Pete Ericson sits down with Dylan Redekop, founder of Growth Currency Media and co-host of the Growth in Reverse podcast. Dylan spent nearly a decade in the newsletter world, including time at SparkLoop where he worked alongside major newsletter operations like Morning Brew and The Hustle. His newsletter, Growth Currency, sits at around 40,000 subscribers. This episode covers what traditional publishers can take from the newsletter creator world, from list-building partnerships to engagement metrics to email sequences that move readers toward paid.

The Cross-Promotion Tactic Traditional Publishers Rarely Use

Newsletter cross-promotions work like this: after someone subscribes to one newsletter, a widget surfaces recommending related newsletters from other publishers. The subscriber can opt in to some or all of them with a single click. Platforms like SparkLoop built a whole business around this model, connecting major newsletters and letting publishers pay per verified subscriber delivered.

For traditional publishers, the question is whether this translates. Dylan’s answer is yes, with the right partners.

The key is adjacent audiences rather than direct competitors. A fishing magazine cross-promoting with another fishing magazine sends readers somewhere else for the same content. A fishing magazine cross-promoting with a hunting publication or camping newsletter reaches people with overlapping interests who are unlikely to be reading both already.

For local news publishers, the calculus is different. Recommending another local news outlet helps a competitor. Instead, Dylan suggests partnering with local businesses that are trying to grow their own email lists: a bakery, a gym, a sports team, a performing arts venue. The local publisher drives subscribers to those lists; the businesses drive exposure back to the publisher. Pete adds an obvious example: a local news publisher partnering with a community events producer, where each audience has natural interest in what the other covers.

Size mismatches are the main friction point in these arrangements. A list of 50,000 and a list of 2,000 are not an equal trade. Paid arrangements solve this. The smaller publisher pays for placement rather than trying to offer equal value in return.

Replies Are the Metric That Actually Matters

Most publishers Pete works with focus heavily on open rates. Dylan argues that open rates are increasingly unreliable as a signal of genuine engagement. Apple Mail privacy protections, along with email clients that auto-scan messages for safety, are inflating open counts in ways that have nothing to do with whether a real person read the email.

Replies, by contrast, are very hard to fake. A reader who hits reply and writes something back is engaged. Even a critical reply counts. Dylan’s view: if someone writes in to disagree with your take, you sparked a reaction. That’s more than most emails accomplish.

The biggest barrier to getting replies is that most readers simply don’t think to respond to a publisher’s email. Fixing that requires one thing: asking. A single call to action at the end of an edition is often enough. Dylan cautions against asking for a reply in every send, since that wears out readers quickly. But asking regularly, especially when a story is likely to provoke a reaction, works well.

One triathlon newsletter publisher Dylan knows runs a short poll in most editions on a polarizing topic and then publishes a curated selection of reader responses in the following issue. This creates a loop: readers see their responses get airtime, so they reply more in the next send.

Pete connects this directly to the traditional publishing model. Letters to the editor served a similar function for decades. Email makes it lower-friction than ever: there’s no form to fill out, no login required. A reader can write two sentences and hit send. Collecting those responses and using them as editorial input is a natural fit for publishers already producing regular newsletters.

Lead Magnets: They Work for Niche Publishers. Local News Is Harder.

Pete shares a data point from The Moss Report, a niche publisher focused on cancer information. When the publisher bundled 20 existing articles into a free content package, offered at the registration wall in exchange for an email and password, registrations increased 20 to 30 percent over their standard free registration setup. The content wasn’t new. The packaging was.

Dylan’s take on this: niche content publishers sit in a strong position for this kind of lead magnet because the topic is specific enough that a curated resource carries real perceived value. Someone researching cancer treatment options has a concrete reason to want a package like that.

Local news is a harder fit. Readers subscribe to a local news publisher because they want to stay informed about their city. The content itself is already the draw. Dylan doesn’t think a content-based lead magnet adds much for daily news publishers, but suggests alternatives: a guide to upcoming local events, a digital coupon collection from local businesses, or a community resource list. These aren’t content assets; they’re tangible benefits that could tip a fence-sitter toward subscribing. Local businesses, Dylan points out, would generally be willing to offer a discount code or promotion to be included in something like this.

Welcome Sequences: Not All New Subscribers Are the Same

Dylan treats subscribers differently based on how they found the newsletter. Someone who discovered Growth Currency through a social post, visited the landing page, and chose to sign up arrived with genuine intent. Someone who clicked into a co-registration widget after subscribing to a completely different newsletter may not have had any idea what they were signing up for.

