Kyle Poyar is the founder and writer of the wildly popular Growth Unhinged, a newsletter with over 85,000 subscribers about pricing, monetization and GTM. He also has over 110,000 followers on Linkedin.
He started the newsletter in March 2021 as a side project and went all-in about a year ago. Since then, his one-person business is doing over 7-figures a year, between brand partnerships, subscriber revenue, and advisory work.
In this episode, we talk about how to build & monetize a newsletter, including how Kyle tests every newsletter idea before writing it, why Kyle’s pulling away from Linkedin, leaving Substack for beehiiv, and more.
Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify
We discuss:
How Kyle started & grew his newsletter from zero to over 85,000 subscribers in 5 years while having a full-time job
How Kyle validates newsletter ideas before writing them up
How he creates his graphics, which are a large part of his success/shareability
Why Kyle is pulling away from Linkedin even though he has 110,000 followers
The math behind running a 7-figure/year solo creator business
Why he left Substack for beehiiv after 5 years on Substack
Why subscribers you get from the recommendation feature are mostly “garbage”
Show Notes:
Connect with Kyle:
Kyle’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyle-poyar/
Growth Unhinged: https://www.growthunhinged.com/
Mostly Growth podcast: https://www.growthunhinged.com/podcast
Connect with Finn:
Finn’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/
Thormeier.co - Founder Brand & LinkedIn Advisory: https://thormeier.co/
Full Transcript:
Finn Thormeier: Alright, my guest today is Kyle Poyar. He is the founder and writer of the Growth Unhinged newsletter where he talks about monetization, pricing, GTM growth and other practical advice for B2B startups. He started it in March 2021 when he was still working full-time at his job and it has since then grown into one of the most popular newsletters in the B2B space with over 85,000 subscribers. He is also a prolific writer on LinkedIn with over 110,000 followers. His background is in Venture Capital where he was an operating partner at OpenView, which invested in companies like Datadog and Calendly, as well as, found this out during research, a company called Project 44. My company is called Project 33, so clearly they have the edge on us. Matter of fact, we’re 25% worse than them. Kyle is also the host of the Mostly Growth podcast and he advises B2B startups on growth and monetization. Kyle, thank you for joining and anything to correct or amend there in the intro?
Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on. No, I think you got it right, but it’s been interesting that I started the newsletter while working full-time in VC, but it’s grown big enough to kind of support an independent solopreneur business, which is pretty cool.
Finn Thormeier: Nine months ago, right? Nine months ago, you went kind of fully on this business?
Kyle Poyar: Exactly. So it was August of last year, of 2025, that I made the decision and then really went in earnest in September.
Finn Thormeier: There you go. Okay, so you started it in March 2021, and then you were full-time at OpenView. In those five years, it’s about five years, you’ve grown it to 85,000 subs. Before we talk about the lessons, I’m just curious about your writing process. What does it look like? How much time do you spend on each thing? How do you pick topics? Just start where you want, walk me through your process.
Kyle Poyar: So the starting process I had is probably the most relevant for anyone that’s thinking about starting a writing practice. I began on LinkedIn actually before I ever had a newsletter — wrote long form content around COVID. Very active on LinkedIn. And I would realize I’d have these pieces. I mean, a lot of my posts would fall flat and have no engagement, but I’d have other pieces that would do quite well, but I would run into character limits, or I’d post something and then it was impossible for someone to find a couple of weeks later. I’d also get DMs from people that were smarter on a topic than I was. And so I was like, I feel really constrained by LinkedIn.
And so what I decided is not just that I would throw out LinkedIn for a newsletter, but I would test ideas on LinkedIn. I would see what my audience cared about. I would take that as signal to go write a deeper piece on a topic, or sometimes string together multiple LinkedIn posts to turn it into a piece. And then I’d promote that back on LinkedIn. And so it all became a flywheel where for me, it wasn’t like I’m going to have this brilliant idea and write about it and then post. I think about content as a place where writing and distribution need to be on equal footing, and where the best practices create a flywheel where you’re building for and with a community. And I think that’s what can make a newsletter really stand out.
Finn Thormeier: And if I remember correctly, back then when you started on LinkedIn, you were an operating partner. So you were working with the portfolio companies at your VC firm on their go-to-market strategy, pricing. And I think you were kind of talking about lessons, takeaways, insights, things that you were seeing with those portfolio companies.
Kyle Poyar: Exactly. Exactly. And so for my content calendar, and even for the LinkedIn content calendar, often it was pretty informal.
Finn Thormeier: Did you back then have like a, “I’m going to post every single day” or “I’m going to post twice a week,” or was it just completely ad hoc whenever something popped into your head?
