Key Takeaways: The Newsletter Marketing Summit

👋 After a great week in Austin, I’m summarising the key takeaways today.

But first, if you’re interested in how I’d launch ad sales on a new publication, join this webinar on Tuesday (no cost or plug). It’s called ‘Data to Deals: A GTM Playbook’, I didn’t come up with the name, but I did come up with the content.

All using data from running out agency and helping launch 30+ publications to market. Sign up here.

Key Takeaways From Austin 2025

For those of you that didn’t have the privilege to be in sunny Austin, The Newsletter Marketing Summit was a gathering of over 300 newsletter nerds. Two days of learning and networking included talks on all different newsletter-based topics. 

Here’s my key takeaways from the talks and casual conversations with media operators from around the world.

⚠️ Warning: Not all of these are directly applicable to just newsletters.

🤝 Trust  > Atttention

This was from Jay Clouse’s speech. He clarified the typical creator funnel in a super simple way that resonated with me and highlighted 2 things:

• Getting lots of views/going viral does not equal conversions. Attention without trust is not a business.

• Focus on creating content time for a relationship channel, and chop it up for a discovery channel.

🫥 Blend in to Stand Out

A nugget from Adcrate’s talk, when discussing how to create compelling ads. Design your creative as if it were native content for your target audience.

Makes sense. Thought it was nicely put in 5 words.

🏷️ Cheap Isn’t Cheerful

This was during discussions oin course sales, but applies to everything. It’s tempting to set low prices in the hope that you’ll make more sales.

But pricing cheap can give you two specific headaches.

1. Simply having less money per input (sounds obvious)

2. Cheaper customers tend to cause a lot more problems

This is a truism that I hear a lot of people smarter than me say.

Price high.

🤑 Make It, Keep It, Grow It

There are 3 money skills, too many people focus on the first one and forget about the second two.

🧳 Opportunity in Enterprise

Media startups are scraping around for lots of new business, often seeking those 1 or 2 whale accounts that will become long-term brand awareness partners. Larger/older media companies have different problems. 

They often have a high-salaried ad sales teams that bring in 95% of their revenue from renewal campaigns based on 10-year relationships. The founders are desperate to start getting down and dirty again and bring in net new advertisers, but struggle to motivate their team to hit the ‘phones’.

👍 B2B is Better

There are pros and cons of being a b2b media co, but mostly pros. I’ve spoken about this before but it’s reassuring to see a full panel of people strongly agree.

🎪 Hire Driven Freaks

2 weeks ago I wrote about the process of hiring our sales team. We’ve found that hiring for character trumps experience any day of the week.

It’s comforting to hear that Sam Parr had a similar approach when building the hustle.

Hire ambitious weirdos that stand out.

Hire Driven Freaks.

🧠 FOCUS

This came up during two speeches, a concept freshly vibrating in my eardrums from Hormozi’s podcast. Most (newsletter) businesses biggest mistake is not staying focused on one thing.

Alex Lieberman’s talk touted focus as a core reason behind Morning Brew’s success. For years, they just did one thing: Morning Brew’s daily newsletter. They resisted the urge to focus on SEO, podcasts or day trading meme coins.

Even when the time did come to create more media properties, they branched out strategically, within the same format (newsletters), and in a way that aligned with existing audiences. Only 8 years and hundreds of employees did they fully diversify media.  

In all businesses, it’s so tempting to try the next exciting thing. But in reality you’re sacrificing momentum and familiar problems for a standing start and unfamiliar problems.

Shiny object syndrome is a real bitch.

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps media companies do just that.