeah, they were like, why do you want to work in travel?

She took it to the next level,

right? Yeah, she did. Um, but yeah, so it was— it worked out. But yeah, so I was working in the travel department and, you know, I was doing really good work with computers and I don't know, then the marketing team decided that they wanted to bring me into their little circle.

So shout out Chanel's mom, who is the real— was the real angel investor in your career.

100%.

But that's pretty much every mom. My mom's like that too. Okay, so we talked a little bit about your background story, what brought you into, you know, this sort of newsletter genre. But were you— when you were dipping your toes early on with the Growth Universe newsletter specifically, How aware of you were you about the space in general, like in terms of newsletter creators? Because you know, you must have seen Drew Riley. You must have seen Packy McCormick. You know some of these guys during the 2022 December time time frame. How acquainted were you about this whole niche?

I had no clue what I was getting into. I honestly didn't even know who Packy was until I did the Mario.

This is the clip that I need. I need this clip. I'm going to send it to Packy. I'm gonna send this to Drew as well to say, like, guys, you know, you haven't— you haven't— you have some work to do.

Yeah, it was, it was pretty funny.

And so what was fascinating to you in the first, uh, I guess in the early days, like in the first phase of you being a newsletter creator, what really stood out for you?

It was just the fact that people like solo creators could get the attention of 50,000. Like that number to me, like 50,000 subscribers is just mind-boggling. Like, that's a lot of people when you think about it. So being able to like amass that number of people following you and then bring in multiple 6 figures a year from that audience is just— it was wild. And it just felt like something clicked and I was like, I need to figure this out.

So would you say that you almost did this almost to kind of scratch your own itch in the beginning to kind of, you know, fulfill your own curiosity and that turned into this whole You know, venture now.

Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't find like one central place where, you know, somebody had done a deep dive on these people and I wanted to figure out how they grew their audiences. So I just did it myself.

That's awesome. I have a couple, you know, newsletter-related questions that I'm going to run through quickly. So tell us about your tech stack. Everybody, you know, who writes a newsletter, including me, is always curious about the other person's tech stack. So what is your You know, what are your set of tools that you use on a daily basis or weekly basis?

Yeah, so the newsletter itself is on ConvertKit. I've been using them for, I don't know, a couple years. I've had like random affiliate niche sites or whatever. So I had that. So I just kind of stuck with it, although Beehive looked cool, but I just stayed with ConvertKit. I use WordPress for my website. That's, those are the 2 like main ones. And then the research stuff is different, but it's mostly free tools,

right? And, and so WordPress is the site, I think, right? Like the, the website that you built. Yes. Um, and you— thank you for sharing the recommendations with me too. Like, I remember we had a DM exchange about that and you were like, Gabby, here's a template. That's lovely. Thank you. Now I'm in the rabbit hole, uh, with WordPress. So that's the tech stack. Now what is your writing regimen look like? And because this is a pretty intensive exercise in terms of the fact that you put in 40 hours or 30, 40 hours each week for each breakdown. So what does that look like for you?

Yeah, so Monday through Wednesday is usually my research days if the week goes as planned. So I'll create a playlist on Spotify. I'll find all of the podcast episodes and interviews that the person I'm doing a deep dive on has been in. And then I will kind of take that playlist and just walk around my neighborhood a bunch of times. I usually do like 3 to 5 miles a day just listening. And I'll take notes on—

You take notes while listening?

Yeah. Yep. On Apple Notes. So I'll use like the voice to text feature. Yep. And then, yeah, so then I'll come back to my desk on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday and kind of start putting it together, pulling in the like commonalities that I heard across all of these.

Is there a specific structure that you have in mind that you try to have? Like, you know, like great stories have like this, you know, the start, the middle, the end, and then sometimes it's like opens with a hook and like, do you, does it organically unfold itself based on whoever deep dive, whoever deep dive you're doing?

Yeah, so I have kind of a template that I follow. So I'll start with like, I don't know, a little blurb about them and then how they make money, what I call the growth timeline, which is essentially me creating charts of like, um, their newsletter growth and their Twitter growth and that kind of thing. And then I'll start breaking down. So the growth timeline is essentially just all of the data that I pulled together. So like the Twitter followers, uh, newsletter subscribers and that kind of thing. And I'll create a little chart like you were mentioning. And then I will kind of go into the growth levers that I found. So whether they went really hard on Threads, on Twitter, or, you know, they were part of a specific community that Like really help them out. And then from there, I just kind of find different aspects to pull in. There's not like a full template. It's more of just what I find along the way.

