Scaling spend: Short term pain for long term gain

Author

Grow A Newsletter
January 24, 2025 • Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Current subscribers: 80

Welcome to the 12 new subscribers since my last post two days ago.

Everyone else, I love you. Thank you again for reading.

Let’s get into it.

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Growth

Since my last post on January 22, I upped my daily budget on Meta from $10 to $15.

My CPA has improved after doing this (down from ~$1.85 to ~$1.50), but it’s still too high. The goal is still sub $1.00.

So, why increase spend when CPAs aren’t perfect yet?

Because Meta ads thrive on data. The more data they get, the better they optimize.

Meta suggests hitting at least 50 key conversion events per week to run efficiently. While it’s true that performance can plateau at higher spend levels, I’m nowhere near that (and probably never will be).

At this stage, I must accept that spending more is an investment—part of the newsletter’s startup costs. Yes, I’ll lose more in the short term, but it’s the fastest way to drive CPAs down to a sustainable level.

I think this is where a lot of newsletter operators struggle. They hesitate to scale ad spend because their CPAs aren’t profitable yet—without realizing that pushing through the short-term pain leads to long-term gains.

The goal? Eventually, CPAs should drop low enough that I can acquire new subscribers at a profit through monetization alone with SparkLoop.

Scaling isn’t always comfortable, but it’s necessary.

Monetization

$6 in confirmed sponsorship earnings from Beehiiv’s ad network + $19 in unconfirmed earnings from Sparkloop.

Sparkloop will get better at recommending newsletters to new subscribers too, so I expect the earnings per new subscriber from Sparkloop to increase significantly soon.

Profit/Loss

Down $225.45.

My Profit & Loss doc contains all income and expenses to date.

Thanks again for reading. Talk soon! 💌

In the meantime, please reply to this email with anything about newsletters you’d like me to discuss or if there’s something I can do to help you and your newsletter.

—SS

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