Hey there, welcome to the Creator Funnel newsletter on beehiiv 👋

I’ve moved across the final two newsletters I had on Substack:

• Clickthrough (top news and opportunities for newsletter operators, affiliates, and funnel builders)

• The Pledge (take the pledge toward making a full-time living as a creative entrepreneur)

And create.beehiiv.com is the new home for content creators leveraging marketing & sales funnels to build creator economy businesses.

This now completes my full transition over to beehiiv where I have consolidated from 6 to 3 newsletters. My other two are at the bottom of this email, where you can automatically sign up with just one (magic) click.

Which appears to be just in time as Twitter has just disabled liking and commenting on tweets which contain a Substack URL, supposedly in response to them launching Substack Notes two days ago.

If you try you’ll see:

In today’s newsletter I discuss whether you should use a welcome series within an editorial newsletter, now that I have automation functionality within beehiiv.

📧 Newsletter Welcome Series - Yay or Nay?

Ok so here’s my hot take and then I’ll explain how I arrived here:

My history with email & newsletter platforms

I first got into automations back in 2014 with my Drip account connected to my personal site richardpatey.com (which I may be bringing back soon).

I had just published my book on Amazon and had an optin to give away a free chapter as well as other landing pages, triggers, tags and sequences.

To be honest it was a mess, this is how it looked for one subscriber at the time:

Then in 2016 I went deep into Clickfunnels (with my business funnelengine.com) and built out a ‘Soap Opera’ sequence, following the Russell Brunson, Dotcom Secrets playbook, with me as the ‘attractive character’.

I’d use hooks at the end of each email to get as many people through the entire sequence as possible.

In 2020 I was early to Substack and built up the Website Investing paid publication.

I really liked Substack as it had so few features so I didn’t have to think about automations, and could just build my free to paid funnel.

I sold that newsletter later that year and then created a web3 newsletter on Revue for a change. It was great when Twitter bought them as I could have a newsletter CTA box on my twitter profile. Although it converted terribly, and my subscriber growth there was non-existent.

So in 2021 I went back to what I knew and launched Alts Cafe on Substack which quickly got acquired by Flippa, as did I.

After six months at Flippa I left to launch yet another newsletter on Substack. I’d seen friends launch on beehiiv but my poor experience with Revue, plus previous successes, had turned me into a Substack maxi.

That was until I tried paid subscriptions again.

Free to paid subscriber funnel fail

Previously I’d managed to get 100+ people paying $49/m from a 2500 list within 10 months. By February of this year, I’d built Acquire Websites on Substack to the same number of subscribers and wanted to try again with a similar offer.

I’d previously priced at $49/m back in 2020 before the worldwide money printer went brrr, so I thought $99/m in 2023 would be reasonable.

After promoting the paid offer for a month, I’d only been able to get one paying subscriber. Yes one.

The Substack magic funnel was no longer working for me, and I turned off paid subs.

Platform risk

I realised I needed to double down on sponsorships, affiliate, and build out my own one-off products.

Substack is philosophically against sponsorships, which I totally respect - they are about enabling a new creator economy built on paid subscriptions. As such they don’t generate revenue unless you are charging subscriptions (10% rake).

Running ads, or any other revenue, on their platform felt like a risk to me.

Whilst it looks like this was a mistake by Substack, Codie Sanchez showed back in 2021 how platform risk is very real:

From Convertkit to beehiiv

So I got to work and fired up both a Convertkit account (which I’d used previously with investing.io) as well as a shiny new beehiiv account.

I started with a Converkit own landing page but couldn’t create anything that looked good and would convert well - from my days of building 100s of funnels, I knew I needed a high converting squeeze page.

I already had a Carrd subscription so built one there and connected it to a Convertkit form - you can see it in the wild at digitlasset.gg:

This converted well at over 50%, and I’m now selling it as a template on Carrd.

I installed Sparkloop Upscribe so could get paid for referring subscribers to other people’s newsletters.

And I connected my classic welcome series to it in Convertkit:

I then set up an affiliate offer on Swapstack which pays over $4 to newsletter publishers that can send me qualified leads - this is the landing page if interested:

But I found that I couldn’t actually track paid ad spend into this funnel well, even after following the excellent guide by Stephen Pratley on how to to track your Carrd conversion rate with GA4.

I couldn’t easily figure out where subscribers were coming from.

Enter beehiiv with its attribution engine.

In beehiiv I’m able to create a segment which matches my conversion definition in Swapstack, and it dynamically updates to show me new subscribers referred:

Newsletter automations

So now that I’m running paid ad spend directly into invest.beehiiv.com/subscribe, what should I do with beehiiv’s automations? Do I simply port over my welcome series above?

For some reason I just couldn’t do it.

It makes sense to have a welcome series when subscribers come through your own optin and have little context about what they’ll be receiving next.

But people opting into my beehiiv newsletter(s) know what exactly what they’re getting, when and how often:

So what to do? Ask email marketing expert Brennan Dunn of course:

Brennan listed three use cases but I still wasn’t sure:

Then Brennan published a newsletter yesterday at Create & Sell with more information about why you should use automations with your newsletter:

• Reason #1: Acclimation (welcome series)

• Reason #2: Touch points (surveys)

• Reason #3: Delivering your highlight reel (evergreen)

It was reason 2 above that made the most sense to me, in particular:

Now I could finally see a way forward:

I’ve set up a sequence in beehiiv where I ask my audience after 3 weeks how well I’m serving them and ask to fill in a survey.

And I’ve now simply turned my previous welcome series into an about page at create.beehiiv.com/c/about that I link to within my welcome email and in the navigation.

I also link to my product The Newsletter Is The Business where I teach how to launch and scale editorial newsletters and why I view this business model as superior to content sites (which I used to build and flip):

It’s now priced at $247, but as a subscriber, you can get $50 off using the coupon code CREATE50 at checkout.

Done selling, now buying

I’ve only just conceptually realised that a previous business I sold (six figure exit on Empire Flippers) wasn’t actually a website, it was a newsletter:

I’m done selling newsletters, and am now actively looking to acquire them in the online business and investing space. 

I put in a LOI on one this week but the seller immediately came back with a higher ask which put me off. Ideally, I’m looking to acquire non-monetized newsletters, where I simply value based on the number of opens.

Ok that’s it from me, I’ll be back in your inbox next Friday or sooner if you subscribe to my other newsletters on beehiiv:

Cheers!

Richard Patey (@richardpatey)

Disclaimer: Nothing in this email is business advice and I am not a professional business adviser. I send weekly updates on the creator economy and what I'm doing personally - consider it informational and for entertainment purposes only. This newsletter is monetized through sponsorship affiliate revenue and my own products.