The Growth Blueprint has been growing quicker over the past few months with Refind Ads as Meta is underperforming and I wasn’t able to reboot my SparkLoop account.
Newsletter ad networks deliver questionable results. I love beehiiv and I’m using the Boost feature as well, but the model isn’t suitable to some newsletter formats (i.e. a good fit for the network and a laser focus value proposition/ultra niche/local or a brand).
SparkLoop took me from 2k to 8k back in the day, but I had to purge nearly half at the end of the growth curve.
We tested Subletter with my friend Mukund for the B2B Disrupted newsletter, but that flopped hard.
Is Refind the best option out there? I’m still dubious, but while the open rate is slowly decreasing, it isn’t too dramatic yet.
I see a number of email accounts with digits (and tons of gmails), and some of these are probably bots or fake, but not all. I see real humans behind some readers going for anonymous and personal email addresses.
This week alone, I had Refind subscribers from Apple, a legal firm, a coupe of universities, Deloitte, someone from Boeing, and a handful of entrepreneurs or agency owners. That’s just the emails I can recognize (leading to a known TLD).
So in hindsight, it’s a viable model for gradual audience expansion – as long as regular purging is involved.
Otherwise, the list would be twice the size minus the inactive or suspicious cuts.
P.S. If a current reader has a winning take on the core value proposition, I’m all ears 🙂
