The Million-Sub Question
When I first met Jason Woodruff, his newsletter had ~30k subscribers. Now, 6 years later, they have 1.2 million subs — and growing (fast).
So I asked him my favourite question:
"If you had to start over from zero — and grow the same newsletter from 0 to 1m+ subscribers today — how long would it take you?"
Jason's answer was super interesting.
He said, "honestly, I don't know. I bet we could go from 50k to 1m subscribers in less than 3 years... but getting from 0-50k is the hardest part. It took us 3 years the first time around — we'd need to figure out how to do that in just a few months."
And that got me thinking...
Let's say you're a "normal" person (no huge existing audience, no bags of cash) trying to grow a million-subscriber newsletter — how can you get from 0 to 50k quality subs in just 90 days?
Here are the 4 strategies I'd try (in no order) 👇
1 Paid Acquisition
The "easiest" way to reach 50k subscribers in 90 days is to just pay for the subscribers.
You could use Meta ads, SparkLoop, sponsoring other newsletters — or a combo of all three.
Reaching 50k active subscribers will cost you anywhere from $50k on the low-end, to $150k+ for more niche, affluent audiences.
Of course, the hard part is finding the cash to invest if you don't have it already.
There aren't many people investing in newsletter companies right now. And the people who are doing so normally want the founder to have some kind of unfair advantage (or track record) that means they won't need the investor's money for the 0-50k growth stage.
But wait...
In 2025, you can (probably) get $100k worth of subscribers from paid acquisition without needing much (or any) of that money to invest at all!
How?
... by monetizing the post-opt-in flow for new subscribers.
I tried this recently with my own newsletter. And I managed to earn back more than I paid to acquire each new subscriber — before I even had to pay for them.
Meaning I could basically use paid acquisition like Meta ads to grow for free.
Here's exactly what I did:
2 Organize Recommendations Swaps
When I launched this newsletter last year, it took me 48 hours to grow from 0 to 5k+ subscribers.
How? A recommendations swap:
By partnering up with 10-15 creators with a similar audience to my own, I received thousands of subscribers for free. And they received thousands of subscribers for free in return — from each other via my recommendations widget.
So — even though I had literally zero subscribers of my own — I managed to create a win-win situation in which it was worth it for them to promote my newsletter to their audience.
And this was with small newsletters in a tiny niche.
If you partnered with bigger creators with an audience that can sustain a 1m+ subscriber newsletter, I bet you could run 1-2 of these recommendations swaps and hit 50k+ subscribers in 3 weeks, not 3 months!
3 Cross-Pollination
Cross-pollination is a newsletter-industry term that basically means "get someone with a huge newsletter to promote your newsletter to their subscribers".
When you're asking them to promote a new newsletter, this can also be called "seeding".
Normally, seeding happens within a media brand. For example, Morning Brew's new "sales" newsletter will launch to (much more than) 50k subscribers on day #1, because they'll promote it to the subscribers of their existing newsletters.
But the truth is, seeding an "external" newsletter is A LOT more common than you'd think.
For example, I know of AT LEAST six different million+ subscriber newsletters who got a headstart by receiving their first 50-200k subscribers from another friendly newsletter (although they don't like to talk about it publicly).
One example I can share is Amanda Hesser's new Homeward newsletter on Substack. Which received a few hundred thousand subscribers (!) courtesy of cross-pollination from the Food52 newsletter:
The crazy part is you can literally just go and ask people with (big) relevant newsletters (or better yet, relevant brands with huge email lists but no editorial newsletter) to do this.
If they like you and what you're doing, there's a much bigger chance they'll say yes than you'd think.
Especially if you make it worth their while. For example with the promise of exclusive ad spots or equity.
Give it a try — there's literally nothing to lose.
4 Amazing Social Content
The truth is, it's much, much harder to grow your newsletter quickly via organic social content today than it was 3+ years ago.
But it's not impossible.
Just look at how Milly is growing her Generalist.world newsletter by 500+ subscribers per day with TikTok videos and a quiz, for example.
The algorithmic discovery engines that power short-form video social networks today (like Reels and TikTok) mean you don't need "followers" to get good results: A great video will reach huge audiences, even from a completely new account.
That's a big opportunity if you're half-way decent on camera and want to add a few hundred subs per day.