And you yourself are sort of on the trajectory to getting to that 50K subscribers. I feel like you are close to 10K now, right? 9.4K. Congrats.

Exactly. Thank you.

Brilliant.

Thank you. It's wild.

It's crazy. And you just started, like you said, you started only 6 months ago. If you have to look back in your own journey in the last 6 months and maybe pick out 3 lessons or reflections that you have that Chanel from December 2022 didn't know, would love to know what would those be about newsletter growth and building out a great audience?

I think the number one thing is just building relationships with people in the space. Mm-hmm. It's so easily overlooked, but because, you know, we can get so hyperfocused on like, you know, subscriber growth, subscriber growth. But if you just actually take a minute and like talk to people, DM someone, help somebody else out, you never know when that's gonna come back to you like tenfold. And that's not the point of, you know, engaging with these people, but it does happen. So that's the biggest one because those relationships have led to people recommending my newsletter to their audience and that kind of thing. So those help grow your newsletter like as a side. benefit. And then at the same time, you're learning from them. Like they're probably ahead of you or they're at the same level and you guys can help each other out. So I would say relationships are the biggest. Number 2 is just the consistency aspect of it. It sounds really boring, but if you don't, like the first time you stop putting out a newsletter or you decide like, oh, I'm just gonna skip a week. I think that triggers something, maybe not in your audience, but in yourself. That's like, you kind of slow down your own momentum. Mm-hmm. And then you kind of You know, takes a lot to get back to that. So I would say that momentum

is key, right?

Yes, momentum. And once you get it, like, it's— you can just build on it. But if you slow it down, it's really hard to get back to that spot.

Right.

Yeah.

Anything in terms of like the depth of content or the quality of content? I think that's one specific unique thing about you is that the quality is just very, very high. And I don't know if this was— if this is an afterthought of the fact that you spent a lot— you spend a lot of time research-wise. Or is it just that you love to read things that are very high quality or like things that are very thought through and thoughtful?

I think it's probably a mix of both. I've always had this like sense in me of like, if I'm interested in something, I will go very deep on it, but then I just like want to walk away from it. So Growth in Reverse has actually really helped me with this because I can get really excited about something for a week and then I don't have to think about it anymore. Yeah. So, but yeah, like the depth of the content is definitely something like, it just makes it so much more shareable. People will see the amount of work you're putting in and they feel almost like they have to like give something back to you because you've spent so much time helping them. So that's helped a lot as well. Another friend, Justin Gordon, he actually does something similar, but with founders.

So the framework that I was sharing on Twitter, which kind of came up serendipitously between, I think, your, my, and Justin's conversation, if you remember a couple of weeks ago, was that there's always going to be a lot of inherent latent demand for the top 1% people's frame, you know, stories and frameworks and how they got there, right? And I think Justin is doing a version of the top 1% founders, you know, like Canva's founder and, you know, Calendly's founder, Tope, and a few others. And the caveat though is that you have to go hard on it. You can't just like do a Wikipedia thread and just say, okay, this is it, right? This is what the 10 things you can learn from Canva CEO. If you really go hard on a particular top 1%, you know, elite athlete or elite founder, in your case, elite newsletter creator, it's a brilliant strategy because one, you learn a ton about what it takes to get to that level. And second, you actually build a lot of social capital with that person. You know, and third, people love. I feel like it's catnip. You know, people love it. People just love it, especially the masses. So I think of that as a framework, and I don't think it's highly explored yet. I only know you and Justin who are doing this, but I feel like that could be done across so many niches. You know, the only other niche I know is Joe Pompliano, who does this for athletes. Top 1% athletes. Does anyone else do like?

I know it's not written, but like Danny Miranda will do the same level of research before he goes into his interviews, and he always gets the best feedback from those people. Yeah.

So yeah, it's almost like a—it's a flattering thing at the receiving end, right? My question to you now is about how many of the people that you've done a deep dive on have replied to you, engaged with you, or some version of said thank you to you.

I would probably say half.

Yeah, it's pretty high, isn't it?

Yeah.

Were you surprised? Were you surprised?

I was surprised. Yeah.

