Interview Date: Oct 20, 2024
Table of Content
- Meet Danielle Desir Corbett
- Newsletter Identity Card
- Tool stack
- How she started her newsletter
- Growth guideline to over 8,000 subscribers
- The most effective growth strategies
- Paid subscription strategy
- Personal & professional impact of running a newsletter
- If she had a chance to start over
- Biggest advice to newsletter creators
MEET THE CREATOR
Danielle Desir Corbett is a former grants administrator turned creative entrepreneur.
Since January 2022, she has been curating grants and other funding opportunities specifically for creative individuals in her monthly newsletter, Grants For Creators.
The result is impressive: Her newsletter reached over 8,000 subscribers and hundreds of paid subscribers in less than 3 years.
But the road to success is never short. She built her newsletter on the solid expertise she accumulated over the years.
Before she quit her corporate career to pursue creative entrepreneurship, she submitted multi-million dollar grant proposals for seven years. Around 2020, she started noticing grants she could apply for as a creative. Over the course of two years, she won four grants as a podcaster.
In addition to her newsletter, she hosts The Thought Card, a 4x grant-funded affordable luxury travel podcast that empowers financially savvy travelers to travel often while building life-changing wealth. She also co-hosts Road Trip Ready Podcast, which shares practical road trip tips and the best destinations across the U.S. and Canada.
In our interview, she shared valuable insights on:
- How she reached over 8,000 subscribers
- Unique growth strategies she used
- Her biggest learnings about paid subscription
- The impact of running a newsletter on her life
NEWSLETTER IDENTITY CARD
TOOL STACK
START
As an ex-Grant Manager, why did you start Grants For Creators in the first place?
While it is time-consuming, I enjoy finding grants and opportunities in general.
Before launching Grants For Creators, I would send my friends grants I found via email or in group chats. At some point, I sent so many messages that I worried I was becoming annoying.
As grants became a viable income source for me, I wondered why no one in the creator space was talking about it.
Since I followed dozens of Substack newsletters, starting Grants For Creators would help me share my findings with creatives interested in this less popular funding source. Today, I’ve helped a dozen creators secure over $100,000 USD in grant funding, and it’s a joy to see their projects come to life.
GROWTH
Growth strategies can vary at different stages of a newsletter journey. Which strategies did you use to grow over 8,000 subscribers?
0 – 1,000
- Social media (X.com).
- Develop a signature talk.
- Speaking opportunities.
1,000 – 5,000
- Cross-promotion with other relevant newsletters.
- Subscriber case studies.
- Podcast guest interviews.
5,000 – today
- Educational articles.
- Weekly Substack notes posts.
- LinkedIn newsletter, which previews our monthly roundup (free tier only).
- Subscriber case studies.
- Podcast guest interviews.
- Substack refer-a-friend promotions
Could you please elaborate on how you apply your most effective growth strategy?
Nothing promotes my newsletter better than referrals and subscriber case studies.
Substack’s built-in referral features make sharing and recommending newsletters a breeze.
I’ve seen tremendous success with subscriber case studies. I encourage subscribers who found a grant through our newsletter to contact me. When I receive an “I won a grant” email, I feel like I won, too!
Sharing “success stories” features our subscribers and inspires and encourages others to take grants seriously. In each feature—shameless plug—I ask pointed questions highlighting how Grants For Creators helped with the grant-finding process.
Besides our monthly roundup, our grant success series gets the highest engagement.
MONETIZATION
You started your newsletter as free and launched a paid subscription after a short while. What are your strategies for growing your paid subscriber list?
Honestly, I wasn’t sure if Grants For Creators would be successful. Since this was an untested idea, I was initially uncomfortable with charging. Nevertheless, I was open to experimenting, so I launched it as a free resource and planned to move to a paid subscription once I received enough traction.
After quickly hitting the 500 subscriber milestone and hearing positive feedback from my subscribers, I turned on the paywall and started a $5-a-month subscription.
I eventually raised the price to $10 a month or $100 a year, which feels good to me right now.
You can learn about the newsletter growth strategies I used to gain nearly 400 paid and 3,000 subscribers in a year.
Over the last two years, I’ve experimented with many different growth strategies.
My top sources are referrals directly from Substack and appearing in Google searches. I also see spikes with podcast interviews and speaking appearances.
With this project, I’ve found that Grants For Creators grows organically through word of mouth, so my job is to continue curating great content and be the go-to resource for subscribers.
Based on what you have learned, what are the most critical factors for applying a successful paid subscription strategy?
- The more valuable your resource, the greater your income potential. Saving time and money and identifying niche skills and talents are excellent places to start. Everyone has innate advantages. When creating a newsletter, tap into yours.
- Experiment with unique call-to-actions to join your paid subscription tier.
- Identify why subscribers may hesitate to join your paid tier and address those objections.
- Rarely offer discounts.
IMPACT & LEARNINGS
How did building Grants for Creators contribute to your life professionally and personally?
Launching Grants For Creators has been life-changing. Professionally, it has allowed me to leverage my previous 9-to-5 project management and grant administrator skills.
Today, Grants For Creators accounts for nearly 50% of my income, which gives our family a new level of financial freedom and independence.
I have been able to step away from active, demanding income streams and focus more energy on growing this project.
With more free time, I’ve decided to homeschool. I set my hours and can work independently from anywhere. Having a small, reliable team means I can streamline our workflow and focus on my zone of genius—research and marketing.
If you had a chance to start over, what would you do differently while building Grants for Creators?
If I could go back, I would have started sooner.
I sat on the newsletter idea for six months until I couldn’t anymore. One night, while pregnant, at three a.m., I couldn’t sleep. I started with a Google search to find out which platforms I should use to launch this thing. The rest is history.
What is the most challenging part of operating a newsletter, and how do you handle it?
Unsubscribes always sting a little – okay, let’s be honest a lot.
Getting unfavorable feedback doesn’t feel good, especially when you put your heart and soul into your work.
While improving your newsletter as much as possible, protect your mental health and tap into your inner “why” when doubt creeps in.
Knowing my triggers, I opted out of getting unsubscribe notifications and review feedback once a quarter to spot trends and ways we can improve.
What would it be if you had the right to give one piece of advice to aspiring newsletter creators?
You won’t know your full potential unless you give [insert your idea] a try. Whatever you’ve been thinking about repeatedly, put it out there. Experiment, and give it your all when you find what’s working.
Final words
With innovative tools and tech available at your fingertips and the demand from subscribers eager to pay for content, there’s no better time to launch a paid newsletter!
