Creator Spotlight: Matt Navarra shares how he built the world's most useful newsletter for social media managers and professionals

About the creator

Matt Navarra is a self employed freelance social media consultant who started Geekout to help social media managers and professionals. He graduated in 2002 with a degree in business and marketing. After several jobs throughout his 20's that weren't particularly enjoyable he found his passion in the social media space. The purpose of Geekout is to provide a one stop shop so if it's all that you read, you'll have the resources needed to succeed. Matt spends a good chunk of his time consulting but also spends time doing media appearances for tv and radio and being an expert on social media for different publications. Some of the companies he consults for are Google, the US Food and Drug Administration and Meta.

About Geekout

What do you uniquely offer your readers? MN: Geekout provides a stand alone resource where managers and professionals can get the information they need to be up to date on new social media updates, tools, software etc., in order to start their week. A lot of readers in the space will read the newsletter on Monday mornings to help prepare for their work week. Describe your newsletter in one sentence

MN: The world's most useful newsletter for social media managers and professionals

What do you know so far about your readers? MN: It's tricky, we left Revue because the insights and analytics were very limited so it was pretty difficult to gauge the overall interest and engagement and really understand what resonated most with the readers. However, what I know now is that typically my readers find me or are referred to me by word of mouth and through my other channels. I've also seen the newsletter shared internally at different companies.

What sparked your interest in social media?

MN: Social media really started gaining some traction in 2009. I ended up being in different jobs where I would essentially end up managing the social media platforms for the company and getting us to create different accounts and profiles and that's typically where it all began.

What are your plans for monetization?MN: I had set up Geekout as a free newsletter. I wasn't sure if people would be interested in it. I sent out a tweet letting followers know that I was starting a newsletter and asking what type of content they'd want to see.

Within a day or two we had several people that worked for different brands asking if they can be sponsored which wasn't a part of our plan so we were definitely surprised by it. So since day 1 of the newsletter we had different brands that were paying us to sponsor them which has been great. We had to figure out for ourselves how much to charge and what would that overall process look like for us.

A lot of it was made up as we were on this journey and seeing what others in the space were doing and trying to learn from them as well. We were trying to gauge what people were willing to pay and what value we could bring them. With some trial and error, we were able to generate about 150k USD in the first year in revenue from ads and sponsorship and this year 200k. We're expecting about 250k this coming year which has been our 3 year growth journey. It's definitely been a blessing since I wasn't planning to monetize the newsletter and had to learn a lot in the process but it has been quite significant income generated from a free newsletter. What does your team look like?

MN: It's interesting because people always think I have a bigger business with a bunch of people doing things for me, but it's really just me and my editor Martin Brian. We figured out a process that works for us and have stuck to it.

What does your content strategy consist of:

MN: The newsletter is basically a curation of my tweets from the previous 7 days. I find the most valuable pieces and curate it for the newsletter while adding memes, humor and personality. We add the tweets to a Google doc, play with the order, choose the most valuable pieces of content and decide the ones we really want to elaborate and talk more in detail on in the top of the newsletter. Then between the two of us, we'll piece it together and send it out.

What are the biggest takeaways from your newsletter journey so far? MN: 1. Anyone can start a newsletter. It's easier than it ever was, but creating a newsletter that people keep coming back to over and over and talk about takes a lot more effort and thought. It isn't just about covering the right stories. It isn't just about making it look sexy with a good cover image and a big name being interviewed in your story. It's not just about incorporating a bit of personality.

It really is a sum of its parts. I think we've realized that if we spend time on the details of the newsletter as a whole we would have more success. People value curation and don't have a lot of time so they want what's worth reading. If you're good at curation and the right things to talk about and can relay it in a fun way, you'll be in a good position.

2. Always seek and collect feedback in small ways because the list will be changing so in order to keep users from churning you'll need to understand what's working and what isn't.

Why beehiiv?

Why did you leave Revue?

MN: The reason for the shift was essentially me becoming aware that Revue wasn't really focused on the actual newsletter and the development and growth of the users. The features were limited. The focus was on other things and we felt like it was a very basic platform in terms of analytics, formatting/customization, etc.

Overall our abilities were quite limited but in order to really grow and make it better for our audience we needed a platform that enabled us to do that. We felt that beehiiv was the best fit for what we were looking for which is a platform that keeps the creators in mind which is what beehiiv has done with all of their features. The speed of development for new features has been impressive. We also knew they were building an ad network which would help us get advertisers, and overall the analytics were more robust.

How is your overall growth and engagment?

MN: We currently have around 23k subs with over a 50% open rate. Our click rate on any link typically lands above 20-25%. The total number of clicks ranges from 8-12k clicks from both web and email. Our CTO ad through rates can range between 2-6%.

What are you particularly proud of when it comes to the newsletter? MN: This was always supposed to be a side hustle, It wasn't this big strategic business move to make money and it wasn't meant to be something that I'd spend the majority of my time on.

I've managed to reach this level of having the newsletter for the last 3 years without any paid acquisition or marketing to promote the newsletter. It's all been word of mouth, Twitter, FB and people just sharing it internally with their teams and being featured in some different marketing articles. I've also had opportunities to speak at webinars where I'd share the newsletter and would see some spikes in growth. Additionally, I think we're at a really good place now to start doing some paid acquisition now and hopefully take our growth to the next level.

What is your favorite beehiiv feature?

MN: I find it particularly useful to have ability to test and see the preview based on web, email, mobile, desktop etc. The segment optionality to create different variations of the newsletter engagement is also quite handy. The analytics, metrics and dashboard make the engagement really easy to understand. And I know when I get advertisers it'll be super simple to provide them the performance metrics rather than having to do it all on my own and have more work.

What is your favorite beehiiv newsletter?

MN: The Split, I currently have them listed as a recommendation because I like the content and the aesthetic overall. The author, Turner Novak is a really smart guy who provides content about business and tech news. I always walk away from it feeling a little bit smarter than I was before I started reading it.

Advice to other creators

MN: The things you can do to typically make your newsletter unique and stand out is either doing it better than everyone else in terms of the content being of better quality or doing it differently. Differently for me typically means in the way you speak, the tone of language, the personality, the character and the overall vibe that the newsletter has.

That will always come through in the writing if you focus on it and make it a key aspect of your production process. Give it an identifiable personality because this is a personal email in many ways.

Your newsletter is going to a sacred place. To get to someone's email inbox you have to treat it with the respect it deserves or people typically will just mark as spam or not open. If you can do that part well, then you're in a great place because typically email newsletter platforms aren't algorithmically sorted so your content as it hits the inbox is going to be read only if the user wants to read it. You don't typically have to compete with other things. If you build a strong relationship with your audience then you can be very successful and stand out to your readers.

Want More?

Be sure to follow Matt on Twitter here and subscribe to his newsletter here!