Yeah, I did. Um, I haven't done crazy deep dives a lot, um, as much— definitely not as consistent as you in that, in that regard. But I've done one on— 2 on, um, cal.com, Pierre, who's actually one of my friends from On Deck. The other one was on Ankur Nagpal, who's now the CEO of Ocho, but before he was CEO of Teachable. Teachable. And I was so surprised that both of them were so flattered, and especially Ankur, he like immediately responded saying, dude, this is some sleuth— like, this is some— sorry, this is some Sherlock Holmes level research, appreciate it. And then write a nice— wrote a nice reaction and also clarified some things which I could go back and include to make the post even better. Have you done that? Have you actually taken some of the things that they've clarified on or some elements that they've added to it and then Updated the post?

Not yet, but I feel like there's gonna have to be a part 2 to some of these. Like even Justin Welsh, I did it in February and he's already like this year he's gonna do like X number more, right? Like dollars per year. So I feel like there's either gonna have to be some updates or I don't know, maybe I can interview him at some point or, or something like that.

Yeah, I think that's seemingly a natural step, right? Like, you know, a brief interview would be, would be fantastic. So we talked about your tech stack, we talked about your regimen. Whose deep dive took you the longest?

Ooh, hmm, I would say Justin Welsh, but I'm getting ready to do one on Sahil Bloom, and that's definitely taken me the longest. There's just so much content.

Whose deep dive made you go, wow, and you became an instant fan?

I was already a fan, but I would say Harry Dry from Marketing Examples. Really? Like the level of, Yeah. The level of detail and just like how he thinks about things is really interesting.

Shout out Harry.

Yeah.

If you're listening. Whose deep dive is underrated and more people should read? You believe that more people should read?

I think Mario Gabriele's. He was my first one, so I only had like 4 subscribers when I sent that out. I might have to just like republish it or something.

Why do you believe it's, uh, apart from the, you know, Apart from it being so early, but like, why do you believe it's underrated?

Um, he's just really smart. Like the, the way he incorporates like collaborations with other creators to create a new like epic piece of content, if you will. Like he ends up getting like 10, 15 people together to work on one piece. And I just think that's fascinating. Wow.

That's fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah. And so the other thing he did was he, he used to write something called the S-1 Club, where he would essentially, if a startup goes to file to go public, Right. they have to do an S-1 report. And he would, once those came out, he would immediately dive deep into them, you know, do a deep dive and publish like his findings and save people like hours of time, just like, oh, here, Mario thinks this is great because XYZ, or he's going to stay away from it. And it's just those things like of saving people time through your work is Like I don't know. It's just something that most people don't do.

Yeah, yeah. Whose deep dive got you the most attention?

I would say Pat Walls because he shared it himself on his Twitter profile. Yeah.

Pat Walls. Yeah, it's fascinating. I love Pat's story and the startup story and the whole thing. Now let's dive into some of the parts where because you've done how many have you done so far? Deep dives total.

I think it's twenty-seven. Yeah, 20. This will be the 27th this week.

That's, that's brilliant. So across these 27, and so many of them have at least 50,000 email subscribers, and many of them have more, way more. What do you think are 3 hyper-specific things that these, you know, hyper-successful people do that maybe other people are missing out? So

I would say the first one is being super consistent with a discovery platform, whether it's Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, something you have to like get people's eyeballs on your newsletter in order to grow. And I think a lot of people give up way too soon with those platforms, especially now with like Twitter changing the algorithm and LinkedIn doing that. I feel like a lot of people are going to drop off. So there's going to be an opportunity here. And then I would say cross-promotions and like recommending others, other newsletters. So like Substack has this, uh, Beehive, ConvertKit now has the Creator Network. Those have like, can really bring in a lot of subscribers for you. And then I think just again, like publishing good content that people want to read and can't get anywhere else.

Right. That I think the third one is underrated, right? Like, yeah, it was always, uh, have just great content. What are 3 mistakes that you see a lot of early stage beginner newsletter creators make that you feel like could be or should be avoided? to grow?

I would say engaging with more people online, on social, whether it be Twitter, like, again, another social platform, but just getting out there, learning about the industry you're writing about, making friends with people, and just kind of be open to learning from everyone because even people behind you know things that you might not. So that's a big one. I think people kind of shoot themselves in their foot if they're just not paying attention

Any other common misconceptions or mistakes you think people, early stages especially, make?

I think expecting it to only take a few months to get to where you think you're gonna go. A lot of people think like, oh, I'm gonna start this, and then 2 months in they have 300 subscribers and they're really bummed about it. Yeah, if you take a look at like Packy McCormick, he was writing for a year and he had like 500 subscribers maybe, right? So you gotta kind of zoom out and look at the big picture.