Kyle Poyar: Back then it was pretty ad hoc. I mean, some of these people post literally daily, including weekends. I don’t know how you have the stamina to do that. I’ve always been long winded and I just don’t have enough good ideas that I want to go that deep about every single day. My cadence over time has been about two to maybe four times a week — almost never publish more frequently than that, unless something is like really wrong with me. And it’s pretty ad hoc. I like to post multiple days a week. And so if I don’t have any ideas, I might find something from my archives and kind of tweak it or tailor it. But generally it’s not super planned far in advance. I try to keep things fresh.
There’s one point in my career when I used a scheduling tool, actually the native post scheduling tool within LinkedIn. And then I realized it was either the content was outdated, or maybe it was LinkedIn penalizes you for scheduling content — I don’t exactly know what it was, but I felt like that was actually having way worse results than publishing fresh insights. I almost always post in the morning. I do find that that’s when I have my best ideas, I’m sharpest, but also that’s when people are most engaged. Sundays work surprisingly well. I think there’s just a lot less competition and you get all the LinkedIn diehards on Sunday, but then your post is the first thing people see on Monday too. So I do find that that works quite well.
And I will say one thing that works quite well for me is I think about the visual as much as the text. I spent six years in consulting and so I would make decks — I’ve always thought in terms of slides — but I would translate that to LinkedIn infographic style visuals. And that’s become a bit of a signature, a calling card for me. But those visuals perform far better than text only posts. They’re way easier to share. I think it’s partly to do with, it feels save worthy — like, oh, I should save this and maybe bookmark it for a presentation I’m working on, or I can share this with a friend or colleague. I think it’s also something that drives more dwell time. These are generally not super simple infographics. They’re pretty complicated ones, which means people are actually spending real time reading it. And that means they’re spending more time on LinkedIn, which means LinkedIn can get more ad dollars. And so they’re going to push that harder. And so these dense infographics are the starting point for most of my posts.
Finn Thormeier: How much time do you spend on an infographic?
Kyle Poyar: 30 minutes, maybe. I actually do them all by hand. I have got a Google Slides template that was made by a great designer when I was at OpenView, and I’ve kept that template and made some tweaks. But it has a couple of fonts in it that are out of the box in Google Slides, a couple of colors, nothing fancy. But I literally will make the visuals myself, which feels weird to be doing point and click in 2026. Some people would say, is that really the best use of your time? But honestly, if you get the visual right, that can make the difference between a post being viral or not. I reuse posts in speaking decks when I go out and do public speaking. I’ll put those visuals in my newsletter articles. A great visual is so valuable that it feels very hard for me to give that up. But yeah, I’m not taking hours and hours on it.
Finn Thormeier: Do you start with writing the text and then later you find a graphic that works for it? Or do you start with the graphic and then write?
Kyle Poyar: Oh no, the graphic is the starting point. And then I write something to go with it. I think of a hook that I think is useful. And then the graphic is so dense, there’s actually a lot of writing in the graphic itself. And so I often copy and paste from what I wrote for the graphic into LinkedIn. It’s kind of like, I mean, if you go on Instagram, people put captions with their posts, but realistically, you scroll through Instagram for the image or for the video. And I think people do similar things on LinkedIn where the hook has to be strong, but the visual also has to be quite strong.
Finn Thormeier: Which visual are you very proud of that we can a little bit use here as an example?
Kyle Poyar: You can take the pricing one. That’s the one you’re hovering on right now. This was a pretty basic one, but it’s rare for a pricing LinkedIn post to go viral. Over 3,500 reactions, over 200 shares. And this is something I didn’t pay to boost at all. I just was seeing people really struggle with pricing for AI. And as much as I thought I had some good guidance for people, really the reality is every company was kind of all over the map in what they were doing. And I just wanted to highlight some examples of really interesting pricing models from the big players and from others. It gets almost used as a brainstorming thing probably that a lot of teams can share internally to be like, hey, here’s a bunch of very different examples from a bunch of oftentimes well-known brands on how they do it that can get us started on how we can think about changing our pricing model.
Finn Thormeier: Plus you obviously have quite a few recognizable logos in here. So I think that also helps.
Kyle Poyar: But you can see this is not done by a designer. This is something I literally put together in Google Slides. The resolution could be higher. I actually think that overpolished stuff looks too corporate-y and people actually get turned off by that. So something that feels a little bit more rough works better.
But yeah, I mean, to me, the best content that’s going to do well has to either educate or entertain. And the entertainment is a very high bar. Some people do it extremely well. Like Elena Verna has such amazing memes and, you know, hilarious content. I’m not a standup comedian as much as I would love to be. And so for me, that educate bucket needs to be there. And so I need to fit into: this needs to be a how-to guide or something that a reader can take and immediately do something with what they read. And if I’m not at that bar, if it’s just like information, that’s maybe like, oh, I learned something — that’s not really enough anymore. News isn’t enough. Information isn’t enough. It really needs to educate and teach someone how to do something.
