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Hey Reader!
Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadian readers 🍁
Here's what's happening in this edition:
→ Can you buy newsletter replies? I tried. → How to build a $500k membership → The Hyper-Personalized Lead Magnet → Mark Manson's subject line formulas → Best tools & apps for Substack writers
But before we get into it...
I have an update on last week's "$25 Starbucks GC for a Reply" experiment.
I Tried To Buy Newsletter Replies ☕
Here's what happened. And what I'd do differently.
Last week in my newsletter, I did something impulsive and unplanned.
I tried to buy replies — with a $25 Starbucks gift card.
I offered the GC to the first person who replied to my newsletter with a correct answer to (what I thought was) a pretty simple question.
The result? A whopping 6 replies 😂
(a little deflating but I appreciated and responded to all the replies nonetheless!)
Two replies had nothing to do with the question or incentive. And four came after I posted about it on LinkedIn.
For what it’s worth, I had no idea how/if this would work. Expectations were low.
My 3 Biggest Takeaways (and would I recommend it?)
1 - If you actually want this to work — don’t bury it like I did. I could have made it way more prominent in the email so skimmers wouldn’t miss it. Instead I put it in a body of text. Only thorough readers (maybe 10-15%) saw it.
2 - Making it the “first to reply” created a Bystander Effect:everyone thought someone else probably beat them to it. It turned individual readers into a crowd of bystanders. My LinkedIn postproved it as several folks admitted as much. According to Claude, I should have added something like "Most people won't bother answering — be the one who does"
3 - The incentive was misaligned.Coffee is great. Lotsa folks drink it. But I should have offered something more enticing and valuable, like a 1:1 call with me, or a free onboarding audit or roast. An incentive that was better aligned with my newsletter and my audience would have been more effective (and technically “free” for me, too).
Final Takeaway
There are loads of ways to encourage more newsletter replies. (In fact, I have a free resource on that)
And since replies are the Gold Standard for engagement, I was very okay to invest $25 into this experiment.
Truthfully, the experiment alone was worth the small investment. While mostly unsuccessful, I'd still recommend it in the right situation — but with the learnings from above applied.
Will I try it again? Maybe! But more strategically.
Let me know: would you try this? Reply YES or NO. Super curious to hear your thoughts.
Resource Of The Week ⚡
Stay out of the Junk folder with instant deliverability feedback.
My newsletter last week hit 60% open rate (for whatever that's worth) -- hurray!
But it could've been even better.
Turns out all my Outlook email subscribers missed it — because it went straight to their Junk folder.
Moments after hitting send, I got a not-so-rosy deliverability score of 30/100 from SendGauge.
In fact, Alyssa Dulin (who built this tool) was kind enough to create a filter for me in Kit so I can stop sending newsletters to cold Outlook subscribers.
SendGauge has already done a lot for me and it's only getting better. I'm in regular contact with Alyssa, and she is continuously improving SendGauge.
PS - Yes I've shared SendGauge in this resource section before. But it's so good and getting even better that it's worth sharing again.
PPS - I do not affiliate with many products. The ones I am an affiliate for, like SendGauge and Kit, are the ones I trust, have tested, and/or continue to use and enjoy.
He built a 340-member community. He told us how.
I've been following Jay Clouse longer than I've been following *almost* anyone.
So it was an honor to co-interview him with Chenell — while in person — in Boise.
(Yay I remembered to wear pants)
One of the things I admire about Jay is how thoughtful he is.
And it's because he legit cares. He cares about his business. He cares about his family.
And he cares about his members and their experience in his community, The Lab.
He's thoughtfully built a community that drives close to $500k in annual revenue while serving over 340 members.
How He Got There
Jay's "overnight success" has taken years.
Jay fired up The Lab back in 2022 (it was called the Creator Companion Club at the time). And he launched it with a 200-member cap — while also using pricing as a filter to vet for serious creators.
He's since eliminated the 200-member cap, added a beginner tier, and turned the higher tier into an application process.
In our interview, Jay shared why he made those decisions, along with...
→ The #1 metric he cares about → The crucial "middle" of community building most people ignore → How he onboards new members → How he structures his multi-tier membership and why → The surprising result of their best sign-up month ever (and what went wrong)
You can watch our interview live on YouTube or catch it on your favorite podcast player now :)
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