I think to me there was like, you know, 'cause I saw the birth of TrendStart VC because, you know, Drew was a close friend of mine. He was part of my mastermind and I, he read out the first version of TrendStart VC in our mastermind, in our session. He showed this is what I wanted to do. And from there to where it's become now, it's been mind-blowing watching that. But in the early stages, what's fascinating is it doesn't feel like it's the biggest, you know, explosive newsletter ever. In early stages, it always feels like it has good resonance, it's got good bones, it's got like good momentum, but you can never say like, this is it, this is the thing, right? Mm-hmm. And you just have to find what he told me and what he continuously tell everyone is you just have to find an infinite game within the game so you can you know, play the longest possible version of that. And if you just do that for the longest time, you know, you just, you just get the results, right? I think in your case, I'm curious, is it the research that you think is your infinite game? Or what is the most energizing aspect of writing this newsletter for you?

I think so. Because even, I mean, for the last 8 years or so, since I discovered podcasts, like I was always listening constantly. And I just never did anything with the information I was learning. So now I'm like able to take something that I love doing, which is like listening to how other people do things and actually translate that into, you know, a business, if you will.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, were you always taking notes in the past too, or is it a newer habit?

Nope. I wish I would have.

Yeah.

There's a lot that went in and out of my head through those years.

That makes two of us. I'm like that too. Whose newsletters apart from yours do you religiously obsess about and study? And, you know, and then, I mean, not from like a copy or clone perspective, but like who you love and you like just study the style and want to like learn from them.

I really enjoy, like we were just talking about Justin Gordon, he does similar things. So I like seeing how he translates a similar format but in a different space.

I have to bring Justin on the podcast too. I've been loving his—

You do.

I've been loving his newsletter.

We actually just spoke this morning. Oh, really? He's a really, really cool guy. Yeah, it was the first time. I do love Trends VC, trends.vc. That's always fascinating.

So can we talk about that? So one thing about the research aspect, Chanel, is for someone who is not obsessed about that infinite game, it sounds so crazy and dumb and like, why are you doing this? So I would call Drew Riley, in early days of Trends. And then he would like, he would leave me a message saying, KP, call me like 24 hours or call me in 48 hours. I'm writing this, this week's thing. And I would call him again and he's like, sorry, it just took longer than I thought. And I'm like, I would call or text him again and he's like, yeah, I'm still— this is Thursday night, I'm still researching. So I'm like, dude, 90% of your week you're spending time researching. And he would sleep at 2 AM. And I thought it was, I thought it was like dumb or obsessed and weird. Like, why would you go that crazy about— ultimately, if you realize the final output is only bullet points, because that's his style, right? Like, he just writes like such a succinct, concise thing. And for the longest time, I just thought, this guy is a madman. He's spending too much time. Of course, I love him as a friend, but I'm just thinking as a writer, I'm like, this guy's too crazy, too nuts. And he would always tell me that in the long run, that's what is the differentiator. among everybody else and what he was doing, right? He just said, I hope that my obsession shines and comes through, you know, in terms of his— his thing is more about like how many avenues you can cover. Like, he will always talk about, let's say he takes, as you know, he takes a particular trend and he covers all possible angles. It's just mind-blowing to me. And so, yeah, it's often— it takes a sense of insane drive and obsession, I feel like, to put something good out there.

Yeah, I'd agree. And I— yeah, go ahead.

No, I was just gonna say about you too, like, the— it may not be about the, the breadth of sources, but I think you go to the depth of the person and you just go into like these Spotify— like you said, the Spotify playlists and like all these interviews. I'm wondering, like, at some one day you'll write about me at some point when I get to 50K, and I'm like, oh my God, all the dumb shit that she has to go through now, all the things that I said in 2017 and '18 that I don't even know. But it's amazing, you know, and I'm glad that you found it is something that energizes you. But that would be nightmare for me.

