Kintsugi

Strategy and Partnerships

ConvertFlow

Advisor

eCom Email Marketer

A b2b growth company driving 5M impressions a month to mid-market to enterprise DTC brands
Commerceroundtable.com

Lasso Technologies, Inc.

Sendlane

Sales, marketing, partnerships @ Sendlane

Vice President, GTM

- Zero to 2 Million in the first year of the department
- Q3 24 - 60% of sales. 
- Team of 6 by the end of 2024.

Vice President of Partnerships

- 300% YoY growth in 2023
- 0 to 10M in new business segment(ecommerce) in 2 years. 
- Managed a team of 25 on GTM.

Vice President of Sales

Senior Director, Business Development; Head of Sales

Building agency and technology partnerships to enable scale and create opportunities for Sendlane.

Series A - 20 Million

Director Of Strategic Partnerships

Viking Coders

General Manager

Consultant

Digital Marketing Consultant

vp, sales @Sendlane

Amir Torabi

Founder & CEO of Boletin Growth - a paid newsletter growth agency driving growth for names like James Clear, Mark Manson, Hubspot and many others. For more about me: mannyreyes.xyz

Manny Reyes (he/him)

Jan 1: I set a $750K 2026 revenue goal.
Jan 2: I completely scrapped it.

For context, at the beginning of 2025, I set what I thought was a lofty revenue goal: $500,000.

During the year, it became very clear that we were going to hit it. And we did. In fact, we surpassed it and got just over $600,000.

And so, setting a $750,000 revenue goal for the year felt like a safe, realistic number to shoot for.

…which is exactly what I switched it to $1,000,000 the day after.

My thesis as to why this is the right move:

(1) $750K doesn’t really scare me. $1M scares the sh*t out of me.

I wouldn’t sleep at night knowing I picked a comfortable goal.

(2) Aiming for $1M makes reaching $750k much more likely. 

Deep down, I’d sleep just fine if we got between $750K-$1M this year. But the only way that happens is if we aim higher.

Goals are meant to be scary. This one, and what we’ll need to do to get there, unsettles me a bit, which is a good thing.

NOTE: I realize $1M in yearly revenue for some folks is child’s play. But comparison is the thief of joy. I didn’t think the dream of launching my agency would come until my 30s, and yet here I am at 28 with a goal of $1M in revenue, all while living more than I work.

I’ll keep you updated on how we progress throughout the year. If you’re a founder and have a revenue goal that scares you in 2026, drop it below for some accountability!

Manny Reyes

I grow newsletters with paid ads | 5M+ subs driven across 25+ newsletters | ex. growth @ Morning Brew & Workweek

Today, if I operated Boletin Growth the same way I did in July 2024, we simply wouldn’t exist. In July 2024, I was in charge of:

1. Selling for the agency.
2. Onboarding clients.
3. Ideating creative strategy.
4. Writing ad copy.
5. All comms with clients.
6. Designing / editing our ads.
7. Publishing our ads.
8. Managing our ad accounts.

In January 2026, I’m in charge of:

1. Selling for the agency.
2. Optimizing for client retention.

How that changed over time:

- Realized I couldn't grow the agency if I stayed in operations. I had to systematically pull myself out.

- Hired my first video editor and static ad designer. I still handled strategy and copywriting, but execution was delegated.

- Brought on a Creative Strategist to handle ad copywriting and format ideation. They plugged into the existing production team (video editor and designer). I was out of creative.

- Virtual assistant became Head of Operations (built full client onboarding SOP, creative review process, etc.)

- Finally hired a media buyer. This was the scariest one to let go of. Once I hired for this, the whole operation connected: Creative strategist talks to video editor/ static designer, back to creative strategist, then to head of ops, then to media buyer.

It was certainly a grind, but I’m certainly happy I did it.

It’s a cleaner, more efficient process, and it lets me focus on what’s most important.

If you’re trying to build a process around what you do, I strongly recommend going step-by-step, as I did here.

I’m thinking of hiring a sales rep for the agency, and I need someone to tell me if it’s a bad idea. 

My thesis:

- I want to make Boletin Growth more of a machine.

- Having someone else sell the offer would remove me from a current bottleneck.

- It can be an incredibly lucrative opportunity for the right person.

It would have to be a part-time, contractor-type role - hiring a FTE isn’t in the cards yet.

But if I offered the right person $1.5k per closed client, they could make a handsome living selling for us part-time. Possibly less than 10 hours per MONTH, depending on volume of calls + follow-up cycle. 

I get removed from selling a little more, and this person makes $4k-$8k/mo part-time.

Why wouldn’t this work?

Too many newsletter operators will spend $5K on ads and expect $0.50 CPAs because their friend told them that's what they got. 

