Codie emailed her own existing contacts (1,000+ pulled from Gmail, phone, old Mailchimp lists) and separately asked ~50 people she respected to forward a curated explainer email to their own networks.

“Send it to 50 people I think highly of and ask them to forward it”

Codie frames the whole first week as leaning on other people's existing audiences rather than building from zero.

“STEAL others' audience (post in big forums, attrition happens)”

She posted directly into Facebook groups and masterminds she already belonged to, where people already knew her.

“I post in Facebook groups, Masterminds I’m in w/ people who know me (5 in total,) 27 people join”

She tried posting the newsletter in Reddit communities early on.

“Tried Reddit & failed, got my posts deleted from 3 groups.”

Codie attributes the failure to her own unfamiliarity with Reddit's norms and moderation, not a strategy flaw she diagnosed further; she moved on rather than iterating on the Reddit approach.

“I know nothing about Reddit and feel like a boomer doing a Tik-Tok video😅”

She built a target list of friends who hosted podcasts and got booked on several of them in a short window, using each appearance to plug the newsletter.

“I make a list of friends who have podcasts and I get myself on a couple of them”

Podcasts stood out enough in her own after-action summary that she named them explicitly as a channel worth prioritizing again.

“Podcasts work, optimize for big ones”

A recurring weekly webinar with an outside group grew her LinkedIn following, which she then used to funnel more people to the newsletter; she also posted weekly video content on LinkedIn through week four.

“I start hosting a weekly webinar with Arcview Group - grows my LinkedIn by 4,000 so I use that to post more on LinkedIn and get 100+ subscribers”

She flags LinkedIn video specifically as an underused, high-performing lever in the course-promotion thread too.

“I used a lot of FB groups, personalized emails & LinkedIn to grow. LinkedIn is so underutilized.”

She promoted the paid M&A course through the channels she already owned (Facebook groups, personalized emails, LinkedIn) rather than any new paid or outbound channel, and only started outsourcing production once real presale revenue came in.

“Once we had $25k in sales we started outsourcing.”

The presale approach meant the course was validated by actual buyers, not the size of the audience alone: only paid signups counted as a real signal.

“ONLY COUNTS IF THEY GIVE YOU $$. (our first post - basically only my mom liked).”

As the audience and media business grew, Codie describes buying progressively larger businesses, moving from small, simple acquisitions to bigger, publicly-shared bets, including businesses that directly extend the media company itself.

“When I first started buying biz's, I kept it simple with laundromats, carwashes, etc.”

She frames this as a deliberate stair-step: start small enough not to bankrupt yourself, build a track record and a network of owners/buyers, then use that leverage (audience trust plus financing tools like SBA loans and seller financing) to do bigger deals.

“Buy my 1st biz for <$10k in 6mos. Then use the cashflow to buy the 2nd in 3mos.”