Yeah. Well, I think that's what differentiates like what I do from what somebody else does. And I'm not saying it's better. It's just different, right? So a lot of people won't go to the depths that I will. But that's just kind of my personality. So

yeah. And I mean, there's a lesson in there, right? It's always like the blessing is the curse sometimes, you know, and I think whatever is the torture that— I think Seinfeld had a recent— I don't know, did you see that, the clip? No. Danny Miranda posted about Seinfeld's clip on, I think it was on Howard Stern Show, and he was saying, Howard Stern asked Seinfeld, like, when are you not thinking about a joke? And Seinfeld says, never. I'm always thinking about a joke, even when I'm like, you know, at a wedding or with my daughter. I'm always thinking about a joke. And he's like, oh my God, that sounds like torture. And he says, No, that's a gift. It's a liberation. It just feels like fun to me. And so his advice was, find the thing that feels like torture to somebody else but a gift to you, and that's your angle. I love that. And it took me a long time personally to get to what is my version of that. And then once you get that, I'm like, yeah, you know, I'm glad that I I have this crazy obsession too.

Yeah, it feels good.

Right?

Yeah.

So the people on Twitter, the people who follow you, the people, um, your newsletter audience, I'm sure, um, everyone will echo me when I ask you this. How the heck did you arrive at this magical teaser tweet thing as a phenomenon? Because that thing is on fire. I love, love, love those teaser tweets, the way you do them. And I cannot— you make people salivate. I cannot wait to read the edition because usually it's like, oh, check it out. It goes live tomorrow. And I'm like, why is she doing this? Can she just say like, it's going live in an hour so I can just deal with this right now and move on? But it's always like, oh, tomorrow morning. I'm like, come on, just give it to us. What's the origin story there?

Yeah, I actually— credit to Justin Walsh because he started doing something similar. with his newsletter because, you know, Twitter started like deemphasizing links. If you put a link to your newsletter in a tweet, they don't show it. So I started, you know, writing this really good hook in the first tweet and then the next one's like, go sign up if you're not already and you'll get it tomorrow. So yeah, it was, that was the inspiration for it. And then I was just having way too much fun pulling out like the really cool thing that I found in the deep dive. And then I just put that as the hook.

Yeah, I love it. I love it.

Thank you.

So there's a couple audience questions that I want to throw at you. Okay, let's start with Justin because, you know, we just talked about him, Justin Gordon. He's asking, when are you launching your own course?

He was just asking me about this this morning. That's why I posted that. I don't know. Hopefully soon. I really want to because I think people want to see that. But yeah, I don't know. I

always have that like— Sort of, I'm curious, what would the premise be? Like the sort of some of the top lessons you learned from the 27, 28 deep dives?

Yeah, either that or like how I got to like 10,000 subscribers or something. Yeah, I don't know. Hopefully soon.

Yeah, yeah. Zlacton said something about Twitter DMs and you get bro'd a lot. And I wanna unpack what that is. What is, what's going on? Are people pitching you?

All the time. And it's so funny because like, I'm a female and they, as soon as I see like, hey bro, like I have the best thing for you. And so I get it daily, at least.

They're selling you ghostwriting services? What is it?

Oh yeah. Ghostwriting or, you know, I want to help you get more clients. And I'm like, I don't even promote that on here. Like, no, it's just really funny because I get a lot of, hey bro. And I'm just immediately like, you couldn't have tried any harder than that.

That's like the absolute minimum, right? And I see the same thing in my DMs too. I'm like surprised, A, they don't follow you. So my thing is this, if I was one of those bros trying to pitch you, Chanelle, the least I could do is hit follow for 10 minutes while you're going to read my DM and then hit unfollow if I really care about my following/follow ratio. And so half the time I look at this and I'm like, who's this person? I go into their profile, they don't even follow me. I'm like, which means you've never read my tweets, you don't even know who I am. And I'm like, the dumbest— like, this is the smallest lift for someone if you're doing a cold DM. Just follow them for 10 minutes. Second, identify their gender. Like, if the profile picture literally shows a woman, don't say, hey bro, right? Right. Also, the other thing that gets me is They always want to say like, yo, I do these audiences. Like you want to 4x your audience, 5x your audience. And then they have 80 followers. And I was like, if you really know how to 4x an audience, you would at least have, you know, 5K audience. Come on, man. Like why would you have 80 people? That means you don't know.

Or there are people who have like 400,000 followers and they're like, hey, I helped this person and this person grow. Do you want help? And I'm like, you couldn't find anyone in your audience to help and you're coming to me?

Right. Among the 400,000. Yeah. Right.

It's funny.

It's funny. Yeah, it's wild. I feel like that is a newer phenomenon. It's getting out of hand. I think ghostwriting, um, suddenly became a trend in the last maybe 2 months, I want to say. Uh, and it's just wild. Oh my God, like the number of DMs I'm getting, and they're all bad.