His approach to the second group: assume they didn’t intend to subscribe. The first email they receive acknowledges this directly, explains how they likely ended up on the list, and includes a prominent unsubscribe option. There is no pressure to stay. The email just gives context and makes it easy to leave.

The outcome: spam complaints are nearly zero, and open rates remain steady even as the list grows. Dylan has added over 2,300 subscribers through free cross-promotion partnerships using Kit, and the list’s engagement metrics haven’t dropped. The readers who stayed are actually there.

Pete draws the parallel for traditional publishers: free registered readers are a closer equivalent to the intent-based subscriber, while casual opt-ins from co-promotions behave more like passive followers. Treating them the same in email campaigns ignores real behavioral differences.

Drip Sequences: Clear, Compelling, Credible

Pete notes that most publishers he’s worked with send a single welcome email after registration. A properly structured drip sequence, dripping out emails over days or weeks with a clear path toward a paid offer, is something most publishers haven’t built.

Dylan frames an effective free-to-paid drip sequence around three requirements:

• Clear: The paid offer needs to be easy to understand. What does a subscriber get for their money? Be specific.
• Compelling: Use testimonials and social proof. Reader quotes, comments, public praise. If you don’t have any yet, go get some. Ask a handful of loyal readers to share what they value about the publication, then build those responses into the sequence.
• Credible: Show the work behind the product. Hours of research, number of editions published, depth of coverage over time. The goal is to help a reader understand what they’re getting in exchange for a subscription fee, and why it would cost them far more in time and effort to get that information another way.

Dylan’s point on social proof is worth noting for traditional publishers: a paid tier rollout lands differently with a wall of reader testimonials behind it than with no proof at all. If your publication has been running for years, there are readers who have strong opinions about it. Find them before you start the sequence.

AI in the Newsletter: Useful Tool, Not the Author

Dylan is direct on this: AI is useful for ideation, editing, and summarizing. It should not be writing the newsletter.

The core limitation is that AI can’t draw on lived experience. It can approximate voice if trained on enough of someone’s writing, but it cannot produce the kind of specific, personal observation that makes a newsletter feel like it comes from a person with a perspective. Publishers who hand off content creation to AI entirely are, in Dylan’s view, doing readers a disservice, and probably themselves one too.

Pete frames it well: AI gives you eight arms. You’re still doing the work; you’re just doing more of it faster. That framing holds up. Using AI to generate a first draft is not the same as having a person review that draft critically and rewrite it. The review step is where the value actually lives.

The Biggest Mistake: One Revenue Stream

Pete closes with a question about what Dylan got wrong. The answer is straightforward: Dylan built his newsletter revenue entirely on sponsorships. His first ad paid $20 to a list of 500 readers. That grew, and for a stretch around 2021 to 2022, the newsletter advertising market was throwing money at smaller lists. Then it stopped. Sponsors pulled back, shifted to affiliate-style arrangements, and stopped paying flat fees for small-list placements.

The lesson took time to land, but it landed: a publisher running on a single revenue source is exposed the moment that source changes. Paid subscriptions, services, and products are not add-ons. They’re structural. Building them alongside advertising, rather than after advertising fails, is the thing to do.

Key Takeaways

• Cross-promotions work best with adjacent audiences. For local publishers, local businesses make better partners than other local news outlets.
• Ask for replies directly in your newsletter. Readers don’t think to respond unless prompted. Even negative replies signal genuine engagement.
• Packaging existing content into a lead magnet can lift registration rates meaningfully for niche publishers, even when the articles already exist on the site.
• Subscribers from co-promotion widgets need a different welcome sequence than organic subscribers. Give them context, an easy out, and a clear reason to stay.
• A drip sequence built on clear offers, real testimonials, and demonstrated credibility will outperform a single welcome email every time.

“A reply just is, to me, the strongest indication of an engaged reader, even if it’s a reply saying, hey, I did not like this edition or this was not a good take.”

Dylan Redekop

Try This Week

Add a single reply prompt to your next newsletter send. Pick a story your readers are likely to have an opinion on, and close with one direct question: “Hit reply and tell us what you think.” Track how many responses come in and use the best ones as editorial material for the following edition.

Watch the Episode

Listen to the Paywall Podcast

Resources Mentioned

• Growth Currency  growthcurrency.net
• Growth in Reverse Podcast  growthinreverse.com
• SparkLoop  sparkloop.app
• List Builder  leakypaywall.com/list-builder