Finn Thormeier: What’s the correlation between — so when your process was, hey, I post something on LinkedIn that I learned working with the portfolio companies or that I kept repeating myself and this resonated, let me make a newsletter out of it and expand on it — how close is the correlation between “this did well on LinkedIn” and now expand on it in a newsletter and it did well too? Is it like 100%? I’m just kind of curious on that.
Kyle Poyar: You know, it’s a positive... I don’t know what the exact correlation would be, the R squared, maybe like 0.6. I don’t know. Don’t hold me to that, but it’s not a perfect correlation. There’s definitely things — I wrote this LinkedIn post about customer success: don’t blame customer success for your churn problem, here’s all the other things that are probably causing your churn problem. That did incredibly well on LinkedIn. I think every customer success person probably liked it so their boss would see it. None of my readers cared about it. I think maybe it was because a lot of that was not necessarily totally new information, or maybe they didn’t have a big churn problem, or they just see me as more marketing and go-to-market focused rather than customer success oriented. I don’t know what it was, but that one fell completely flat when turned into a newsletter.
I do find things that don’t resonate at all. So screening out things that no one cares about, that’s the most useful bit, because then I’m not spending hours and hours writing a full newsletter post about something I already know is not going to do well. And at the very least, even if the newsletter post doesn’t perform as well, I’m going to be able to repost that same kind of idea on LinkedIn to amplify my newsletter. And I know my second LinkedIn post will actually probably do quite well. So that correlation — if it did well on LinkedIn the first time, having it do well on LinkedIn the second time, that’s maybe an R squared of 0.9 or something.
Finn Thormeier: Is that still your process today? You said this was kind of how you got started.
Kyle Poyar: So that was my process for several years. I’m no longer an operating partner. And so I still do that sometimes, but honestly, I’ve been really disillusioned by LinkedIn. And so I’m kind of moving away from LinkedIn right now. And I also just have... I’ve published more than 200 newsletter editions. I think I’m coming up on 250. So at this point I have themes that I know my audience cares about. I try to have a mix of content that touches on different themes.
Finn Thormeier: You said you’re disillusioned by LinkedIn. Tell me more.
Kyle Poyar: I mean, LinkedIn used to be fun in 2020, in COVID times, but that’s when I really started getting active. I did it because I wasn’t going to events. I wasn’t meeting people. And I actually met real life, very smart people on LinkedIn. They would maybe show up as someone commenting on a post, or maybe they’d DM me as a result. We’d hop on a video call. Some of the best networking connections I have came from that period.
And now I’ll write something, no matter how good I think it is, the comments are like 80% garbage LinkedIn slop comments. The engagement on content has fallen a lot compared to what it was before. LinkedIn seems to be prioritizing content that is of mass appeal. I think they’re even piloting showing things like how much of your content is shown to in-network versus out-of-network. But I have over 110,000 followers. My followers don’t consistently see my content. It’s like the content is shown to random people who might or might not care about my stuff. And that means I need to have hooks that are basically bragging about myself or telling people that don’t know me who I am. I like to have 201 level content — I don’t write for a beginner audience — but to do well on LinkedIn these days, you kind of have to be doing 101 level stuff. And that’s just way less fun all around for me. And there’s not a whole lot in it, except for yes, the occasional post does quite well and it drives a lot of newsletter subscribers even still. So I’m kind of forced to be on it. I’ll also scroll it occasionally to get inspired by what’s working for other people. I’ll use that to find some experts that I’ll interview for my newsletter or some case studies to share. But even that’s gone downhill, because my feed just — I rarely see that kind of good rich post on LinkedIn anymore. I see like AI slop stuff.
Finn Thormeier: And do you think that is — I mean, there’s the kind of AI slop automated comments. I definitely see that too. And it just ruins your experience, because I feel like it makes you question every single comment. Some comments are obviously AI. Some comments are obviously not AI. But then there’s a lot in the middle where you’re like, this could be AI, but this could also be an actual person trying to ask me a question right now. And I’m trying to decipher, is this AI or not? Because if it’s a real person who wants to ask me a question, I want to answer them. But if it’s someone who automated this stuff, I don’t want to answer them. But it makes me second guess a lot of comments anyway. So that’s obviously happening. There’s a lot more content happening. And then it sounds like this algorithm change, that it’s less and less of a follower based feed and rather an algorithmically driven feed. When did that shift happen time wise, where you’re like, I’m just not enjoying LinkedIn anymore?