It's the new NFTs.

Yeah, it's like the new NFTs. It's just wild. Arvid Kahl gets really frustrated about this, and he's, he's got the teacher in him. He can't resist, and he always takes a bad cold DM, and then he like puts all the links—I mean, puts all the corrections and grades it—and then says, "Here's how I would write it." I'm like, "Arvid, these guys are not willing to listen, man. They're like so dumb, and they're so rigid. This—they're not taking gonna take the hint because if anybody—if anybody was coachable or had the intention to learn and like write a better cold DM, I think they would spend five seconds on Google and." Write a better DM or identify the right person, the right gender. These people are just like doing this spray and pray, the next level, you know.

Yeah, it's bad.

Okay, Matthew asks, uh, if you had to start a newsletter from scratch— this is actually a legit question that I, I'm very curious too— if you had to start a newsletter from scratch with no audience, what would you make it about and how would you get your first 500 subscribers?

Hmm, I would say For me, I'd probably do the same thing. Maybe do deep dives on a different audience, whether that be like fitness people or, or something. I think that there's a big open sea there for people to take advantage of. But whatever your topic is, like, that's what I would do. But whatever your topic is, you just need to pick something specific. So like, I help people learn how newsletter creators grow to $50K. Like, you have to have your specific You know, tagline or niche, if you will. And then you just have to go find people who are interested in that, like who's building newsletters, who's creating that kind of thing. I don't know if you have an example we should work with, but—

I feel like, I mean, we, I mean, like you said earlier, like we did earlier, the break, the sort of the deep dive. Did you know the backstory before Product Hunt? Ryan Hoover used to do deep dives on products.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. And that in many ways, he said that it led to the creation of Product Hunt, because he was just so obsessed about these new products launching left, right, center every day. But every once in a while, he would come across a particular product that he loved. And he would just do an unsolicited deep dive. I think the other thing people actually have to realize on the internet, the biggest opportunity is that you don't need anyone's permission to add value.

Yes.

And often I, I mean, because, you know, I do the fellowship, right, the, the Building Public Fellowship, and I talk to a lot of founders. So many times they're waiting, they come to me and they're asking for permission from me or from the market to do something. And I'm always asking like, why? You don't need that, you know. And it's such a— I feel like Probably a school mindset that we need to kind of grow out of because in school you need the teacher's permission to write an essay on Ben Franklin. You can't just write an essay on Ben Franklin when everybody was studying Abraham Lincoln, right? Right. But on the internet, you can write anything you want. If you love LeBron James, Steph Curry, just go hard on him, right? Just get crazy and just go to the 18th page on Google and pick something that's Fascinating or something nobody would have heard and then start there. That's your hook.

Yeah, I like that. That's actually really interesting because I think a lot of people get held back by that. Yeah, they just, they just don't start because they think that they're not the person to do it. And it's like, well, who, who said I was the person to do it? Like, I just started writing.

And I think the other thing they think is you— the few people that we should talk about confidence too. I, I feel like people think confidence is a leading indicator Uh, you know, for, for taking action. And generally when, when, generally when they see people like Paki today or Drew today or you today or maybe me today, they're like, oh yeah, you're so confident, it's easy for you. And they, they realize that— I mean, what I always remind them, and that's why like I always bring back my old tweets from 2018 and '16 and whatever, is because, hey, I was the nobody shit, nobody gave a shit person back in the day, you know. So Action is the leading indicator that brings confidence up to the surface. It's not the other way around. If you just took action and without anyone's permission wrote an unsolicited deep dive on Ramp or Brex or any of these new startups, you will get a ping from them. You're highly likely to be in the pipeline if they ever want to hire someone. Yep. I feel like there's such a missed such a misconception there that people think that you build— now, the relationships part you talked about, which I want to actually unpack also. People think these creators are some, uh, mystical godlike creators and sort of creatures that, uh, somehow don't feel flattered if somebody gives them an earnest praise or somebody says something specific, somebody offers some feedback. Like, the best way to build relationships that I found is to pick on one particular episode. Like with Arvid Kall, what I did was I just went to one of these episodes and, um, I loved a particular segment and then I wrote 3 lines about what I loved. And then that's how our relationship built or began. And now we're like almost best friends.

That's cool.

