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Hey hey Reader,

I think you might find a few resources below interesting (if you write a newsletter, of course)...

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How to Spend $100k to Grow A Newsletter: The Self-Liquidating Flywheel

Learn the simple system this solopreneur uses to grow his newsletter—fully funded by new subscribers.

We (Chenell & myself) published our exclusive interview with Olly Richards on the Growth In Reverse podcast last week.

But today I'm sharing just a small-but-mighty learning from that chat. (Click the thumbnail below to watch the whole interview.)

Here’s why we wanted to chat with Olly:

He founded StoryLearning.com in 2013.
He grew it to a $10M online business with very little overhead.
He now only works ~4 days per month in it.
Giving him time to build a personal brand at OllyRichards.co (launched in 2023).
Where he built a 118-page book (in a Google Doc) about how he built StoryLearning.com — and it’s FREE by the way.
The Google Doc helped Olly grow his newsletter to over 18k subscribers.
That same lead magnet has indirectly led to $1.2M in revenue for his personal brand.

All this is overwhelmingly impressive.

It’s clear when talking to him that Olly is smart, entrepreneurial, and disciplined. He did a lot of things the “right” way. But there’s one key part of Olly’s story that’s living rent-free in my mind.

And it’s something I believe strongly that newsletter operators — including myself — need to learn.

What is it?

It’s how Olly paid for the distribution of his 118-page Google Doc and grew his newsletter, in essence, for free to 18k+ subscribers in ~18 months.

And it’s called a Self-Liquidating Flywheel (or SLF for short).

But before I get too deep into the SLF, you should understand the potential impact this can have on your business.

Spending Your Subscribers’ $100k To Grow

Olly readily shares that he invest in paid growth (over $100k worth!) to market the free Google Doc case study, and grow his newsletter audience.

That’s right — he didn’t market his newsletter. He promoted a free resource.

You might be asking why the hell you’d spend $100k marketing a free resource 🤔

He did so because it was the Trojan horse into his ecosystem.

And he knew anyone who found the resource valuable would be an ideal fit to work with him in some capacity.

Olly shares in one post how he spent over $100,000 marketing the Doc.

Nearly $50k was spent sponsoring other newsletters (“Sponsorships”)
Nearly $7k was spent on Twitter & Meta ads
And $thousands spent on other paid efforts to push the Google Doc

Olly shared the image below in one of his blog posts about this.

I share all the details of how Olly spent $101k generated by new subscribers to grow his newsletter—and how YOU can do the same.

Learn how to create a Self-Liquidating Flywheel and a Self-Liquidating Offer, like Olly did, that got him "free" traffic, 18k subscribers, and resulted in $1.2M in revenue 👇

Get the gooods >>

Newsletter Hits
Of The Week

⚡ 10 Unconventional Newsletter Growth Strategies To Reach 40k Subs—and beyond.

⚡ The 4 Quadrants of Newsletter Growth—and what you should do in each.

⚡ He hit 50k. Now he's aiming for 100k newsletter subs. Here's how he's doing it.

⚡How she makes $20k/month from 572 email subscribers.

👆 That last link is from my friend (and fellow GIR Pro member) Matt Gira.

Matt writes The Quarter**, a newsletter where he dives deep into how founders bootstrap their startups to hit their first $250k in revenue. Learn from their strategies, wins, and mistakes.

Your newsletter strategy look like this?

Stop wasting ~~spaghetti~~ your time.

Throwing newsletter spaghetti at the wall isn't a good strategy...

Book a 1:1 newsletter strategy session and walk away with a clear plan to grow, monetize, and scale — from someone who's done it and helped dozens of others do the same.