Or they'll blow through $15K in a month chasing unrealistic numbers.

After 6+ years managing millions in newsletter ad spend for newsletters from Morning Brew, James Clear, Mark Manson, I've seen this same story play out dozens of times.

So I built something to fix it.

It's the 2026 CPA calculator that gives newsletter operators realistic expectations for what they should actually expect to pay per subscriber based on their audience, niche, and budget.

You can tap into the real numbers based on real data from 5M+ subscribers we've driven to get an educated estimate as to what newsletter subscribers should be costing you.

It takes 2 minutes to complete and gives you:

- Your realistic CPA range
- Expected monthly subscriber growth
- Why your numbers are what they are
- When your expectations might be off

This is the same framework I use when setting expectations with new clients. Now you can get clarity on your numbers before you spend a dime.

Want it?

1. Like this post
2. Connect with me (if you haven’t already)
3. Comment "CPA"

I'll DM it to you.

$0 ARR: I need to do heavy outreach!
$600K ARR: Outreach is overrated.

I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. When I started this agency, I thought my clients would come from heavy outreach sprints.

I was fully prepared to allocate as much time as I needed to doing said outreach.

And I did a bit of it, but over time, I realized that doing outreach had much less of an impact on our ability to sign clients than something much simpler:

Doing great work for clients and providing free value for people in your network/industry.

This has led to far more clients through referrals and inbound than any of my small outreach sprints have.

In a more literal sense, this means:

1. Going above and beyond for clients when there’s an opportunity to, even if it’s “out of scope” (ex: handling their welcome flow, even though we’re not “technically” contracted to).

2. Offering to lend my expertise to others in my network regarding things I can help with (auditing creative, LP, welcome email, etc.)

And yes, this takes time to “start working”. No doubt about it.

But it compounds in ways outbound doesn’t. I promise you that.

TLDR of my learnings on growth 18 months into my agency:

Outbound is cool and can work to an extent, but doing a great job for clients and becoming an asset for your network will take you much farther.

Newsletter operators: if you want to waste a lot of money, run giveaways like this.

This is no shade to Morning Brew. I loved my time there, and they pioneered so many of the best practices we call normal today.

If you remember, though, these giveaways were prevalent from ~2016-2020. 

I remember the data analysis team retroactively analyzing these giveaways and coming to one conclusion: 

The cons outweigh the pros.

Giveaways of cash or other broad-appeal items (ex: MacBooks) give readers the wrong incentive to sign up / refer others.

It leads to people gaming sign-ups, sharing links with people that just don’t care for your newsletter specifically, and a subsequent reduction in avg open rate + CTR.

…which makes it harder to sell ads, affiliate deals, or your own products - thereby hurting your newsletter more than it helps it in some cases.

There’s a reason you’re seeing less of these from the more sophisticated newsletters nowadays:

They aren’t as beneficial as people think.

CAVEAT: For strictly top-line growth, this still works. If your goal is to reach the next subscriber milestone or juice up the numbers for whatever business reason you have in mind. Have at it, just don’t be surprised when the avg OR and CTR drop.

Every year on January 1, I create a vision board of how I want that year to look. Last year, I accomplished most of it:

✅ $500k in revenue for the agency
✅ Went to Japan
✅ Got married.
✅ Became a permanent resident of the US.
✅ Minimized drinking.
✅ Got the tattoo I wanted.
✅ Got to see the green river in Chicago.

Though I used to write this stuff off, I fully believe now in a visual reminder of your goals to increase the likelihood you hit them.

With that, below, you’re looking at 2026’s.

Some highlights:

(1) Top left: Therapy. I wanted to start last year, but didn’t. So it’s on there to keep me accountable.

(2) I want to run 3 HYROX races (NYC, Chicago, and Anaheim again)

(3) $1M in revenue for Boletin Growth: A lofty goal, but based on how we grew this year and exceeded our $500k goal, I don’t think it’s totally impossible.

(4) TRAVEL. Planning on Italy, Germany, Montana, Banff again for the summer, and a solo trip to Redwood National Forest.

To be clear: I don’t know if I’ll achieve all of this. In fact, doing so scares me. I do know, though, that I’d be a better person on Dec 31st for putting in the effort to do so.

If you’ve made a vision board or wrote down some lofty goals for the year, would love to hear about them in the comments!

If I were in charge of running my worst enemy’s newsletter, here’s everything I’d do to make sure they fail:

1. Stick with the same 3-5 ad creatives for months. Why create new ones when I can optimize your "winners" until they're completely burned out?

2. Plaster my logo and brand colors on every single ad. Make sure people rezognize it's an advertisement the second they see it in their feed so they can scroll right past it. 

