Growth in Reverse by Chenell Basilio
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Today, we’re welcoming Chenell Basilio, the creator of Growth In Reverse, a great resource for newsletter creators. Every week, she shares a deep dive into how a top newsletter creator has grown to over 50k+ subscribers.
As a previous market research person, I know how hard it is to conduct high-quality research. But what is more difficult than the research itself is connecting the dots and creating a meaningful story out of all the findings. In the deep dives, Chenell is not only revealing the growth dynamics of top newsletters but also turning them into actionable insights that are part of the bigger strategy. I think this is one of the main drivers of Chenell’s success in reaching 8K subscribers only in 5 months.
This time, I asked her reverse engineer her own growth. Let’s start!
Hi, I’m Chenell. I graduated from Arizona State University in 2009, during the height of the recession. There weren’t many jobs at that point, so I waited tables for a while. I ended up getting a job at AAA (the roadside assistance company) and started in their Travel department helping people book car rentals and hotels. I was good at it because I was quick with computers.
Eventually, I wound up working in their e-business department running their paid ads for a few years. In 2017, I had saved up around 8 months of expenses and left my job to help clients grow their businesses with Google and Facebook ads.
Growth in Reverse is all about figuring out how some of the top creators got to where they are. We often see what they’re doing now to keep growing, but that is not usually what got them to where they are. So each week, I spend about 20-25 hours reverse engineering how a top creator has grown to over 50k+ subscribers.
I go through all of the interviews they’ve done, podcasts they’ve recorded, and then dig into their past tweets, posts, emails, and more to find the growth levers they’ve used to get to where they are.
I’ve been helping people build their online businesses with paid ads for years, but I always wondered how you could do that without paid traffic. Then I started learning about people like Mario Gabriele of The Generalist, who was making over $300k a year as a mostly solo creator.
I had to figure out how someone with seemingly no digital marketing experience could build an audience like that so quickly.
So, I started looking into the details and reverse engineering how he did it.
I thought it would be cool to share those stories with other people. And that’s how Growth in Reverse was born.
The only big change is that the growth timeline charts are more professional now. In the beginning, it was a screenshot of Google sheets chart :)
Other than that, the content might be more refined since I’ve learned a lot about newsletters since starting.
My first 100 subscribers were mostly from Twitter. As with most things, I only told my wife about this at the beginning.
I updated my Twitter profile to be all about Growth in Reverse (similar to how it is now), and just started commenting on other people’s tweets.
Cross-promotions, Sparkloop Upscribe, and Twitter/LinkedIn.
Upscribe and Twitter/LinkedIn are more impactful than cross promos, but those two can swap percentages depending on the week.
Twitter and LinkedIn are the most consistent ways I get subscribers. I wish I had more time to truly master them, but the deep dives take a lot of my week to complete.
I write a thread each week covering the previous week’s deep dive. And then I repost that onto LinkedIn.
Every Saturday, I tease the upcoming deep dive. Those posts usually get me between 80-150 new subscribers every week.
I spend a LOT of time engaging on Twitter, and am starting to do the same on LinkedIn. I think it’s imperative to comment on other’s posts if you really want to grow on Twitter.
Lately I’ve been taking Ship 30, and while I’m wildly inconsistent with it, it’s taught me a lot about the kinds of ideas I can try in the future.
Aside from people sharing the content and newsletter, Twitter has been the most consistent. It’s hard to say, I’m still doing a lot of what I was doing in the beginning as it was only 5 months ago :)
My referral program is centered around the section in my newsletter called the Community Spotlight. If you refer 10 people, I’ll give you a shout-out in that section. Each of those is now getting around 50-80 clicks every week, so they get a lot of value in return as well.
I’m using Sparkloop for the referral program at this point.
The referral program is kind of hit or miss. In the beginning, a lot of people used it, but now it’s not as regular. I think it’s worthwhile for sure, but don’t rely on it to drive a ton of subscribers consistently.
They were started at the same time. The deep dives are often 4-5k words, so they would likely get cut off by typical email clients. Plus, having them on a website allows for some kind of SEO to eventually take hold - although I don’t get much traffic from that yet.
I’d reach out to bigger accounts earlier and just have conversations. You never know when they’ll put together a recommendations thread on Twitter and randomly include you, or shout you out on a podcast, etc.
