025: Louis Nicholls - Explode Your List Growth: Use a Referral Program

Louis Nicholls is the co-founder of SparkLoop, an email newsletter referral program where you can have each of your subscribers refer their friends to unlock cool rewards.

SparkLoop is amazing. They’re growing really quickly in the audience-building space and ConvertKit actually gives away free SparkLoop accounts to all of our creative pro customers.

In today’s show, Louis talks about how to increase your email list growth rate by more than 30% with a referral program. He also gives his (hot!) take on paid newsletters, discusses how best to monetize your audience, and so much more.

Links & Resources

• James Clear
• Tim Ferriss
• Brennan Dunn
• Anne-Laure’s Ness Labs
• Art of Newsletters 018: Anne-Laure Le Cunff – Building a Loyal Audience & Growing Your Newsletter

Louis Nicholls’ Links

• SparkLoop’s Referral University
• Personal site: LouisNicholls.com
• Twitter: @louisnicholls_

Episode Transcript

Louis: [00:00:00]
I think you should be creating content probably in other places. Most often people who get to a hundred subscribers and carry on, they get there relatively quickly because they’ve been being useful in other places. For example, on Twitter, in forums, you should focus less on getting more subscribers through the door and more on being useful and creating content. 

Nathan: [00:00:25]
In today’s episode, I talked to Louis Nicholls from SparkLoop and SparkLoop is an email newsletter referral program where you can have each of your subscribers refer their friends to unlock cool rewards. So, for example, if you refer three friends to a newsletter, you could get access to the special content, 10 friends, you get a t-shirt 50 friends, you get something extra incredible.

SparkLoop is amazing. They’re growing really quickly in the audience, in the audience building space and, ConvertKit’s actually an investor in SparkLoop and we give away SparkLoop accounts for free to all of our creative pro customers. So the article is so good. Talk about how to grow your email list by more than, or increase your email list growth rate by more than 30% with a referral program, as well as Louis’ take on paid newsletters, how best to monetize your audience and so much more.

So let’s dive in.

Louis, welcome to the show.

Louis: [00:01:17]
Nathan. Thanks for having me, excited to be here.

Nathan: [00:01:19]
All right, so let’s talk SparkLoop right at first. you’ve been in the newsletter industry for awhile. You’ve been watching this whole space, building lists of your own. What was the impetus for wanting to start SparkLoop?

Louis: [00:01:32]
Yeah, I’m kind of half from me, but also half from my co-founder Manuel. So Manuel had been running a, like a generic referral tool called referral hero for a couple of years. It was, or it still is pretty successful at a lot of clients, you know, larger fortune five hundreds as well as smaller ones. And that was in like the generic referral space.

So mainly e-commerce SaaS and so on. And I was at that point where I just sold my last company was kind of looking around for things to do and keeping myself kind of engaged. So I was running a small newsletter, doing a small course teaching founders, how to do sales and doing kind of like that classic.

I call it marketing consulting, but really just kind of helping other founders who reached out with some kind of like consulting gigs. And one of them ended up being a paid newsletter in like the flight steals space. And they, I think they probably, at that point seeing what morning brew was doing with their referral program and they were really eager to add one in.

So they asked if I knew of anyone who could help do that. And I said, well, I’ve done referral programs before. And the software I’ve used is from my friend, Manuel, who runs her federal hero. So I thought, well, if anyone knows what tool to do or what, what tool to use, it’s going to be Manuel. So I’ll ask him, reach out to Manuel.

And he says, well, you can kind of make referral hero, do this with a lot of work. there isn’t really a better option out there. But it’s funny you say this cause you’re like the fourth person this week has asked me if we can get referral here at working with newsletters. So maybe we should look a bit into this together.

And, that’s kind of, I think where it starts, if we didn’t originally planned the Spock week to be a new tool necessarily, we thought it could be kind of inside of referral Europe. But as we. Kind of understood more about exactly how it was supposed to work and kind of the integrations that newsletters need to be successful. We’ve realized it really needs its own dashboard and its own integrations. And at that point it may as well be a separate product.

Nathan: [00:03:46]
Yeah. And so we’re recording this in January, 2021. when was that? That, you two started working on.

Louis: [00:03:55]
I think the first time we probably started talking about it was in summer 2019. Yeah. So about a year and a half ago. 

Nathan: [00:04:03]
Yeah. And so now, I mean, SparkLoop powering referral programs for a whole bunch of people. I know James Clear, a lot of ConvertKit customers, who are some other examples that you could share?

Louis: [00:04:15]
Yeah. James Clear, Tim Ferriss would be two big ones from kind of that personality author space, I guess. then we have a lot of info-product creators using us people like Vernon Dunn. and Anne-Laure from Ness Labs, who I know you had on the, on the podcast recently. And then we’re seeing a lot of interest from kind of the, the media companies as well.

So, Punchbowl news, we just recently launched a using us front office sports, people like that.

Nathan: [00:04:46]
Nice. Okay. So when someone’s thinking about a referral program, What are some of those misconceptions, right. Someone comes in and they’re, they’re like, I’m going to copy. What morning brew does exactly. Like, and then it’s going to explode. We’re going to have viral growth. Like it’s going to solve all of my, user acquisition problems.

What are some of the things that people come in with and where do you either say, no, this is actually the best practice or like sort of reset their expectations.

Louis: [00:05:16]
Yeah. I mean, how long do you have we could, we could go at this all day, I think. so I’ll start with some common ones. The, I think the most common one we see straight off the bat is that some people that newsletters are just too small for it to be worth one. so if you have, if you’re a hundred or 200 subscribers, yes, you can grow.

I don’t know, 20%, 50% faster with a referral program, but 20 or 50% of five new subscribers a week, just isn’t worth the time you’d put into it. Right. And you could be cross posting or doing something way more useful at the tim...