Newsletters as Network Businesses
Nathan Barry, CEO and founder of ConvertKit, on ConvertKit’s path to $100M in revenue
The key shift was turning newsletter growth from a platform marketing problem into a network design problem. Instead of asking how many readers the company itself could send, Substack and then SparkLoop treated every creator as a possible acquisition channel for every other creator. That works better because supply scales with the network. Each new writer can bring their own audience, recommend adjacent newsletters, and make the whole graph more valuable over time.
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Substack made this concrete with recommendations and a reader product that moved discovery inside the network, helping writers grow through other writers instead of paid acquisition or homepage featuring alone. That was strategically important because Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue, so stronger in network growth directly supports its monetization.
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ConvertKit adopted the same core mechanic through Creator Network and then added paid recommendations through the SparkLoop acquisition. In practice, that means one newsletter can recommend another at signup, either for free or for a bounty, so growth and monetization happen in the same workflow.
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This also explains why newsletter platforms started to look different from algorithmic social platforms. YouTube or TikTok growth depends heavily on a central feed deciding who gets shown. Creator to creator recommendations are more decentralized. The edges between publishers become the distribution system.
The next stage is a tighter bundle of recommendations, ads, and creator operating tools. The winners will be the companies that make audience sharing feel native and measurable, then layer monetization on top. That is why newsletter software is evolving into a network business, not just an email sending tool.