Month 0: The decision
I didn't start The Founders' Fuel to make money. I started it because I was already sending long emails to 5 friends about what I was learning building my startup. One of them said "you should turn this into a newsletter."
So I did. And 18 months later, it generates $15,000 per month.
Here's exactly how it happened, month by month. No vanity metrics, no survivorship bias caveats. Just the playbook.
Months 1-3: The ugly beginning (0 to 700 subscribers)
I launched on Substack with zero audience. My first issue went to 12 people — all personal contacts.
- Posted every issue on Twitter with a key insight as the hook
- Engaged genuinely in founder communities (IndieHackers, Twitter, Reddit r/startups)
- Created a "founding subscriber" badge for the first 100 people
- Cross-promotions with other tiny newsletters (both audiences too small to matter)
- Posting in Facebook groups (wrong audience, too much noise)
- Trying to be "professional" — my best-performing issues were raw and honest
By month 3, I had 700 subscribers with a 55% open rate. Good engagement, terrible scale.
Months 4-6: Finding the growth lever (700 to 2,500)
This is where most newsletters die. Growth flatlines, motivation drops, and you start questioning everything.
My breakthrough came from an experiment: I started writing deep-dive case studies on real founders. Not interviews — case studies. I'd research someone for 3-4 hours, then write a 2,000-word breakdown of their strategy.
The first one I wrote was about a founder who went from $0 to $40k MRR in 6 months selling a Notion template. That single issue got forwarded 340 times.
The lesson: Your growth content isn't about you. It's about the people your audience wants to become.
I kept doing one case study per month alongside my regular weekly content. Each one brought 200-400 new subscribers organically.