Newsletter Circle is the newsletter for newsletter creators.

👉 Every Sunday, you will read the unique journey of a different newsletter creator and learn more about how to start, grow and monetize your own newsletter.

👉 Every Wednesday, you will read articles and the list of curated resources to level up your newsletter business.

CREATOR INTERVIEW

Bill Kerr is an ambitious newsletter creator who is chasing Lenny Rachitsky.

As a CEO himself, he wants his newsletter Open Source CEO, to be the ultimate destination for founders, investors and leaders to be entertained and educated.

In line with this vision, he has already reached over 25,000 subscribers & $6,000 in monthly revenue in one year. His objective for 2024 is to hit 150,000 subscribers!

As a creator who adopted a build-in-public approach, Bill Kerr shared immensely valuable insights in our interview today, including:

• How Open Source CEO complements his work as a startup CEO

• Key learnings about paid growth and paid recommendation platforms in comparison

• Lead magnet strategy he uses

• Results from 3 newsletter acquisitions

• How he maximizes his sponsorship revenue

• The well-working system he builds with a content assistant for a smooth delegation and to focus what really matters

Let’s dive in!

🏷 NEWSLETTER IDENTITY CARD

🛠 TOOL STACK

• ESP → Beehiiv

• Writing → Notion

• Research → Chat GPT

• Planning & Task management → Notion

• Curation & Note-taking → Notion

• Design of visuals → Canva

• Digital products → Notion & GumRoad

• Growth → Sparkloop & Beehiiv Boosts

• Social Media → Taplio

• Affiliates → PartnerStack

• Sponsorship → Passionfroot

• Team → Athyna

• Payment → Stripe

• Incorporation → Stripe Atlas

👋 MEET THE CREATOR

Welcome Bill. Let’s start with getting to know you.

I have a funny career, as it’s been very non-typical so far.

I have never worked inside of a startup, nor worked in corporate. I was a tradie for a decade and bought and sold real estate from a really young age. I purchased my first house at 19, second and 21 and third by 22. I was the most successful 22 year old you could ever imagine.

After coming back home at 26 or so, I spent a brief stint in the fitness industry and then at 28 I founded my first startup, AdventureFit. AdventureFit was a beautiful idea but a horrible business. The tagline was ‘improving the world through travel, exercise, mindfulness and conversation’. What we actually did was, we took people all around the world on adventure holidays for the wellness community. Picture this - Vietnam with cave exploring, rock-climbing, yoga, meditation, training etc..

We went to Mexico, South Africa, Iceland, you name it. The product was incredible, and the experience was second to none, but we never really made any money. I probably hung on two years longer than I should have, and after about four years, we would it up.

All of this led me to Athyna, which is the startup I founded and run full-time today. We build remote teams.

🥁 START

How and why did you decide to start Open Source CEO newsletter? Did you have a clear objective from the beginning, or has it evolved over time?

I started Open Source CEO after hearing about the success of The Hustle and The Milk Road on the My First Million podcast. I have always been a creative, and enjoyed writing in school but I’d never really done much of it in my professional life.

Having said that, even when we had really good copywriters on our team at Athyna, all the highest-value copywriting duties, like the copy on our site, would get given to me.

As a CEO, I think of my job description as setting the strategy, having enough finances to execute said strategy, hiring an All-Star team, communicating, and holding people accountable.

If you think about Open Source CEO it aligns incredibly well with my job description.

Strategy-wise, I am always learning from founders (interviews) and studying successful business cases (deep dives). Then, when it comes to raising money, building my brand, and especially now, having a budding ‘community’ opens doors with investors.

This leads to the next point: hiring the All-Star team. This has always been relatively easy at Athyna because we have 91% engagement (culture) scores and a great employer brand, but now, thanks to my newsletter, it is even easier again.

