Viral content almost ruined my business
In 2020, the world shut down. I started a new business.
I’d been doing online marketing since 2012.
But this time, I wanted to build something around my own name. Write about what I know. Help others. Sell digital products. Fund my freedom by writing about my ideas.
And since I thought I had it all figured out, I burned $7,000 on Facebook ads.
Didn’t work out.
Next, I started a YouTube channel. Posted almost daily for nearly three months straight.
Didn’t work out.
Then I tried YouTube ads on top of that. More money out the door.
Didn’t work out.
At that point, I felt like a loser.
After weeks of frustration, something clicked. What if I stopped fighting my nature and just… wrote? I transcribed my YouTube videos, cleaned them up, and posted them as articles on Medium.
A few days later, things started to take off.
In 4 months, my list hit 3,000 subscribers. I launched my first course. Five figures in the first few weeks.
Since then, I’ve never looked back. The list hasn’t stopped growing. 37,013 people have signed up at one point or another over the past five years.
But there’s one thing I wish I had known earlier that would have made the whole thing much, much easier.
What game are you playing?
There are many games you can play online.
You can play the celebrity game, the money game, the lifestyle game, and probably a dozen others.
I’m in it for the lifestyle. I don’t want to become the next Hormozi.
That’s also one of the reasons I’m running a “faceless personal brand.”
For someone who actually enjoys writing, running a newsletter-based business is the closest thing to perfect. You write, you send, you sell on the backend. Simple. Lean. Profitable.
Every subscriber represents a chance to help someone and keep this whole thing running on my terms — a few hours each morning, from anywhere.
But when playing this game, the quality of that list matters way more than the size.
Because unless you’re playing the “big audience game,” you’re not selling eyeballs to advertisers. You’re selling your own products. Advertisers want reach. Creators who sell their own stuff need trust. And trust only lives in the right, engaged audience, not the biggest one.
And that’s where I found a massive problem.
The question Google Analytics & your platform dashboard can’t answer
After years of creating content and growing this list across multiple platforms, I had one simple question:
Where do my best subscribers actually come from?
Not my most subscribers. My best ones. The ones who opt in, stick around, and buy stuff.
I opened Google Analytics. Fancy graphs. A world map. Bounce rates. Session durations.
Completely useless.
Google Analytics is built for websites. It tells you how many people visited a page. It’s like a thermometer that shows the temperature but can’t tell you if it’s raining on your head.
It doesn’t tell you which article generated email subscribers. It doesn’t connect those subscribers to actual sales. Instagram won’t tell you either.
Neither will LinkedIn, YouTube, Substack, Medium, or any platform you’re posting on.
These tools were built for a different game: the eyeball game.
But not for people like us who sell stuff through email.
271 claps, 13,000 views, and $0
Back in 2022, I published an article on Medium called “If Nobody Cares About Your Writing, Then You’re on the Right Way.”
It pulled in 13,000 views and 271 claps. From the outside, it looked like a home run.
But when I checked what actually happened behind the scenes, it barely brought in any email subscribers. And the ones it did bring? None of them bought anything.
Meanwhile, other articles — some with fewer than 500 views — brought in subscribers who went on to spend thousands on my products.
Same platform. Same writer. Completely different results.
If I had made decisions based on what “looked” successful, I would’ve doubled down on the wrong content. I would’ve written more articles like the viral one and fewer like the ones that actually brought in the right subscribers.
Most creators are doing exactly that right now. Optimizing for applause instead of revenue.
The $81,000 black hole
Because I wasn’t new to all of this, I told myself early on: “I’m going to track where my subscribers come from.”
So I built a DIY tracking system:
- Zapier.
- Google Sheets.
- Ugly formulas.
Duct taping, basically.
It worked… kind of.
I could see some sources. I knew SEO was strong. I knew Medium was pulling its weight. I knew YouTube was underperforming despite 15k monthly views.
But after years of tracking, I sat down and looked at my data. Over $81,000 in revenue couldn’t be traced back to any source. Some of my biggest clients? No clue how they found me.
The DIY system was better than nothing, but it still left a gaping hole where the most important data should have been.
So I built the thing that didn’t exist
I looked for a simple tool that could answer one question: where do my best subscribers come from?
Not another dashboard with 47 tabs. Not a Google Sheets monster that breaks every time you sneeze. Not a website analytics tool pretending to understand email businesses and requiring a $999 enterprise course to get a grip on it.
I couldn’t find it. So I built it.
It’s called Best Subscribers.
Think of it as Google Analytics, but built specifically for creators who grow an email list and sell digital products.
It connects the dots between:
- the content you publish,
- the subscribers you get,
- and the revenue those subscribers generate.
So you can stop guessing which platform to double down on. And start knowing.
As I’m posting this, there’s an early adopter deal.
If you want to check it out, here’s the link…
I Added 37,013 Subscribers To My Newsletter. Here’s One BIG Lesson I Learned was originally published in The Startup on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.