Growing an Audience to 25k in 3 Months

Alex Banks is a man on a mission to satisfy his curiosity, and he's bringing thousands of people along for the ride.

Around the beginning of 2022, Banks wanted to delve into his own interest in startups, financing, and venture capital, so he started experimenting with sharing his thoughts on Twitter. "I started creating content to distill concepts to the essential and help people go from A→B without the frills.”

The first weeks were frustratingly slow as Banks explored his broad base of interests and found the right voice and focus. But, as soon as he found his audience, he scaled it to 25,000 in under 4 months.

Here are the key takeaways from our interview:

• Embrace your quirks and write in a style that’s as “you” as possible to find/connect with a like minded audience.

• Find unique topics by documenting and expressing your curiosity (and avoid the sea of sameness).

• Connect your existing marketing/branding to your newsletter as soon as possible (so you don’t miss out on subscribers).

• beehiiv recommendations are effective if you can connect with fitting publishers (don’t be afraid to reach out).

• Focus on the right fit and be careful when selecting partners/sponsors. It’s easy to lose audience trust with the wrong promotional message.

• Don’t be afraid to seek out a “personal board of advisors” to guide and ground you in work and life.

Interested? Subscribe to Through the Noise to learn more.

Through the Noise

As the audience grew, Banks wanted a medium where he could explore concepts more deeply. That's when he launched his newsletter, Through the Noise.

It was a good move. In fact, Banks told us he would advise new creators to offer email signup as soon as possible. "Even if you're not writing, just being able to capture that audience in case Twitter falls off the next day...you have that direct line to them, you can chat to them, you can speak to them. And that is super, super important for building a trusted community."

"I don't think I opened up an email signup form on Twitter soon enough. I was all the way to about 30 or 40,000 followers without being able to capture that event. So I was a little late to act."

The newsletter allows him to connect more deeply with his unique audience — "You know, people who subscribe to my newsletter, we often share common interests and a sort of quirkiness and slightly nuanced views as to how we see the world. So it's really nice to share that with other creators so we can ultimately get behind each other's backs and support one another."

A High-Band Signal

How does Banks capture a modern audience's attention with the written word? He credits his success to the thought behind the words. Instead of just creating content for its own sake, his strategy begins with his own curiosity and original analysis of concepts and ideas.

"So my newsletter, Through the Noise — it really does what it says on the tin. There is a sea of chatter on the internet. What I'm doing with the newsletter is to give you that clear-cut view through the vibrations, so to speak, so that you can understand what's going on. I'm not here writing thousands and thousands of words about a given topic. I'm taking the time to distill concepts all the way down to their core so that I can give my audience this sort of high-band signal."

But there’s more to Banks’ success than refining the details. It’s about shrewd analysis and

"So in terms of how I go about structuring my content strategy, it really relates back to [doing] the work on my end to disseminate these points and find key insights I can give to my audience. Versus finding an article and just sort of rewording. What I'm here to do is to give you a thought-provoking piece."

Banks credits his traditional finance background, which includes a master's degree in finance from Imperial College London, for the ability to drill down to the detail. In that world, he says, there's a lot of rigor in the process of writing. Banks says that having clear, defined deadlines and objectives is massively important to him as he moves from that structured background to a creative setting where everything is much more open-ended.

But Banks discovered another huge mindset change when he shifted to a creative setting: Community.

A Vibrant Creator Community

"Coming from my background in traditional finance, where it's very hush-hush, and not much is discussed outside of close-knit circles. Now I’m immersing myself in this wonderful, vibrant community that is beehiiv and Twitter — my friends who I've met online, real, genuine people that I couldn't see living my life without now. It's super, super cool because everyone can learn from everyone. And we're all in this game together."

When it comes to community, Banks speaks of "finding your personal board of advisors, so to speak, of individuals who are trusted to give candid feedback to one another. It isn't just a friendly pat on the back…You know that the feedback you get from them is going to be more honest and you can ultimately trust it. That's been hugely important for me."

"A big thing for me is having mentors,” he adds. “So I know through weekly or monthly conversations, I can garner an awful lot of knowledge and insight from those individuals.”

Mentorship offers more than just a trusted sounding board, however. Success comes quicker when you stand on a mentor’s shoulders, rather than trying to figure everything out on your own.