Kyle Poyar: Really, it’s been the last six months. I mean, I’ve always been hot and cold with LinkedIn, because there is a real creator burnout phenomenon where I could have a couple bangers in a row and be feeling on top of the world, even though I’m like, LinkedIn doesn’t matter, LinkedIn doesn’t matter. But really, from a psychological standpoint—
Finn Thormeier: The dopamine is real.
Kyle Poyar: Yeah, it has an ego effect. But then you go a couple posts that are full crickets, no one cares at all. I’m like, I have 110,000 followers, but I got like five likes on something. Did I completely lose it? But the highs and lows are really challenging to deal with. And so that’s been the case for a while, but this slop era has really been since probably January of this year. Everything’s like slop or hype posts, or they just feel — it lost the fun that it used to have. We’ll just say that.
Finn Thormeier: Given that you want to move away from it — I mean, I think I saw a newsletter by you where you talked about growing the newsletter, and I think LinkedIn was your biggest or second biggest kind of growth driver in terms of subscribers. Given that, how do you think about it? Has the newsletter now reached a scale where it’s self sustainable to some extent? Or how does that affect things?
Kyle Poyar: Yeah, you know, as much as I would love for my mental health to be off LinkedIn, it is probably the most powerful growth lever that I can control. And if you think about what options you have available to grow, there’s some platform growth opportunities. So Substack has recommendations and they have Notes, which is kind of their LinkedIn. beehiiv has a recommendations feature as well. And so that’s a core part of growing any newsletter, I think. But it’s a little bit more algorithmic. It’s tied to the platform, tied to your relationships with other authors. So definitely recommend — that’s really low hanging fruit acquisition for anyone growing a newsletter.
Then there’s paid. And so you can pay on beehiiv for boosts, or you can pay on third party platforms like Meta or like LinkedIn. I am doing some paid testing with boosts via beehiiv that are coming in at decent cost per acquisition. I haven’t really scaled that channel.
And then otherwise you’re looking at word of mouth, which is a really fantastic channel, but hard to measure, hard to control. I get a lot of growth through just readers forwarding the newsletter, dropping it in Slack organically, sharing it on LinkedIn. That’s fantastic. But I’d love for every piece I write to be a banger that people organically share, and it’s just hard to fully rely on that as a growth channel either. And so when you look at things that you can control that are not that expensive, LinkedIn is one of the few channels out there. I do think AEO and SEO has some low hanging fruit and that’s something that I neglected for a while. And then my own referral program for readers has been another area. But yeah, LinkedIn is the single largest growth driver in terms of both my direct traffic sort of attribution, and then I now have a survey of new readers when they sign up — I have a “how did you hear about us” field and LinkedIn is number one there too. And so I’m just like, that is so organically tied in with the content I’m writing. These are inherently shareable on LinkedIn. I’ve got a large LinkedIn audience. I’ve got to keep relying on that even if I hate it.
Finn Thormeier: I mean, it is interesting. I had Emily Kramer on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, who has one of the biggest Substacks, the MKT1 newsletter. And I think she said her biggest source right now is recommendations. And for her, LinkedIn is a surprisingly small part. Where she even has more subscribers on Substack than she has followers on LinkedIn.
Kyle Poyar: I would be very careful with recommendations. They’re a great source of growth. And at one point, about half of my new subscribers came that way — I had over 500 publications that were recommending Growth Unhinged. And essentially what this looks like is, in the signup flow, someone goes to sign up for another newsletter and it’s like, hey, this writer recommends these 15 other publications. Do you want to subscribe to these too? And a lot of people click select all, and then all of a sudden they’re auto subscribed to 15 newsletters they know nothing about.
It’s great for growth. Don’t get me wrong. If you care about the vanity metric of your number of subscribers, it does go up. But often deliverability is really bad with those subscribers. Unsubscribes is really high. Substack as a platform doesn’t really let you dig into unsubscribes very well or get much visibility into the subscriber quality by channel. But realistically, a lot of the recommendations oriented subscribers were garbage. And that’s why even Substack started tightening up that growth lever a bit. And that’s why I was seeing less subscribers come from it. But I also just think that was a channel that was fantastic in like 2023. And then like every channel, it kind of got saturated, where instead of you having a handful of other writers you’d maybe swap with, I see some publications that have like 60 publications they recommend, because they’re gaming the algorithm. And then there’s some reciprocity where you’re like, maybe I want to recommend them back. But show me — I want someone to show me what’s the delivery rate and the open rate among the subscribers they got through recommendations, especially for people doing this gaming. It’s a vanity metric. The reality is there’s not a lot of real quality subscribers to that channel. And your own channels — if you get subscribers through LinkedIn or direct to your website or through word of mouth, there’s an affinity to your newsletter. They subscribe purposefully for your content, and that’s going to be a way healthier subscriber.
