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CREATOR INTERVIEW

Today, I’m excited to introduce Emanuel Cinca, the founder of Stacked Marketer, which reaches over 60,000 subscribers and generated $715,000 in revenue in 2023.

Stacked Marketer stands out as a beacon of success in the newsletter landscape, serving as a model for many creators like myself.

What began as a single bootstrapped newsletter 6 years ago has evolved into a full-fledged newsletter-led media business under Manu's guidance.

Last October, they raised a €250,000 investment at a €3,000,000 pre-money valuation, signaling a significant milestone for the team. And just last week, they unveiled their most ambitious upgrades to date.

In our interview, we dived into:

• Exclusive details about recent upgrades and future plans fueled by investment

• The secret sauce for a successful paid growth strategy

• Insights into evaluating and acquiring potential newsletters, along with managing the transition

• Diversifying newsletter revenue

• Importance of list cleaning

Emanuel Cinca is a generous source of knowledge, always willing to share insights on building a thriving newsletter business. I highly recommend following him on social media for invaluable tips and advice.

Now, it's time to pass the mic to him!

🏷 NEWSLETTER IDENTITY CARD

🛠 TOOL STACK

• ESP → Campaign Monitor

• Writing → Google Docs

• Project management → Basecamp

• Team communication → Basecamp

• Curation & Note-taking → RSS + Manual

• Website → WordPress

• Website Analytics → Google Analytics 4

• Growth → Sparkloop

• Sponsorship → Sponsy

• Social Media Tools → Notion, Hypefury, CapCut, Adobe product suite

• Design of visuals → Photoshop, Illustrator, Midjourney

• Automation → Zapier + Custom plugins

• Payment → Bank, Stripe and Wise

👋 MEET THE CREATOR

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

Thanks for having me here!

I’ve had a fair few “pivots”: studying programming in high school, dropping out of computer science at university, and also dropping out from the second attempt at university, this time business administration. So, double dropout, no degree.

I’m a former professional poker player, and author, from Romania who now lives in Vienna, Austria (back to the top of the list of most liveable cities for 2023!) with my wife and our adorable puppy.

My sole focus when it comes to business is Stacked Marketer.

Started initially as a single newsletter, we’ve now added the building blocks for a newsletter-first media and education business for marketers across the world.

🥁 START

You founded Stacked Marketer in 2018. In just five years, it has evolved into a business with a team of 15 people and generated over $700K in revenue in 2023.

How did it all start? Did you have a clear objective from the beginning, or did it become more clear as you went along?

Before starting Stacked Marketer, I used to be an affiliate marketer, which meant generating traffic to send to other people’s products and then getting paid for conversions.

In 2018, I wanted to create my own product, something that would allow me to control the whole customer journey.

We tested several ideas I had, and in this period of researching even more ideas, I found Morning Brew, which back then was very focused on finance news.

It got me thinking “This is really cool, is there something like this for affiliate marketing?”, and the answer was no.

Since then, we’ve evolved to be more than just for affiliates… And that was not quite intentional – all kinds of marketers were already reading our newsletters, not just affiliates.

And recently we also planned out our next steps for this bigger evolution.

In short, had no idea if the concept would even work, so I didn’t have a clear objective in the long term.

However, in the short term, the objective was to get more than 1,000 readers and get at least one sponsor to pay for a sponsored placement.

🚀 GROWTH

Which strategies did you use to grow over 100,000 subscribers across all newsletters?

0 - 1,000 subscribers 

Industry friends, communities, and groups, some swaps with other newsletters or paid smaller newsletters for a promo.

1,000 - 5,000 subscribers

More and more swaps, this was the main driver at this stage, along with a referral program.

5,000 - 25,000 subscribers

Buying ads in other newsletters, started adding paid social to the mix, and giveaways.

25,000 - 50,000 subscribers

Paid social, along with everything mentioned before, were the things that helped the most at this stage.

Towards the higher end of this range, the SparkLoop Partner Network also came into play.

I’d recommend it for most newsletters, but it’s imperative that you have proper list cleaning, bot filtering, and engagement screening processes.

50,000 subscribers - present

Everything from before, along with acquiring other newsletters.

It might still be tricky for newsletter creators to craft a well-working paid growth strategy. We can learn a lot from you since it is your biggest source of growth.

What is your paid ads strategy in Stacked Marketer?

Our two main paid channels are Meta Ads and SparkLoop Partner Network.

For SparkLoop, things are mostly on auto-pilot with relatively strict engagement screening criteria where we ask for at least a 50% open rate or 1 click in the first month people are subscribed.

We also have our own extra segmentation to exclude likely AMPP users who are disengaged.

For Meta, there’s more work, but the main focus is on finding the right audiences to engage with our newsletter.

We haven’t noticed a huge difference in engagement between lead ads and website conversions, but there’s a slight edge for website conversions.

And this also allows us to experiment more, so we prefer to run all our campaigns to for website conversions.

When do you think is the right time to start experimenting with paid ads?