Communication-wise, it is an easy fit as well. I get to a) build an engaged, trusting audience and b) talk about Athyna. I plug Athyna in some relatively organic-ish way every edition. And I do build-in public posts. My personal pipeline has exploded since launching the newsletter.

The only thing my newsletter doesn’t really influence is the point about holding people accountable. So overall, it’s a great fit. But to answer your question, I’ve never really had a clear objective. I just want it to be fun and entertaining.

🚀 GROWTH

Which strategies did you use to grow over 25,000 subscribers?

Growth has been a funny one. I have done a little bit of everything.

I started by building a pre-launch hype list of around 500 people—not that many, but still decent. This was really my LinkedIn audience, as that’s the main place I have a following.

After that, I moved straight to paid.

I have run ads in beehiiv Boosts, SparkLoop, Refind Ads, Twitter, Meta etc etc.. I found the most success with SparkLoop and beehiiv Boosts. At one point, I could get a lead at Refind for 0.70c, but the opens were at 38% or so, so although they were cheap. You get what you pay for.

Today, I spend almost all of my marketing budget at SparkLoop, where I have a 70% open and 3% click on paid subs. Pretty bonkers really.

I have run many paid ads in the past, so I know I could probably beat these results on Twitter and Meta, but it would also be a lot heavier lifting.

One of the things that I need to focus on is making sure that the main thing stays the main thing—my startup, Athyna. 

Elaboration on newsletter acquisitions

Another thing I have done over the last 12 months is buy three other newsletters.

I did this as somewhat of a trial, as I think there are too many newsletters out there right now and a lot of them will come on the market in the short to medium term.

Obviously, I am comparing myself with the top end of the market but that’s where I expect Open Source CEO to sit when it’s all said and done.

So, I have purchased a small AI newsletter, a small startup newsletter and small Notion tools newsletter.

I will not do any more acquisitions now until I feel like there is a really great content overlap, but at least I know the strategy can work.

Elaboration on lead magnets strategy

Another thing that has worked well so far is lead magnets.

I call them lead magnets but that’s not really how I think of them. I am a founder and a CEO and I know business is really hard, so I wanted to try to make it a little bit easier for founders and leaders out there by sharing all the best tools & resources we have for others to plug into their operations.

It’s all built in Notion and we have a lot of great tools. Investor CRM, OKRs Template, Swipe File, Content Planner and more.

At Athyna, and in my day-to-day, we swear by Notion, and we would be considered power users, so the tools are actually very high quality. Much more so than most of the stuff you will download from your typical Gumroad store.

At the moment, we are betting on reciprocity here, but in the next months, we will start to roll out paid tools, email-based courses, and more. So, the fact that we have built trust with our audience will work great because if they do decide to use a paid tool, they’ll know it will be of value.

Regarding growth efforts, what would you do differently if you had a chance to start over?

I wouldn’t change too much, as in order to get where I am today, I needed to test and learn, and fail a little bit too. Having said that, I won’t be going back to low-quality Refind Ads too much again in the future, and when I have time, I will definitely try to move over to Twitter and Meta Ads.

I don’t love how with SparkLoop and Boosts you need to dilute the subscriber experience and also add more competition for eyeballs into your new subscribers ’s inbox.

You have an ambitious goal of reaching 150K subscribers this year. What is your strategy to achieve this?

I plan to start outbound with sponsorship in the next few weeks, with a plan to sell 2-3x the inventory. I have been super lucky so far that I have a 100% fill rate and all with sponsors of which I use their product.

I also am about to launch a paid version of the newsletter.

With more revenue, it will mean more growth.

I am lucky that I am able to put 100% of my revenue back into growth as I have my CEO salary. I don’t get paid that much but enough for the newsletter to just continue to fuel the newsletter.

I am in the mix to purchase a 20k newsletter right now with an all (or near all) vendor financing deal. Meaning, I will buy it for no money down. So that will help.

💸 MONETIZATION

Let’s talk about your sponsorship strategy. 

How do you find sponsors? Do you have a process & system in place?