Finn Thormeier: Now, I have similar feelings around the LinkedIn part and the algorithm, and that it’s less enjoyable. I’m just curious — so I’ve been playing a lot more with this idea of a newsletter. But I’m also aware of this idea of grass is always greener. So I’m just curious, you have the perspective on both, and actually having a big audience on both and kind of keeping the machine fed every week. Is the newsletter a more, I don’t know, sustainable, less up and down journey? Or are there just other downsides that make it net-net just as bad or just as good?
Kyle Poyar: Well, with the newsletter — I think that anyone that is trying to do any sort of creation online, whether it’s LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, whatever it is, the algorithms are fantastic for getting some initial reach, but they’re increasingly feast or famine. There’s no guarantee that anyone following you will see your content. Linking someone outside of the platform is really challenging. So you’re stuck within this sort of walled garden. It’s just a really challenging place to have any sort of control over your growth or what people are seeing. And so I encourage people, yeah, sure, use the algorithms, build a following there, but quickly pivot people from the closed social media platforms onto something that you control.
And what I find for the newsletter, with my control audience, views and engagement are extremely consistent. I mean, yeah, do I have some open rates or some subject lines that do better with open rates than others? Yeah, of course. But my open rates range from like 42% to 46%. It’s a pretty tight window. My deliverability is consistent. As much as people talk about inboxes being spammed, I have pretty good confidence that my newsletters are getting delivered to someone’s email, and that a lot of people are opening them. And then my views are pretty consistent from newsletter to newsletter. I mean, we’re looking at within a range of plus or minus like 15 to 20%, right? So you’ve got some good ones, you’ve got some bad ones, but it’s very consistent.
And I get a lot of replies. So one thing that’s great with a newsletter is someone can just reply and end up in your inbox. And so I also just feel a much stronger direct connection, and it’s almost always a positive connection. If someone doesn’t like a post, they’ll just unsubscribe to the newsletter. They’re not going to send me hate mail about it. If they do really like a post, they’ll reply. It’s often a great source of leads for some of the consulting and advisory work I do too. I would encourage just about anyone — a newsletter is one of the best things that you can build. The challenge though is the growth is a little bit more linear. It’s slow and steady growth. You don’t have these algorithmic highs and lows. So you have to be willing to build over the long term. And you need content that stands out, that I think needs to be so good people are willing to pay for it. Otherwise you don’t earn the right to end up in someone’s inbox week after week. And not everyone is willing to invest that much in content.
Finn Thormeier: How do you feel about saturation for people who don’t yet have a newsletter? Because obviously, similar to LinkedIn, which is getting more and more crowded, when you and Emily Kramer started on Substack five years ago, there were a lot fewer newsletters and people on Substack. How do you feel about the opportunity now for someone new starting?
Kyle Poyar: It’s funny. When I started my newsletter, I thought I was late to the game. I thought Substack was already saturated. Lenny had been on Substack for a couple of years at that point. There were already a number of newsletters that had really taken off. I felt like it was cliche in 2021 for someone who worked in VC to have their own Substack. The thing is, it’s just hard to predict with a lot of these channels. Even if something seems saturated, there’s often still room for one more. And just because something in aggregate might be saturated doesn’t mean people aren’t going to care about your content specifically. I think that there’s always space for one more.
And my advice for people though, is niche down. So yes, marketing as a concept might be a pretty saturated space, but do you work in demand gen or product marketing or content marketing or a different part of marketing? Are you an expert in like AI tooling or XYZ channel that most people haven’t really optimized for? What’s that really specific expertise? And if you can find something that maybe a thousand people care about, but those thousand people care about a lot, that gives you permission to expand from that position of strength. In my early days of writing, a lot of my writing was around pricing and product-led growth. I actually don’t have that much on product-led growth anymore. And pricing is maybe one out of five, one out of six newsletters. I’m much broader. I’ve broadened my topics. I’ve added a lot of new content pillars. But I started with a niche — I even had posts that were about pricing for product-led growth companies that were specifically B2B software, like series A through C. I don’t think that there were more than 100 companies that would really care about that content. But if you can write the best content for a hyper-specific niche, that earns you the right to grow with your audience.
Finn Thormeier: And then for people who want to do that and run it as a business, so monetize the newsletter — what’s your recommendation? There’s different levers, obviously. I think you have premium subscribers, which is $15 a month. I think you have some affiliates with companies that you recommend. You obviously have an advising practice. I think you have sponsorships and partnerships. Across these things, what advice do you have for people who want to start writing but then have a path towards actually making that a real income?
Kyle Poyar: Yeah. I mean, I pay a lot of attention to monetization. It’s where I started my career. I spent my first six years doing pricing strategy consulting work. And so monetization is near and dear to my heart. Substack will tell you that is the number one way they make money. They take a cut on every transaction from a subscriber. That is their business model. I don’t think that’s the business model for most B2B newsletters. I personally am probably going to make six to seven times as much revenue from ads as I do from paid subscribers this year. And I have a six-figure paid subscriber business. It’s just that the ads are that valuable. And that is with publishing once a week.
