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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?

You want to make sure your first 1,000 subscribers are from organic channels or personal recommendations.

Those first 1,000 subscribers will give you feedback to improve your newsletter.

You need those first 1,000 to be huge fans, people who will go out of their way to push your product to be better.

As a disclaimer, this applies to someone who isn’t an experienced newsletter operator with plenty of funds to spend on paid social.

I’m sure that if you have $1m ready to spend on building a newsletter, different decisions make more sense for you.

What is your definition of success for a paid ads strategy?

Engaged readers. So people who open, click, reply, and ultimately buy. Each newsletter has its own target CPA but it’s all related to those metrics.

What’s important for this is a good tracking and analytics setup so you can see at least most of those metrics based on source, campaign, or other tags you want to use.

What are the most critical factors to ensuring this success with paid ads?  

You need to have a good idea of what campaigns generate a good ROI, so you need to be able to look at those previously mentioned metrics based on different factors like audience, location, creative, and more.

Once tracking is solved, you can focus on your audiences, your hooks, and your creatives in general.

🤝 NEWSLETTER ACQUISITIONS

You have acquired two newsletters so far. 

What were the main criteria for evaluating a newsletter to acquire?

We usually think of acquiring a newsletter for one of two reasons:

• We think the audience is a great fit with an existing newsletter we have, so we want to merge their readership into one of our existing newsletters.

• We think the concept is great and fits our vision for what content marketers need. So we could buy it now to get a head start on readership or recreate the concept ourselves.

With those two reasons in mind, we then look at the readership metrics in more detail.

We also look at the subscribers' location and any information about their professional experience, along with soft factors like “How much do we like this newsletter?”

With all that in mind, we can usually put together an initial offer if we think there is a fit.

What was your strategy during the transition process?

The transition is flexible and depends both on the reason we bought the other newsletter and what the previous operator wants to do.

In one case, we had the previous owner stay on for a few months to continue writing the newsletter.

In the other case, we made an announcement in the newsletter we acquired, and over the next 5-10 sends, we transitioned everyone into our existing list step by step.

🚀 INVESTMENT

In October 2023, you raised a €250,000 investment at a €3,000,000 pre-money valuation.

What are the key differences btw running a newsletter with investment vs a bootstrapped newsletter? What changed in your life?

It hasn’t changed much, because we didn’t raise from a fund that needs us to sell within 2 years or anything like that.

So the main thing that changed is the speed of execution – we’re much faster for certain developments that are now finally visible.

Without the investment, this wouldn’t have been possible to do within six months.

You recently upgraded your website, which includes tech upgrades for users and a new visual identity. Why did you decide to prioritize these improvements with the investment?

Content on its own has limits. 

You can have outstanding content, but if the experience of consuming it is unpleasant, it’s not enough.

Aside from providing a subscriber with valuable information and education, consuming content has to be a pleasant experience for it to fulfill its full potential.

While it’s not perfect, to begin with, I’m sure our readers will give us plenty of valuable feedback that will help us improve from this strong foundation we’ve created.

We strongly believe that a great user experience helps content completely fulfill its purpose, in our case educating marketers – whether that’s about the latest news in the industry, insights, research, or courses.

What are your other plans for using the investment?

Part of the investment is used for content, part for some advertising, and there’s also some extra buffer left we can use if any interesting opportunities come up, such as acquiring other newsletters.

💸 MONETIZATION

While sponsorship is a crucial source of revenue for Stacked Marketer, you also create non-ad revenue resources due to companies' decreased marketing budgets. What is your strategy here?

We’ve had Stacked Marketer Pro for a while now. It’s a monthly or yearly membership with educational content like courses, research, reports, and more.

It’s a smaller part of our business but it got the most attention and the biggest upgrades of everything with what we launched.

Regardless of the ad market situation, this is a step we wanted to take, so our decision didn’t depend on the ad market.

We know educational content of different levels is something our readers need, so we know we want to continue creating more of it. 

That also means that our existing readers are our potential Stacked Marketer Pro subscribers. Our strategy is relatively straightforward:

• Create the kind of valuable content our readers from free newsletters said they want and would pay for.

• Promote this content in our free newsletter.

• Offer an ever-improving user experience where aside from content there are additional value ads like special deals, discounts, community, and even more in the future.

Those are the basics. We’ll see if we hit the right note with our current upgrades to leap forward with Stacked Marketer Pro, and we will then plan the next steps on the roadmap.

📌 IMPACT & LEARNINGS

How did building Stacked Marketer contribute to your life professionally and personally?

Professionally, it made me a better entrepreneur and marketer. There’s always a new challenge so it’s never boring.

We have a group of products that over 100,000 marketers subscribed to, an outstanding Crew that delivers a wonderful mix of news, insights, and more within our products…

So professionally, it’s been very fulfilling and exciting. While there are ups and downs, so not every day is smooth sailing, I can’t see myself working on something else any time soon. 

We still have so much more untapped potential, and I am very much focused on surfacing it together with our Crew.

On the personal side, I pay myself a fair salary so it’s been nice financially. While there are always small things you learn in a business and at work that can help you in your personal life, there hasn’t been anything else that stands out in that regard.

With that said, I don’t separate my professional and personal life that way.

I take breaks when I feel the need, and there are challenging days, but I don’t think I would choose to do something else. Even if I sold Stacked Marketer, I’m sure I’d want to continue building it.

If you had a chance to start over, what would you do differently while building Stacked Marketer?

I would avoid mistakes and would have spent even more effort and resources on things that paid off, haha.

But to make a more concrete list of mistakes I’d avoid or wins, I’d want to be even more focused on:

• I would not sponsor any conference if the goal is to get newsletter readers. 

  Maybe there’s some format of conference that makes sense but what we tried was by far the worst cost per reader you can imagine.

• I would fire faster.

  One thorough review and warning, and if things don’t improve that’s it. No reason to drag it along, one bad team member drags down everyone significantly.

• Hire not just for skills but also for culture. 

  Building on my previous point, work culture is way more important than I thought for a great team, it’s not just the hard skills for the role.

• Buy more ads in high-quality newsletters when you can get active subs for under $3. 

  That opportunity doesn’t exist anymore and we could have done much more of it back in 2020.

What would it be if you had the right to give one piece of advice to aspiring newsletter creators?

Clean your list! Properly.

Don’t fool yourself with Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens and bot clicks.

Make sure that with every send, you update your disengaged segments, try to re-engage them, and ultimately purge them from your sends.

The amount of misleading information out there about “active subscribers” and “list cleaning” is insane.

So many people say they “clean their list,” but when asked, you realize they’re doing this.

In the end, they are building on a faulty foundation and are lying to themselves.

If your newsletter business is something you want to do in the long term, don’t lie to yourself.

And if you’re looking to sell in a couple of years, any educated buyer knows what you’re doing and will lower the valuation.

👋 FINAL WORDS

If you’re a marketer, check out Stacked Marketer. We probably have some stuff you’ll like.

And if you’re someone who wants to chat with me and dive deeper into any newsletter-first business topics for your publication or podcast, just hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn.

🔗 Where to find Emanuel Cinca and his work

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

3 Popular Pieces of Content from Stacked Marketer

• Stacked Marketer’s 2023 Annual Report

• The State of Marketing Salaries in 2024

• The Email Deliverability Guide

👉 Do you want to reach over 2,100 newsletter creators & enthusiasts?

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and don’t be shy about hitting reply if you want to reach out to me.

See you on Wednesday.

Ciler