“Mentors are massively important, I think, in that they can teach you how to get in halfway up the ladder and shorten that learning curve for you. So your speed and ability to execute in a timely fashion is far greater than someone who's tripping over himself, making lots of mistakes, and spending a lot more time getting to where you already are."

Steady growth

The community is not the only aspect of beehiiv supporting Banks' growth as a content creator.

He cites beehiiv’s recommendations feature as one of the primary growth drivers for Through the Noise. "From the capacity of a newsletter, I think having these flywheels embedded into the product is really important. So rather than it being an individual sport, it can be a team sport, and everyone moves together.

Growth at Through the Noise has been steady, averaging around 600 to 700 new subscribers each week. People find Banks's writing on Twitter and LinkedIn and then get funneled into the newsletter.

Currently, the newsletter has a readership of just over 13,500 subscribers and an open rate that fluctuates from the low 40s to just shy of 50%.

You can subscribe here:

"One of the great ways that beehiiv lets you build [a healthy open rate] is A/B testing. Doing that and saying, 'Oh, my goodness, the headline that I wasn't actually going to use is now performing better than the one that I thought I was going to be all in on.' And I get an extra five or six percent open rate on my email. It's almost done the work for me by being data-driven."

Monetization Through Sponsorship

In recent weeks, Banks has begun opening Through the Noise to sponsorships as a way to monetize the newsletter, but he's very deliberate about protecting his brand and his audience as he proceeds.

He's asking himself, "How can I find a way to uplift startups — brands that I can ultimately get behind — and let my audience see them too? ...I would only undertake sponsorship with companies that I would personally get behind. I've been quite selective in that process because I want to keep it high signal.”

Alex also looks for new ways to grow. “Another level that I'm interested in building on is a sponsored deep dive,” he explains. “Say, for instance, founders are in the process of raising a seed round, and they want to get new eyes on their products and tap into an audience of individuals who work in tech, who are active investors at tier-one VC funds, or who are also operators and entrepreneurs. I'm very grateful that I have a few of those in the mix with Through the Noise. I can now present these insights in front of them through a deep dive.”

Ultimately, sponsorship not only opens financial doors; it reveals avenues to explore new domains.

“It allows me to chase my curiosity in those business plans, whether it be climate or whether it be AI — sectors that fascinate me. So it's very much a mutually beneficial arrangement where I can chase my curiosity, but also, the founder of the operation can showcase that business to a few thousand more people.”

On Goal-Setting

Banks has recently shifted his approach to goal setting. "Back at the beginning of [last] year, I was a real goal-setter. My original goal for 2022, back in January, was to build 25,000 friends on Twitter. I'm grateful to have surpassed that."

"But," he says, "in terms of the newsletter, what I quickly realized was that goals don't matter. Systems do. Focus on the input and allow the output to follow. There's a great quote by an American football coach... he says that if you focus on the score, you'll lose focus on the game, but if you focus on the game, the score will take care of itself. It's so true. When you focus on the systems — on the controllables — and let the output follow, that's when you are much more likely to deliver a positive result."

So, for example, rather than setting a goal for a number of subscribers or an open rate, Banks would focus on producing one or two high-quality pieces of content every week and let the results follow organically from that.

A Long Game

Banks is committed to the long game with Through the Noise. Although he's open to the idea of a YouTube channel or some other platform in the future, he feels the newsletter and Twitter approach he's using now is well-suited to his audience and subject matter.

His next venture is a startup called TribeScaler, an AI assistant to help people write better hooks and headlines in seconds — creating tweets, threads, and other content that can help capture your audience instantly and get their attention. As Banks says, "When you have that one-two combo of a great hook and great content, that's when you really satisfy your audience and become a thought leader."

Banks's overarching approach to business is a careful, long-term strategy—for example, in selecting sponsors who make sense for his audience instead of grabbing anyone willing to put up the funds. "If you want to build an enduring, differentiated business," Banks says, "You've got to really focus on how you can make your process and the product of your business as sustainable and as valuable as possible."

Check out Through the Noise on beehiiv, including some great recent content like Top 3 Startup Lessons From Y Combinator and Focus: A founder's number 1 weapon.