🦅 How to Gain 30,000 Subscribers With This One Thing

How Milly Tamati Gained 30,000 Subscribers

Milly Tamati has 55,000+ newsletter subscribers, and brand deals with Notion and Canva. She runs a six-figure business from the Isle of Raasay, a Scottish island with 170 people, seven hours from the nearest city.

She takes forest walks between meetings and plays guitar in the evenings. She didn't build a business and then escape to an island. She built the business around the calm she wanted to keep.

1) Even Generalists Can Do This

Milly got a teaching degree in New Zealand. She co-owned a hostel in Thailand, co-founded a wine tour in Australia, and started an illustration agency in the UK. And that's just the short version.

None of it made sense on a resume. Every job interview started with the same question: "So... what exactly do you do?"

At some point, she stopped trying to answer it and started wondering about something else.

There had to be other people with careers like this. People who zigzag between industries, who collect skills instead of titles, who never fit in one box. I'm one of them. I quit a banking job, bounced through a marketing agency, built hundreds of websites, and eventually co-founded Hypefury.

Milly didn't know if people like us existed. But she went to LinkedIn and started looking. DMing strangers. Browsing profiles. Asking people with squiggly career paths if they felt the same frustration. She found a handful. Put them in a Slack group. Then posted about it publicly.

The response was immediate. Three weeks later, the project became her main focus. Not after months of planning or a careful transition. Three weeks from "I wonder if anyone else feels this" to full-time founder of Generalist World. Sometimes burning bridges is the right move.

2) The Quiz That Built the Audience

The main growth engine behind Generalist World is a five-minute quiz: "What Kind of Generalist Are You?" It sorts you into one of four archetypes: Connector, Innovator, Systems Thinker, or Translator. To see your result, you enter your email. Over 39,000 people have taken it.

A quiz beats a PDF because it feels personal. You're not downloading a generic guide that sits in a folder. You're getting a result that's about you. That alone can make the conversion rate higher than any ebook or checklist.

But Milly's quiz goes further than most. A typical one is fluff dressed up as self-discovery: fun for a moment, forgotten right after.

Milly's quiz works because it solves a problem her audience actually has. If you're a generalist, you know the frustration of not being able to explain your career. It doesn't fit in traditional boxes, there's no neat progression of titles, and every job interview feels like an apology. The quiz promises to fix that: "this quiz will help you discover what makes you exceptional, so that you can articulate your value more effectively." 

When someone who's struggled to sell their own career for years sees that promise, they don't just click out of curiosity. They click because they need the answer.

Milly promotes it through daily content. She has posted every workday for over 1,000 consecutive days across multiple platforms (the best way to protect yourself from the whims of algorithms). She posts short, personal videos about being a generalist, each pointing back to the quiz.

👉 Use Hypefury to effortlessly schedule content across platforms.

3) $950 Once + Recurring Sponsors

The quiz builds the audience. The newsletter nurtures it. The main source of revenue is the community.

Milly priced the first community cohort at $150 per year. Over the next three years, she tested everything from $150 to $1,350. She landed on $950 for lifetime access. No monthly renewal. No annual decision. You pay once, you're in forever.

She opens the doors 3-4 times per year, and the community now has 700+ paid members from over 20 countries.

The tradeoff of lifetime pricing:

• Pro: a bigger upfront payment than any monthly or annual plan could justify

• Con: zero recurring revenue

Milly minimized this second part with sponsorships. She pursued Notion for two years, reaching out through four different contacts before landing the deal. Notion renewed. Other partners followed: Canva, Lovable, Gamma, Zapier. Newsletter placements go for $1,500 each. Podcast sponsorships run $10,000 per month.

None of this works without an engaged audience she can reach across multiple platforms.

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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