🔴 4M newsletter subscribers in 18 months

Engaged, high-quality subscribers are the foundation of profitable newsletters.

Nathan May is the founder of The Feed Media, a newsletter growth agency specializing in Meta ads. His focus on subscriber quality over quantity has driven as many as 4 million newsletter subscribers across his client base in just 18 months, including helping scale The Neuron, a newsletter covering AI, from 150,000 to 500,000 subscribers, leading to its acquisition.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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Nathan May has driven close to 4 million newsletter subscribers in 18 months by convincing his clients to prioritize quality over cheap growth.

He’d been working with newsletters since 2023, and recognized a fundamental disconnect in how other agencies measured success. While most chase the lowest ad cost per subscriber, Nathan discovered that subscribers from higher-cost ads often had 4-5x higher engagement than those from cheaper campaigns. The difference is crucial for businesses reliant on advertising revenue.

That insight is the foundation of The Feed Media, the newsletter growth agency Nathan launched in early 2024. He has built a lean team — just 10 people — focused on delivering measurable, high-quality growth for select businesses.

Rather than competing for attention through traditional marketing, Nathan created an exclusive channel to reach newsletter operators. His invite-only* newsletter, Newsletter Growth Memo, operates as the top of his sales funnel, reaching decision-makers at companies like Morning Brew, Industry Dive, and beehiiv. (Full disclosure: Creator Spotlight is a client of Nathan’s.)

*(We asked Nathan to open up his newsletter to the Creator Spotlight community for the next few days. You can subscribe here.)

Nathan personally selects and invites each subscriber, creating a lead generation system that's generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in business (learn more on this under Steal this Tactic).

In conversation about his services, Nathan told us about his work with The Neuron, an AI-focused newsletter that first came to him in September 2023. It had a sizable list, 150,000 subscribers, but their sponsor program was struggling. The agency they’d previously worked with had prioritized low cost-per-acquisition (CPA), acquiring subscribers for as little as $1.80 each.

Those cheap subscribers weren't engaging enough, and sponsors, seeing lowered click-through rates, lowered or pulled their budgets. The newsletter was trapped in a cycle of diminishing returns — cheap subscribers leading to poor sponsor performance leading to declining revenue.

Instead of solely tracking the lowest cost per lead, his team built a measurement system that combines the cost per lead, open rate, and click-through rate for subscribers coming in through any given ad (or in any given segment).

Within two months, The Neuron's click-through rates had doubled. Sponsors stopped churning and started increasing their budgets. Over the course of 17 months, Nathan helped scale the newsletter from 150,000 to 500,000 subscribers, but more importantly, his work brought it out of a risky moment, helping turn it into a profitable acquisition target.

In early 2025, TechnologyAdvice approached The Neuron's founders with an offer. Nathan threw his hat in the ring, too, seeing an opportunity to own the asset he'd helped build. But when the bidding was over, TechnologyAdvice won.

A buyer like TechnologyAdvice could justify a costly acquisition because they were interested in the asset as a distribution channel for their existing business model; subscriber count didn't necessarily matter as much as it might for a business model built on traditional advertising. TechnologyAdvice could immediately use The Neuron as a lead generation machine, allowing them to justify a higher bid.

It’s a lesson that now informs how he helps position his clients for long-term success; Nathan encourages operators to strategically build and scale products focused on quality. He’s currently working on a new project: a podcast featuring founders who've built successful audience-based businesses or have leveraged their audiences to launch large-scale businesses. Episodes begin releasing in August.

A few things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:

Connect with Nathan on LinkedIn.
Learn more about The Feed Media.

Nathan's invite-only* newsletter, Newsletter Growth Memo, embodies his core philosophy: quality over quantity. He’s not interested in chasing thousands of subscribers, but in curating an exclusive list of newsletter operators who could benefit from his services. It’s model worth replicating for any high-ticket, services-based business.

*(As mentioned above, we’ve asked Nathan to open up his newsletter to the Creator Spotlight community for the next few days. You can subscribe here.)

Instead of building a traditional newsletter funnel, Nathan identified exactly who he wanted to reach: decision-makers at major newsletter companies. He then went to LinkedIn to find and personally invite them.

His approach: Find the top two people at every newsletter-focused company who might make purchasing decisions. Send them a LinkedIn message explaining the private newsletter and mentioning 2-3 people they know who already subscribe.

There's no signup form or public access for Nathan’s newsletter. He manually adds each email address after personally vetting the subscriber.

This approach serves multiple functions:

It’s a tactic that’s resulted in major players like Sean Griffey (Industry Dive founder), Robert Dippel (Morning Brew CEO), and the entire beehiiv leadership team becoming subscribers.

Nathan shares exactly what his agency does — real numbers, specific tactics, case studies — without hiding behind vague promises. His content includes:

His strategy: make “your free stuff better than everyone else’s paid stuff.” Even if most people who read his insights never hire him, the small percentage who do convert are already convinced of his expertise. One qualified prospect is worth more than 100 casual readers.