🔴 A 10k-word newsletter with 21k subscribers

It would be an understatement to call today’s guest, Justin Gordon, prolific. For example, we publish one ~50-minute podcast episode per week; he once published one ~50-minute podcast episode per day for 112 days straight.

Justin, for the last 12 years, has been a blogger, vlogger, podcaster, newsletterist, and entrepreneur — often all at once. In this issue:

• ☮️ How Craigslist kickstarted his creator-entrepreneur journey

• 🏃 Doing a ‘podcast ultramarathon’ (would he recommend it?)

• 💯 Why writing extremely long newsletters is good, actually

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to Justin and I in conversation on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

You never know what you’ll find on craigslist

He didn’t really think he’d get murdered, but he wasn’t not thinking about it. It was the summer of 2012, and Justin Gordon was a football player and rising senior at UW-La Crosse. He’d decided to start working as a personal trainer, so he posted a craigslist listing, and within a few days, some stranger reached out — his first client.

The craigslist play worked, Justin didn’t get murdered, and he set up a search engine-optimized blog to land in-home personal training clients around Milwaukee more efficiently. From 2012 to 2018, he wrote over 200 blog posts and topped out at 5,000 monthly site visitors, building his practice as an in-home and online fitness coach while working with clients through various gyms.

A ‘podcast ultramarathon’

It’s not that you have to run a 5k every day to be a successful creator, but the repetition and consistency required to do both well are the same. Check Justin’s Twitter feed, and among posts about entrepreneurship, investing, and his various ventures, you’ll find regular Strava screenshots like this one for a casual 15-mile Sunday run at a 7:36 pace.

In 2018, Justin started his MBA at USC and a new blog, Just Go Grind; the second era of his creator career. He wrote about and interviewed investors, founders, and entrepreneurs for an intended audience of the same. Six months in, the format frustrated him.

Justin switched to podcasting: “I wanted to have relationships as the starting point.” An interview done over email is, relative to a recorded-live podcast interview, a missed connection. You can’t interrupt with a follow-up question, you can’t laugh, you can only build so much rapport. Podcasting was a great networking move; if someone agreed to come on the show, he’d get to spend a focused hour speaking with them, building, over time, a healthy Rolodex.

By July 2020, two years in, Just Go Grind had 128 published episodes. On August 1, 2020, Justin started what I’d call a podcast ultramarathon. He decided to release a new episode every single day, indefinitely.

Each episode would only get a couple hundred listens, but the audience was so valuable and the output volume so high that Justin could secure sponsors at a fee around $2,000 per month.

In the end, Justin lasted 112 days. One Sunday in November, he did not post. Of course, he posted again on Monday, then Wednesday, then Friday. But the streak was over.

Not for nothing, the experiment supercharged his network growth, which was always the goal. Just two months after finishing his ‘ultramarathon,’ Justin started a new role as Director of Marketing at VITALIZE Venture Capital. He’d podcasted his way into a job.

Would he do it again? “I don't recommend it, necessarily.” But did he stop? Absolutely not; he would release a new episode every few days for the next couple of years, through January 2023, until he’d released 352 episodes.

At that point, Just Go Grind shapeshifted from podcast to newsletter.

Just go write (10,000 words)

Before he started his newsletter in earnest, Justin had been sending out the show notes of each podcast episode to a small email list, meaning, in December 2022 he sent the first issue of his dedicated newsletter to 519 subscribers.

That first issue contained Justin’s advice for reviewing a year and planning for the next, but most issues since have been in-depth founder profiles — the first of these, from February 2023, was a 3,898-word piece on OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

Many of the people Justin profiles have already been written about and interviewed extensively; he reviews anywhere from 10 to 40 sources, quoting from them heavily in the final piece. He aims to create as complete and insight-rich a narrative as possible, all “in one spot, both for me personally and other people [who] find it useful.”

For the first 9 months of the newsletter’s existence, Justin shared subscriber numbers at the top of each issue. That hockey-stick subscriber growth is mainly from two sources: organic Twitter and paid ads.