Finn Thormeier: And when you say ads, is that when I go to your newsletter, basically in the top, you recommend like...
Kyle Poyar: Yeah. And I’m very careful — I don’t recommend products, but in the top, I have an ad slot that’s up to a hundred words. So there’s a specific offer that I have, and yet the text is in my writing. So some of my partners like to just promote the product, other partners like to promote like, hey, we’ve got a webinar coming up, and so the offer is about attending their webinar. Or they’ve released a new content playbook about a topic and that’s the offer. But really it’s like — if you read The Economist and you read it in print, there’s the inside of the magazine cover, right? What’s that first ad that everyone sees as everyone opens to the next page? That’s how I think about the ads in my newsletter. And so that inventory is very valuable to advertisers.
Finn Thormeier: So you always do two slots per newsletter? Because I think there was beehiiv and then Monday.com.
Kyle Poyar: I do one slot, the monday.com feature. And this is, I think, something I should probably clarify for my readers. I love featuring case studies of interesting things people are doing, and that does help promote their company, but I don’t charge for that. I mean, I think the way I charge is through a lot of their time — these are very time intensive pieces. And I ask for very potentially sensitive information that a lot of brands are not willing to share publicly, but I want them to be able to share some of these next level insights with my readers. And so for people that work on collaborations with me, it’s free to collaborate — bylines, guest posts, some of these case studies. But I monetize that ad slot at the beginning.
Finn Thormeier: And so you said you have a six-figure business just from premium subscribers, which is the 15 bucks per month, and then you’re going to do six to seven times more than that from the ads.
Kyle Poyar: Exactly.
Finn Thormeier: Which, I mean, that means you do minimum 600k a year just from ads. And is it fair for me to say to just divide that by 52, if you’re going to do a weekly newsletter, to get a rough estimate of an ad spot cost?
Kyle Poyar: Yeah. People can do the math. It works out to be a little over 10 grand per slot. It’s not totally apples to apples to think of the cost per slot, because when I think about ad packages, I have multiple editions. I have minimum duration. So my minimum buy for most partners is quarterly, but I have a number of partners that actually have annual ad buys. And so there are in some ways volume discounts, but also some of these partnerships also include like I’ll speak at one of their customer events, or we’ll do a couple of webinars together, and then maybe do some LinkedIn posts around that partnership as well. And so these are partnerships that are anchored in the newsletter, but there are different packages to monetize things beyond just the ad slot.
And for my partners, that’s valuable because it’s really about maximizing that exposure over a long period of time. Because if you’re trying to promote an enterprise-grade billing software that might be six figures or maybe even a seven-figure purchase for customers, someone’s not going to see one ad slot and buy your product. That’s just not how it works. You want to stay relevant — you want them to know who your brand is and stay relevant for them, so that when that customer has the purchase need, they already trust your brand and that brand is front and center in their consideration set. And that’s where I find quarterly actually gives more time for attribution, for marketers to actually see that these ads are generating a return for them. And it also gives more time for some of the early pipeline to either close or not close, so they can ideally attribute deals. Because at the end of the day, for ad revenue, the ad business models have been about cost per impression or cost per thousand impressions. I think that is total BS in B2B, because it’s really about influence on purchasing within really target customers.
Finn Thormeier: Right. And who is your audience, right? I mean, you have a very specific audience and probably quite a few senior leaders in there. So that’s very different.
Kyle Poyar: Exactly. I think about the ceiling on how much you can charge for ads is based on what ROI you generate for your advertisers.
Finn Thormeier: Right. What part of the business is the advising, consulting? Is it a meaningful part of how you monetize having this audience, or is it something you do on the side that’s nice but not super meaningful?
Kyle Poyar: So the advising, consulting is about a third of my overall revenue. So still fairly healthy. And for that, I devote probably about half of my time to advising and consulting work. And the way I think about that — so it is healthy from a monetization perspective, I do a good business there, but realistically, it helps me stay fresh to what’s top of mind for high growth companies. And it holds me accountable to real life problems and trying to be helpful to an individual person and company on something that is hard for them to solve. And by doing that, I think that it gives me a lot better insight into what topics I should write about and how to write in a way that’s really going to speak to what people care about. And so, yes, I do monetize on the advising, consulting side, but honestly, a lot of it is picking the right companies to work with and problems to solve with them. And if I can do that, it really makes this whole thing a stronger flywheel.