It just takes a small step like that, right? But people think that there's some, uh, secret Illuminati club that we're all part of. It's just not. I'm curious, how did Justin build a relationship with you? Justin Gordon.

Um, I honestly don't know. All of a sudden he was like showing up in my timeline, like liking my posts, or I maybe I liked his. I don't know how it started, but then like I just saw what he was doing and I was like, oh, this is like super similar. This is really cool. And then we just started kind of like connecting on Twitter.

That's it. And the other thing too, I think your work, you know, a lot of the times your work is the answer you're looking for, right? So I mean, I used to in 2018 and '16, '17, that era, I used to think that I— my personality, my personality, like I need to work on my personality. Unless you have a completely obnoxious personality, which, you know, it's very unlikely that— what I've learned is your, your work is your ticket to connecting with anybody on the planet, practically, especially in this era with the internet.

Yeah, especially with creators. Like if someone's creating something and they see you creating something on the other side, like They're like, oh, they're like me. Yeah.

And it's such a, again, I guess it's such a novel nascent thing. I think most people don't realize that. By the time I got to working at On Deck, which is, you know, I don't know if you know, like backstory, practically everybody knew there. Everybody knew me there. And almost everyone, like, almost it was like a homecoming thing. They were like, KP, so glad you're here. And I was like, I don't know any of you. What do you mean? And they were like, Yeah, yeah, we've been reading this stuff. Yeah, we've been like reading all the things. We've been— and I realized that, you know, that's another thing I want to touch on, Chanel, is regardless of whether you're doing a newsletter or a podcast or a, you know, just a Twitter person personality, if you're being authentic online, which I think is very, very important, and often people miss that— if you can be authentic, as real as you would be in real life, this is the biggest service you're doing to yourself for For your career, because eventually you'll run into one of these people that you met on Twitter, and when they see that you're the same person, oh, it's gonna be such an easy exchange of, you know, both like, I mean, transactionally, but also just you just, um, I feel like you just stand out a lot more.

Yeah, I agree with that.

You know, because also it's also easier mentally because you don't have to pretend. You just see yourself in real life too.

Yeah, I actually was able to meet Jay Clouse a couple weeks ago at CEX, and it was just awesome because he's the same person in real life. Yeah, me too. Yes.

And I think that's my, um, been my biggest takeaway in the last few years is that like a lot of the creators I looked up to, um, are very human, very normal, and the same people that you would think. And I'm like, huh, okay. That gave me a lot of confidence to be me, myself, on anything that I did. And that's really like my long-term plan. The next 40 years, I want to be able to do whatever I want to do, but be extremely authentic. Like, be me that I would be in real life, and like, don't hold back, you know?

Yeah, that's, that's the goal. Like, that's all you really can do, right?

Yeah.

Otherwise, your life's gonna be really hard.

Right. Otherwise, you're miserable because you're pretending, and, um, and you may have the outcomes, but you're, uh, you know, you're never gonna be fulfilled.

Yep.

All right. So, we're coming to the end of this particular interview. What are you fascinated about or eager to try in the next 6 months for the newsletter?

I think I want to add an audio version to the deep dives. I get a lot of feedback that people, they love the length of them and the detail, but it's like hard to sit down and read every single week. And I've had people tell me that I should they would pay me $150 a year just to have a podcast part of it. So yeah, I think I might listen to that and explore that.

I mean, um, it reminds me of, um, there's a couple creators who are also just as obsessed as you. They're, you know, The Founders Podcast, right? David Sinra, I think, is just crazy.

Such a good one.

Yeah, he's just— he's like, like I said, like Drew, he's just nuts. I don't get it. But like, from a place of positive admiration, I'm like, Nuts, like completely nuts. Yeah, Acquired, I think, is another podcast too, right?

Yep.

They're doing some version of this 3-hour. I'm like, crazy. But I feel like it might be a great complement to your main, you know, newsletter, the text version.

I hope so. We'll see how it goes.

I would listen to it if you did one. Thanks. Yeah. Awesome. This is great. Thank you for being on the show. And sharing, you know, some of your reflections along the way and some of the lessons and tactical, specific actionable things.

This was fun. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, yeah, this was fun too. Where can people find you and give a shout out to our newsletter too?

Yeah, I spend a lot of time on Twitter, probably more than I should. So I'm @chenellco, C-H-E-N-E-L-L-C-O, or you can find me at growthinreverse.com.

Awesome. Thanks again, Chenelle, and wish you all the best for the rest of your, you know, journey.