🦅 After 30 Dead-End Jobs, He Grew His Email List to 70,000 Subscribers

After 30 Dead-End Jobs, He Grew His Email List to 70,000 Subscribers

Jesse J. Anderson cycled through about 30 jobs in his twenties. Each one started the same way: he'd love the work for the first few months, then slowly fall out of it as the boredom set in and the details started slipping. He read every exit as a personal failure. Teachers had been telling him he wasn't reaching his potential since junior high, and the pattern seemed to confirm it.

At 36, after a casual nudge from his wife, he got an ADHD diagnosis. He spent months studying ADHD in therapy and on his own. Then he started writing about it...

1) The 30 day-challenge that became a newsletter

Till February 2021, Jesse barely had an audience. He tweeted occasionally, and the only posts that ever got engagement were about ADHD.

Here's a typical tweet (with typical engagement rate):

And this is one of the first tweets in which he started to focus on ADHD:

He noticed the signal and decided to find out if it was real, so he joined Ship30for30, a daily writing challenge that forces you to publish one short essay every day for 30 days.

He didn't pre-pick a niche. He wrote across the topics he'd already been thinking about, including the ADHD work he'd been doing in therapy. It didn't take long for the pattern to become clear. The ADHD essays got way better engagement.

Take a look, he published this post just a couple of weeks after the previous one, yet the engagement rate is on a completely different level:

He started focusing on ADHD more and more, till it became “his thing.”

The lesson: don't spend time pre-picking a niche. Post about those topics for which you have a genuine interest. Be consistent and when something gets traction, double down.

2) Protect the access to your audience before the algorithm changes

During Ship30for30, Jesse launched Extra Focus, his newsletter about ADHD.

Once it was live, Jesse repackaged the same essays as issues. Then he bundled them into a free PDF, called it the ADHD Strategy Guide, and plugged it on 𝕏 and TikTok. He paired it with quippy, evergreen tweets, treating 𝕏 as his testbed.

𝕏 became his dominant funnel for years. His subscriber growth flowed through it all the way to 59,000 readers by mid-2023. Then his engagement dropped sharply, and Jesse shifted attention to Bluesky and YouTube.

To be clear, this is not "Elon's fault."

It's normal for a platform to change its algorithm. It happened in the past, and it will continue to happen.

We creators can complain about Elon or Zuck being &#!*^%, or we can play smarter like Jesse did.

1. Convert as soon as possible your followers into email subscribers (that's why Hypefury has a feature called "autoplug")

2. Don't bet everything on one platform. Pick two platforms and use Hypefury to schedule your posts, so maintaining your daily presence doesn't eat every minute of your life.

3) Constraints are how the work gets done

If you want to grow online, you have to create content. Consistently and in big quantity. And this is the most common issue for creators: it's hard to find enough time for this task.

Here’s how Jesse fixed this problem.

The newsletter used to eat hours per issue and was burning him out. Now he sets a 30-minute timer and writes the whole thing inside it.

Long-form projects need a different shape. Jesse started his book with energy and ideas, then forgot it existed for months.

To fix this, he hired an editor to impose deadlines and ran a beta-reader cohort to create stakes.

He created external constraints and the risk of embarrassment to force himself to work on the project without useless delays or rewriting.

Just like with the Ship30for30 challenge, constraints help him be productive and push out content even when he doesn't feel ready or inspired.

It's a trick, but it's probably the best way to kill your impostor syndrome or the 10,000 "very good" reasons to wait and post tomorrow or the day after, instead of today.

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That’s it for now, everyone! We’ll meet again next week to discuss more of this!

Don’t forget to try Hypefury (for free) if you haven’t yet.

Feel free to reply to this email. It goes directly to me.

Cheers,

Yannick Veys
Co-founder and CMO of Hypefury