Finn Thormeier: How do you think about — I’m just curious. So I have a Substack. I have 3,000 subscribers. It’s basically just my podcast. I have a podcast where I interview mostly around executive brand and LinkedIn and audience growth. It’s not monetized at all. The only way that I kind of monetize it is that I run an agency that does executive brand, but it’s very indirect. Because I oftentimes talk about things that are not at all LinkedIn or executive brand related. How should I think about — is this worth trying to turn it into its own thing that I monetize, by trying to grow it more aggressively, by trying to charge premium subscribers, which I don’t do, but trying to find advertisers, which I don’t do, but trying to monetize it in different ways? Or should I just keep it as the podcast, the Substack, that every now and then sends a person to my agency? How would you consult me through this?
Kyle Poyar: Well, so yeah, 3,000 is on the smaller side for monetization, but it’s not too small for monetization by any means, especially if it’s a very hyper-targeted audience that is at an executive level. And so if you could run your subscribers through an enrichment, or if you have a reader survey where you get a sense of who these people are — if these are executives at interesting companies, I think there could be some monetization opportunity.
A few thoughts I have for you. One is, podcasts are worth a lot more in terms of cost per impression than a newsletter ad. And I think part of that’s like, it’s a host read in your voice. Maybe people can double dip where they get promoted in your newsletter and your podcast. I think it’s also a longer ad slot usually, and so it can convey a lot more nuance and information about the company. So having ads that run in your newsletter and your podcast — I think that you could do that. And I think you could start charging — I don’t know exactly how much for them, but I think you can start charging a handful of partners.
And my personal view is that your readers and your listeners will not be fazed by it. I went five years before having a single ad in my newsletter. I was really nervous about what happened when I ran my first ad. There was zero change in terms of click-through, open rates, anything. When I partner with great brands, I actually get good feedback from a lot of my readers, because they all work in tech. They’re working in go-to-market. They’re getting exposed to tools and offers that they had not heard of before, that are going to help them do better at their job. And so for a lot of readers, if you partner with great companies and the offers are valuable, they see it as a win-win. And so in your space, if there are products that you’re regularly partnering with on your consulting work with companies and finding yourself recommending frequently — these are products you already trust, you think your readers and listeners are going to get value using — I don’t think people would be that turned off by the ad slot.
And by having the ad slot, that’s actually going to give you money that you can invest in acquisition. It’s going to give you more reason to keep doing it. You’re going to be on the hook to keep publishing. When you get busy with the consulting work, you’re not going to fall off an episode — you’re going to have a reason to do the episode. And so I would start there. I don’t think that the paid subscriber model makes as much sense for a podcast newsletter combo, but there are some things if you wanted to go paid from a subscriber standpoint. There are things that you could do, like publish somewhat regular in-depth reports, or take some of the consulting work.
That kind of has a monetization ladder to more effectively monetize different folks. And honestly, that’s how I think of paid subscribers for my newsletter. I’m not actually gating almost any newsletter post. They see the full edition. What I do is I produce these in-depth reports that are like 60 page PDF reports. And I do that once or twice a quarter, on topics that I think are really valuable to readers. And every report has a summary in the newsletter. That summary is fine for 95% of people. Maybe 5% want to read the full 60-page report. That’s worth a lot, I think. And that has a lot of my kind of proprietary expertise, that are the things that I work on on a consulting basis too. And so I charge for that. And I don’t think it hurts the free reader experience that I charge for it.
Finn Thormeier: beehiiv versus Substack. You switched to beehiiv a couple months ago after using Substack for many years. Obviously, I think you’re now a beehiiv partner, so that’s important to disclose here, I guess. But I’m curious about how you would compare them, what you like more of which, which one you think in the end is the better platform for whom?
Kyle Poyar: Yeah. So I went about five years on Substack. And then it was when I started getting serious with things like wanting to have advertising, wanting to have paid subscriptions — that’s when I started realizing all the limitations in the platform. So if you have a free newsletter, Substack has great free tools. They don’t charge a subscription fee. It’s really intuitive. There’s some built-in growth through recommendations and Notes. It’s a really simple platform to start using. But if your ambitions are much more advanced with your newsletter, I think you’re going to find a lot of limitations.
Things that I ran into with Substack that people should be aware of before getting locked into the ecosystem were: for a while, your website had very little customization abilities. I think that’s changed a little bit. It’s hard to produce ad slots that feel kind of carved out from the content, because there’s not a whole lot of customization in the editor. It’s kind of meant to look more like Substack. The emails get delivered via Substack deliverability, and so their deliverability health impacts yours. On beehiiv, you can send from your own domain.
Finn Thormeier: Have you seen a big change in your deliverability?
Kyle Poyar: So yeah, my deliverability rates were trending down to low, like 91, 92% on Substack. And when I moved to beehiiv, they’ve been at 98, 99% pretty consistently. Open rates have gone from low to mid-30s to mid-40s. So my emails are getting delivered and read at much higher rates.
