How fast should a new local newsletter get to 10,000 subscribers?

For a new local launch, the goal is to get to 10,000 as quickly as possible, ideally within the first three to six months. The next goal is 20,000, but going from 10 to 20 is much harder than going from zero to 10.

Why is 10,000 the number?

It's the point where you're legitimate. At 10,000 you're getting more impressions from local people than almost anybody in town.

There's nothing magic about it, though. 10,000 isn't worth more than 9,000 in any real sense. It's emotional: five digits instead of four. That still matters, because five figures is the number that wows a local business owner and makes them say, okay, this is legit.

What does it cost to get there?

Rough numbers I give people planning a launch. Treat them as estimates, since Meta costs move.

Item	Rough cost
Meta ads to 10,000 subscribers	About $5,000, at an assumed 50 cents each
Email platform (Beehiiv)	About $150 a month
Paid Gmail	About $10 per user

It might cost more per subscriber. Some of mine have gotten expensive, but only in small, very wealthy areas with fewer potential readers. Compare all of it to the roughly $250,000 people put into one strip-mall restaurant. It's not much money for something that could have a big impact.

What do the first weeks look like?

Here's my own first local newsletter at about seven weeks old: 1,400 subscribers, a 62% open rate and a 19% click rate. I was paying about $25 a day on Facebook ads and getting subscribers for about 50 cents each. We'd already had 25 requests from businesses that wanted to advertise. My guess at the time was $3,000 to $5,000 a month in ads within about a year. The second newsletter I launched the day before had 94 subscribers.

How do you pay for the second 5,000?

With advertisers. If you can get them for 30 cents a subscriber, about $1,500 gets you to 5,000. At 5,000, plus effort and social media, you should be able to get local businesses to pay you. Don't keep that money and call it profit. Put it into more Meta ads.

"So take the money the advertisers are giving to you, put it into meta ads. Now the brand gets bigger. Now you can charge more for ads. Take that money, put it into growth. Now you're bigger. It's like a flywheel, right?"

Done that way, getting from 5,000 to 10,000 should cost you nothing out of pocket, because the advertisers are paying for it.

Should you keep spending past 10,000?

Not blindly. No advertiser says, I'd pay you at 12,000, but at 10,000 I'm not interested. Once you're over about 10,000, spending to grow from 10 to 11 to 15 thousand won't, by itself, bring in more ad dollars. Until the revenue is there, that's a real question to ask. See how to split budget between a mature newsletter and a new one.

What changes if growth pays for itself?

Everything. Cost is what stopped me from launching a lot of these on my own. 50 cents a subscriber sounds small until it's 50 subscribers a day in 20 locations, which is about $500 a day. If signup offers earned back roughly the 50 cents each subscriber costs, I could launch 25 at the same time. That break-even assumption may be aggressive. It's the idea behind negative CAC.