3. Build landing pages with 19+ different elements. Add testimonials, feature lists, social proof boxes, navigation menus, and at least 4 different calls-to-action. Give visitors plenty of options so the conversion rate can be under 20%

4. Target anyone willing to sign up for the absolute lowest cost per subscriber possible. A subscriber is a subscriber, regardless of whether they'll ever open your emails.

5. Expect $1 CPAs no matter how niche my audience is. CFOs of $100M+ companies should cost the same to acquire as people interested in productivity tips, right?

6. Try to scale my winning $30/day campaign directly to $300/day and expect identical performance. Math works the same at every budget level.

7. Run monthly giveaway campaigns as my main growth strategy. Nothing builds a quality email list quite like people hunting for free stuff, right?

8. Micromanage every creative decision my agency makes. I know my brand better than anyone, so I’d make sure to scrutinize every ad 3-5x over, no matter what the agency full of experts says, before it goes live.

9. Keep my daily ad spend under $50 while expecting serious scale. I should be able to add 10,000 subscribers per month on a shoestring budget, right?

Plenty of newsletters operate like this. If any of this sounds like your current strategy, and you’re not my worst enemy, we should chat.

beehiiv ARR vs newsletter bubble claims:

2023: $9M ARR → “There’s a bubble.”
2024: $15M ARR → “There’s a bubble.”
2025: $20M ARR → “There’s a bubble.”
2026: $24M ARR → “There’s a bubble.”

Not too long ago (2 months, in fact), I wrote this exact post. beehiiv had publicly claimed they were at $20M ARR. A few days ago, Tyler Denk 🐝 shared that they had crossed $2M MRR / $24M ARR, so I feel like this is worth bringing up again.

Every time someone says there’s a “newsletter bubble”, the platforms come out with new stats sharing that they’re still growing. In my view, beehiiv and Kit’s YoY growth are a great gauge for industry health (good growth = industry’s healthy / stagnation = industry’s not).

Not to mention, beehiiv has added both digital products and a full website builder in recent months, making it unfair to view them as an ESP alone.

My point is that a “bubble” happens when prices rise far above true value as a result of industry speculation. This is not that. People from all corners of the internet are using beehiiv, Kit, and others to monetize their passions and OWN their audience, and the industry itself is growing as a result.

A real bubble would show up in the infrastructure first, imo. If Beehiiv and Kit's growth stagnates in 2026-2028 while operators claim everything's fine, then I'll worry. But today, we’ll keep riding this newsletter train.

I’d rather shut down my agency than give in to what gurus say I need to do to grow it.

If you asked the X and LinkedIn gurus how to grow your business, they'd obsessively say:

- Run the agency
- Create a course
- Sell the course
- Run webinars
- Run a podcast
- Create long-form youtube videos
- Produce an event

This constant pushing for more (more content, more revenue streams, etc.) is exhausting, yet seems to be accepted as the only way to grow an agency business.

I call bullsh*t, and I’ll use my own experience to do so.

Because I don’t do any of that.

Instead, I:

- Run a really good agency with strong ops
- Walk my dog with no rush in the mornings
- Workout twice a day
- Have lunch with my wife whenever I want
- Take my dog to the dog park at 4 pm every day
- Train for and run hyrox races
- Have coffee with friends at 11 am on somedays

…and generated $600k+ in annual rev with 60%+ margins in my first full year doing so.

The latter list does not happen when you run the former list.

Respectfully, keep that as far away from me as possible.

I’ve spent 6 years driving 5M newsletter subscribers with Meta and TikTok ads. But if I were in charge of organic growth, I’d bet on this method:

Below are organic social posts from Box Life Magazine. If you notice, each:

1. Makes a bold or counterintuitive claim
2. Mentions some type of research / study
3. Pairs an actual photo to blend into the feed

This, alone, works so well because:

1. People are prone to send these posts to their friends (no different than mainstream media companies’ organic posts).

2. To get the “evidence”, you have to go to the link in their bio…where you’re of course prompted to subscribe.

3. You can post these as much as you want, at no marginal cost. 

As for evidence it’s working: The newsletter’s Instagram page has 61,000 MORE followers than the newsletter itself.

If you want to replicate this:

1. Find studies, headlines, or other artifacts your readers would be prone to saving and sharing (Complex on Instagram does this well).

2. Create a simple workflow (possible on Canva or with a VA / AI) to extract the most intriguing headlines + pair them with creative + publish.

Because it’s free, this is quite accessible to most newsletters. The flywheel will, of course, take time to spin up, but as you can see, it’s well worth it.

taplio

The Battle

Amir Torabi

Manny Reyes (he/him)

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taplio

The Battle

Amir Torabi

Manny Reyes (he/him)

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Manny Reyes (he/him)'s LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreManny Reyes (he/him)'s LinkedIn Performance