By 2023, Justin recalls having around 20,000 Twitter followers; “I probably got to the first 3,000-ish subscribers organically.” He then took a newsletter course and started running paid ads.

The subscriber count has remained flat this past year compared to the early surge — this is due both to Justin’s routine clearing out of unengaged subscribers and turning off paid advertising. 

Justin generally spends 20-30 hours working on each deep dive. A recent piece on Walt Disney was an exception — he read two books while researching, spent two weeks writing it, and ultimately shipped over 10,000 words. 

Why aren’t the newsletters shorter?

The Just Go Grind podcast feed still lives, by the way; when Justin shifted his focus to the newsletter, he began reading out the newsletter text and publishing the recording to his podcast feed.

A pillar of the village

Justin’s ideal audience has never been measured in size, but in value. He wanted ambitious entrepreneurial types, founders, and investors in the crowd; the who mattered more than the how-many. He writes for them. This has also allowed him to charge a premium for ads: at the peak, Justin sold ad space at a $100 CPM. These days, that number usually tops out around $75.

By now, Justin’s network is quite large. It’s founders at all stages of the journey, it’s investors at firms investing in various stages of business, it’s talented specialists. It’s a game he relishes: connecting people.

In 2020, Justin tried building a community for founders, but it didn’t last long. In June 2022 — while still focused on the podcast and his job at VITALIZE — he tried again. Within two months, 100 people joined. He still runs regular events in LA.

The Just Go Grind events are free and open. At the end of May, Justin launched a new venture, Village Lane, a vetted community for startup founders. Members — early-stage startup founders with at least $100k in ARR or $250k in funding — pay for access to a structured community with services including coworking, retreats, a Slack group, an investor database, and more.

Justin now seems to be entering a new chapter in his journey as a creator-entrepreneur; after 12 years of relentless content creation, his output has slowed.

Blogging to promote his personal training services taught him how to operate in the world of online content; he used those skills to build a network. That network now sustains itself. Content creation brought him here and he’ll probably never stop doing it, but he no longer needs to be so prolific.

Theres a seemingly inexhaustible energy to Justin. It’s how he spent two weeks putting together a 10,000-word newsletter issue on Walt Disney; it’s how he published 112 podcast episodes in 112 days; it’s why he can build a business around connecting other driven people. Beneath everything is this energy; that is what he sells.

Connect with Justin on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Read and subscribe to Just Go Grind.

For the full story, listen to our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

🎙️ In Justin’s episode of The Creator Spotlight Podcast:

• 💵 All the ways Justin has made money in the creator economy

• 🎤 The best and worst interviews Justin ever had on his pod

• 📆 Everything Justin has ever learned from podcasting

Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

No rules, no goals, but your own

Is releasing a nearly hour-long interview podcast every single day for 16 weeks straight a good idea? It accelerated the growth of Justin’s network and led him to a job, but it was grueling; he wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. Nonetheless —

Justin’s up-to-10,000-word newsletters are cut of the same cloth: the desire to follow these whims, to execute these creative acts of endurance. The point is not that you should produce a daily podcast or write a novella’s worth of newsletter each month; it’s that you should act on your own ideas:

Being an independent creator is only sustainable if you’re working on projects you want to work on. Justin said that with podcasting, he was inspired by Acquired "breaking every rule of podcasting because that’s what they wanted to do. They were scratching their own itch, and you find your people through that.”

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Thank you for reading. For more, check out Justin’s episode of our podcast on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

Next week’s guest is Ernie Smith, a seasoned newsletterist with a refreshingly earnest and DIY approach. Nobody is doing it quite like him; I learned a lot.

And if you missed last week’s issue, about Kate Lindsay from Embedded, making a living newslettering, and building a newsletter from the bones of a scrapped publication, read it here.

Talk soon,
Francis Zierer, Editor
Twitter / LinkedIn
Say hi!