How To Grow Your Startup With A Niche Newsletter

It’s becoming much more common for startups to use a newsletter as their early go-to-market strategy.

The problem is that founders are super busy and putting yourself on the hook to write a newsletter each week while balancing fundraising, hiring, and the search for PMF can quickly feel like a chore.

Even before that, how do you know if investing in a newsletter is a good idea for your startup?

Thankfully there’s a playbook for newsletters and I’ve adapted it specifically for founders 👇

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Using a Newsletter as a GTM Strategy

Should Your Startup Start a Newsletter?

Founders should NOT start a newsletter when they:

• Don’t know who their target user is yet

• Won’t have bandwidth to commit to writing it every week, or a team member who can

• Have another early growth channel that’s working well (stay focused!)

• Would have to compete directly with a massive and established newsletter, without clear options for differentiation

• Are targeting users who don’t use email much

If none of those are true about your startup, a newsletter may be a good fit. It can be particularly useful if you:

• Are building a waitlist, since a newsletter keeps you on their mind

• Have an existing audience somewhere else, since it’ll be easier to build your subscriber base

• Have budget for growth, since newsletter subscribers can be acquired cheaply (~$2 / subscriber)

• Are selling a high price-point product, since you’ll have more time to build familiarity and have more chances to get them to convert

• Are building in a brand new market, since you’ll likely need to educate potential users about it

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