The Evolution of the Newsletter

Nat Eliason is the founder of Growth Machine, a successful SEO and content marketing agency. Nat also teaches the popular Roam course, Effortless Output.

Nat earned his B.A. in Philosophy from Carnegie Mellon University, and has worked for companies such as Zapier, and Sumo Group. Nat co-hosts the Made You Think podcast with Neil Soni.

Nat also writes a weekly newsletter called Monday Medley. Each Monday Medley has ten articles, videos, discussions, pieces of research, or other interesting finds from around the Internet, spanning a broad range of topics.

In this episode Nat discusses the evolution of his newsletter. He shares his strategies on developing online courses. He also explains how to find product-market fit before launching a course or product.

Highlights of the conversation include:

• How Nat made $300,000 from his online course
• What separates a mediocre newsletter from a great newsletter
• The differences between running a newsletter and teaching a course
• How Nat balances work, family, and leisure

Links & Resources

• Shane Parrish
• Farnham Street Sunday Brain Food newsletter
• Tim Ferriss
• Five Bullet Friday
• Azeem Azhar
• Exponential View
• airr
• Building a Second Brain
• Tiago Forte
• Wes Bos
• Derek Sivers

Nat Eliason’s Links

• Effortless Output with Roam
• Nat’s Twitter
• Nat’s website
• The Monday Medley
• Made You Think podcast

Episode Transcript

Nat: [00:00:00]
Build up little channels. There’s a lot to be said for having one thing that drives 10 grand a month. But if you’ve got 20 little things that drive $500 a month, that’s cool too. In some ways it’s a little more resilient because if one fails, you’ve only lost 5% of your revenue versus if the $10,000 a month thing fails, you’ve lost all of your revenue.

Nathan: [00:00:26]
In this episode, I talked to Nat Eliason. We talk about a bunch of different things ranging from his newsletter, the course that he’s running, you know, earning a crazy amount of money from the course, his thoughts on paid newsletters versus courses. Really just how he approaches life. It’s kind of a meandering episode as we go through those details.

I love the way that he’s not trying to grow and optimize everything. And then also the way that he’s taking internet money and bringing it into like tangible, real world life experiences, connection with friends, things like that. So it’s a great episode. I hope you enjoy it. And, actually before we dive in, I’d love for two things.

One, if you’re listening to the podcast and you just clicked through from random clips or things like that, and you haven’t subscribed, go ahead and subscribe in iTunes, Spotify, and, you know, wherever you listen to podcasts, really appreciate that. And then the other thing is, I realized I’ve never actually asked for reviews and it turns out reviews help, you know, with rankings and more people to discover the show.

So I would love it if you would go on iTunes in particular. Is iTunes a thing? Apple podcasts, I guess you go on Apple podcasts in particular and subscribe and then write a review or just a rating. That’ll help more people discover the show. So thanks for doing that. And let’s dive into the interview.

Alright, Nat, thanks for joining me.

Nat: [00:01:40]
Yeah. Thanks for having me, excited to be here.

Nathan: [00:01:41]
Why don’t you just kick things off by talking a little bit about the newsletter that you have, and I’m actually curious, you know, how long ago you started.

Nat: [00:01:51]
Yes. So my name is Nat. Hi, in the world of newsletters, I started my newsletter, which is called the Monday Medley or often just the Medley in may of 2015, no 2016.

Nathan: [00:02:08]
Either way it’s been awhile.

Nat: [00:02:10]
Yeah, it must be only 2016, cause I’m coming up on five years next week. I think it’s next Monday is the five-year anniversary.

So, I’ve been sending it out every single Monday for five years straight, which is kind of absurd. I actually, I have no idea how I haven’t messed one up in that time, but here we are.

Nathan: [00:02:34]
At 200, what was that, 260 weeks?

Nat: [00:02:37]
Yeah, it would be what, 260? Yeah, three times five. So it’s a lot of newsletters.

Nathan: [00:02:42]
That is. So what made you start the newsletter? Were there particular people you were following? And you’re like, “Oh, I want to be like them.” Or was it solving a business problem for you?

Nat: [00:02:52]
Yeah. So I was originally following sort of the standard advice of emailing every time an article came out. And that was working fine. And this was for my personal site NatEliason.com. and I was emailing for every article, but it’s like too many emails. Cause I was writing like a couple of posts a week back then, and I didn’t like having to like write a specific email for each article. And it felt like there wasn’t that much like extra value with being on the newsletter besides getting updates on posts, which people can do if they were just like on Feedly and subscribe to the RSS feed or whatever.

So, I saw Shane Parrish start his, brain food kind of newsletter for Farnam Street. And, Tim Ferris had launched his like Five Bullet Friday, around that time too. So the Medley started as very similar to those two where it was like, you know, here’s like something interesting. I read this week. Here’s like a video I enjoyed just kind of like a little, link dump.

And it was kind of that way for two or three years probably. And then it transitioned into kind of a different vibe where I got a lot of inspiration from Azeem Azhar and his Exponential View newsletter, which is like really, really good. And I just loved how, like, he wasn’t really just sharing stuff that he found interesting.

He was kind of like going in depth on each thing. And what I liked about his was I felt like a lot of the link dumpy newsletters were, they didn’t feel very like high effort or very high value. And it was just like, okay, like, here’s kind of like a dump of things, but you can kind of get that from Twitter or elsewhere, plus like everyone was doing it right.

It wasn’t that special anymore. So I was trying to think of how I can make it higher value. Azeem’s was such a great model because he was like going into detail on each thing. So I shifted in that direction first, where it was like, okay, here’s, you know, five, six, seven things from this week that are interesting.

They’re kind of lik...