Finn Thormeier: What’s the theory on the — I mean, that’s a much higher open rate, right? What’s the theory on why is that?
Kyle Poyar: So I think some of it is just the deliverability tools that beehiiv has, and also being able to deliver from your own domain. I think that actually lands in people’s inbox at a higher rate. I did a one-time cleaning of a few thousand people that had not gotten any emails in months via Substack. But that cleaning is not nearly enough to account for how big of a jump I did have and how consistent it’s been. Other things I did — I did a staged rollout. So I actually did a couple of sends to a smaller, more engaged audience before ramping up the sends to the full list. And I think that staging did really help warm up the domain and get the emails landing in the primary inbox. I’m not a deliverability expert though. That’s the kind of thing that I’m really happy for a platform to manage. I just want the emails to be in people’s inbox.
Finn Thormeier: Sure.
Kyle Poyar: But other things — analytics are totally different. So you can actually see things like unsubscribes. You can see much better analytics on the website and on the subscriber behavior via beehiiv. You also see a lot better click based analytics, where they have a distinction between all clicks and verified clicks, which is really important for advertisers, because you get a lot of clicks that are just spam platforms, even like checking your links. And so on Substack, I think it consistently misreports click behavior versus what the advertiser would see as valuable clicks. Just my opinion — I mean, I’m not an expert at all of these things. But then they have an API and an MCP, so you can access everything through Claude, which is my preferred AI tool. I connect my beehiiv with Zapier and also have a lot of automations I run within beehiiv. They also have things like digital products, and they don’t take a cut on your ad revenue.
I could go on about this stuff because I’m a nerd about it. These things are not things that you probably care about if you don’t have big aspirations to build a business, or you’re not building a really serious newsletter. And so if you just want something basic out of the box, I do think Substack is okay. But these things — I mention them both because I’m a nerd, and because I think that people that do have those ambitions, they should know about these before they maybe get locked into a platform too early.
Finn Thormeier: Do you think — Substack has this home feed with Notes and stuff. Do you think the fact that beehiiv doesn’t have that, is that a benefit or a downside?
Kyle Poyar: Oh, this is a tough question. So to me, I’ll be honest, I was a beneficiary of some of that social media feed. You do get some growth on it through Substack, through Notes, and through just your posts popping up algorithmically via the app. But what I found is that Substack kept pushing following as opposed to subscribing. And following was great for their ecosystem, not so great for you as a publisher. It had a lot of junk and noise on it and just was not super valuable. It was a lot of people posting about like, if you put your newsletter in the comments, I’ll go subscribe to it. And then those would go viral. And you’re like, I don’t need another social media platform.
The other thing that stood out to me was that I kept noticing that Substack was promoting the app. And so my readers would sometimes get automated notifications to download the Substack app. And I also would notice — I think they’ve stopped this — but they would have some tests where if your posts were going to be cut off by the email provider because they were too long, Substack was going to push you to go read the rest of it in their app. A lot of Substack’s growth is built on this idea of, the audience is Substack’s and they’re kind of locked into the Substack app and algorithm ecosystem. And that is great right now for writers, because you’re going to benefit from those readers that are locked into the ecosystem. I got worried about this being another algorithm that had control over my audience and my data that would hurt me long term. And so I did not want to be locked into another one. And that audience control was really important to me. But, you know, you do sacrifice some growth in the short term for that.
Finn Thormeier: Because of the recommendations and the notes.
Kyle Poyar: Yep, exactly.
Finn Thormeier: Yeah. I mean, one of the big reasons why I decided to go with Substack — I was overthinking it way too long — is because beehiiv at the time didn’t have the podcast hosting thing. Which seems to be a solved problem now.
Kyle Poyar: Yeah. So man, maybe you’re going to give it another look?
Finn Thormeier: How painful is the migration?
Kyle Poyar: I am a beehiiv partner. They’re great. I actually have known Tyler, their CEO, for like three years. He’d been trying to convince me to move to beehiiv for a while. And I didn’t move because of the partnership. I have plenty of other ad partners. You’re not going to switch your entire platform just because there’s an advertiser who wants to advertise. But it is very helpful that I have that direct relationship with them. I was given a white glove treatment, and I don’t know if everyone gets that treatment. I hope that they do, but it’s been amazing for me.
Finn Thormeier: I guess with 3K subscribers, I got to do some work. Cool. No, this makes sense. All right, we’re at time. Kyle, thank you so much for all of your insights. Obviously, if people want to check you out, either your LinkedIn or your newsletter, both will be linked up in the show notes. And that’s it. Thank you for your time.
Kyle Poyar: Thanks for having me on.