I’d also start using Upscribe earlier or another recommendations platform. It’s been a big driver of growth so far.
Continue putting out content that people find valuable and want to share.
Word of mouth is probably the biggest driver of new signups at this point, so as long as I keep doing more of the same I should hit that goal in a few months.
Sponsorships: 40%
Consulting: 35%
Helping people with their newsletters and conversion rate optimization to improve subscriber rates. These clients came from Growth in Reverse, or came after someone hearing I’m really into newsletters now.
Upscribe: 15%
Affiliates: 10%
I have clients outside of the newsletter which is what really pays the bills though.
I think it was the first sponsor I got on February 3rd. I had 1,800 subscribers at that point. A past friend reached out on Twitter DMs asking what I would charge for a sponsorship. I essentially made up a price and went with it :)
I’m pretty new to the monetization side of things. I have sponsors, Upscribe, affiliates, and consulting going on now. I plan on helping people with custom audits for their newsletters to help with growth.
Affiliate income is from courses/products that the people I do deep dives on sell. I include links to them and some people are interested enough to go ahead and purchase.
I wrote a thread about this here:
I’m lucky as so far they’ve all been inbound. People reach out wanting to book a spot or they can buy through my sponsor page directly, which is nice. Removing friction in the process has helped a lot.
The first one was $100, and then I’ve been slowly increasing it since then. The Who Sponsors Stuff calculator is fantastic for helping get an idea around what you should be charging.
I plan to launch a course eventually but want to get a better grasp on what specific things people in my audience want help with. Other than that and raising my sponsorship prices, I’m really not sure.
I’ve been using ConvertKit for years for my own stuff and with clients, so it was just the most familiar option. For someone just getting started it’s probably overkill for a simple newsletter though.
A typical week usually looks like this:
Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday - 4-5 mile walks while listening to podcasts and interviews they’ve done
Thursday - I start writing and usually outline most of the post
Friday - I go back through all of the written content and find more evidence to support what I’ve found, or add new things to it.
Saturday - I’m usually writing until about 5pm when my wife tells me I’m spending too much time on work, so I close my laptop.
Sunday - I wake up around 5am to finalize the post, write the email and hit publish. Then I’ll create the podcast playlist for the next week.
It’s a lot, but I enjoy it.
The response to Growth in Reverse has been amazing and truly humbling. People I’ve looked up to for years are reaching out and telling me how awesome it is. So that’s really cool. But on a mental health aspect it's done wonders.
I have a hard time sitting still and focusing on something for too long - so the fact that I can get a lot of research in while I’m on a walk or doing yard work is really critical to my being able to stick to it.
The most challenging part for me is pulling the story out of all of the research. Sometimes, Friday rolls around and I feel completely lost as to what the main points are. I inevitably end up figuring it out, but that makes the process a little stressful.
A few days after I set up the Sparkloop referral program, something on the technical side of my site ended up changing, and it broke all of the referral links. So whenever someone shared their link it went to a 404 page. I didn’t notice this was happening for a few days. It wasn’t a great first week of referrals to say the least.
We might have to consult the magic 8-ball on that one. I’m really not sure. For now I’m loving doing weekly deep dives and hearing how much they are helping people with their own newsletters.
Just get started.
The number of years (yes, years) I wasted sitting around wishing I had this or that person’s business is ridiculous. If you’re interested in something, just start writing or creating that thing. You’ll make laughable mistakes in the beginning, but the best part is those make for really great tweets and stories down the line.
Oh man, there are way too many to name:
Alex from The Steal Club does an incredible job curating the wild world of Twitter and audience building.
Katelyn Bourgoin with Why We Buy - really interesting (science-backed) takes on marketing and branding.
Jay Clouse always has really insightful takes in the Creator Science newsletter.
Louis Grenier from Everyone Hates Marketers always has a spicy take on things I didn’t know needed a spicy take.
Eve Arnold has a newsletter where she shares experiments and how to be a successful part-time creator.
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading.
See you next week.
Ciler
📌 P.S. I’ve switched from Substack over to Beehiiv (here). But don’t worry; you don’t need to do anything; I will manually add you to my Beehiiv list if you subscribe here. This is just for you to know :)
And don’t worry; you will receive the new issues only from “cilerdemiralp.beehiiv.com”, no duplications.
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