Matt McGarry was not a first-time builder when he started Newsletter Operator on January 16, 2023. He had already spent years as a paid-acquisition marketer, working as the first hire at the crypto newsletter Milk Road and running growth at The Hustle before HubSpot acquired it. That background gave him an unusual edge: he understood exactly how email lists grow and how to turn subscribers into buyers. The newsletter became the place where he documented that playbook in public.

He started small and on purpose. About a week before the first issue went out, he posted a tweet announcing the newsletter, added a signup line to his email signature, and asked friends and clients to subscribe. That got him roughly 100 subscribers to write for, and the public commitment kept him publishing weekly. His starting audience was modest, around 1,300 followers on Twitter and 1,000 on LinkedIn, but he treated it as a launchpad rather than a limitation.

The first 10,000 subscribers came mostly from three sources: organic Twitter threads, Twitter ads, and direct website traffic. Writing one strong thread per week and adding a call to action the day before each issue did most of the organic work. He also spent about $6,200 on Twitter ads at a $2.69 cost per subscriber, and those paid subscribers opened emails at nearly the same rate as organic ones, which is unusual.

As the list grew past 25,000, the channel mix shifted. Twitter reach declined, so McGarry leaned harder on Meta ads, spending more than $23,000 to add roughly 6,000 high-quality subscribers. The money to fund that growth came from the business itself: two cohort courses generated over $250,000 in sales, and across three products he had served 406 customers, four out of five of whom were also newsletter subscribers. By August 2024 he described Newsletter Operator and his related work as a 7-figure business.

What makes the story useful for other founders is how deliberately each stage was funded by the last. McGarry did not wait for a huge audience before selling. He validated demand with a small engaged list, sold high-ticket training, and recycled the profit into faster, more predictable paid growth. His stated next target was 100,000 subscribers, focused mainly on Meta ads and YouTube.