How Eli Weiss Got a Sponsor & 1,000 Subscribers Before His First Send

All Things CX & Retention is a newsletter all about optimizing a brand’s customer experience to foster better retention.

Its creator is Eli Weiss, the Senior Director of CX & Retention at Jones Road Beauty.

We recently sat down with Eli to discuss his approach to building a successful newsletter in the highly saturated marketing space. Eli was happy to share how he essentially created a space for himself in the market, how he approaches newsletter content creation, and how he secured a sponsorship deal of $1,000 before he sent a single issue of his newsletter.

How a Trip Across the World Landed Him in CX

Eli’s story starts with an adventure around the globe. After he finished high school, he traveled the world by leveraging over a million miles in credit card points. After his travels, he naturally found himself working in the travel space for a Kickstarter startup that was selling luggage.

But, Eli didn’t have a prior passion for customer experience. He shares how he stumbled into the role by chance.

“I started my career in customer experience in 2016. I got into CX [customer experience] because it was the easiest startup job to get. And I thought I had a leg up on others when it came to reading between the lines.”

Eli didn’t realize he was walking into a storm. He shared, “[The Kickstarter] was two years delayed in production. 95% of the customers were angry and wanted a refund.”

Despite the bumpy start in the CX world, Eli continued to grow, learning everything he could about customer experience, e-commerce, and retention.

“I started in a CX role, was there for four years, and did everything from operations, logistics (shipping to 64 countries), running Facebook ads, launching in multiple markets, going to trade shows, etc. I did it all and learned a ton.”

“Then, I jumped into “Nuggs,” which is now called Simulate—a vegan Chicken Nugget Alternative. I jumped there in 2020. Then I was at OLIPOP, which is in the food and beverage universe. I was there for almost two years. I'm now at Jones Road Beauty, which is one of the fastest-growing beauty brands that's founded by Bobbi Brown (formerly of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics), and I lead all things customer experience and retention.”

Learning to Fly on Twitter

Eli shares how, while many people on Twitter start their accounts with the goal to monetize, he didn’t. He just loved CX and wanted to share his take on it with the world.

“I was sharing CX for a couple of years now, based on a conversation I had with a guy named Ben Levy, who started the Milk Road newsletter. Before Milk Road, I was chatting with Ben in 2020. We met on an Andreesen Horowitz-backed networking app called Lunchclub.”

“[Ben asked] ‘What do you love to do?’ And I'm like, ‘Sitting and talking about CX nonstop.’ He says, ‘Why don't you talk about it? Your Twitter has zero about it.’”

Eli was hesitant about sharing about CX because he thought nobody was interested in the topic.

“I said, ‘Nobody gives a s— about any of this stuff. CX is not a thing. People love talking about growth on Twitter.’ He was like, ‘Just try it.’”

Those three words would put Eli on a trajectory that placed him at the mountaintop of the CX space—surprising him both in terms of the demand for the subject and the result of him putting himself out there.

“I started tweeting about [CX] and I went from 200 followers to 1,000, to 2000, to 5,000.”

$1,000 & 1,000 Subscribers Before the First Newsletter Send

Eli’s Twitter was taking off. One thing led to another, and people started asking him to share about CX in-depth—particularly, more than Twitter’s 280-character limit would allow.

“I just continued growing [on Twitter], and I got to have a bunch of conversations where people were like, ‘You have this different view on what customer experience is versus what it could be—what it should be. Why don't you share more long-form?’”

But, like many introverts, Eli was quite reluctant to put himself on a public pedestal—even a digital platform like a newsletter.

“I spent most of my career just hiding in a corner like most introverts do. I'm not an influencer or a newsletter writer. But, I was having a moment where I was like, ‘This would be fun. I love writing. I never write long form’. I tweeted, ‘Hey, would anyone be interested if I launch a newsletter?”

To Eli’s surprise, he had “a ton of responses.”

Here’s where Eli took things to the next level. He didn’t just ask his followers if they’d read a potential newsletter on CX and retention. He asked them if anyone would be willing to pay for a sponsored ad in his newsletter from the get-go.

“I wrote under that [tweet], ‘Would anyone be interested in sponsoring it?’”

The result? He had not one, not two, but three people reach out to say they were interested in sponsoring his newsletter. One of the three brands was Wonderment: a post-purchase tool that Eli uses at Jones Road Beauty that automatically reaches out to customers if their order is delayed.

Eli shared how enthusiastic Wonderment was to sponsor his newsletter. “Whatever it is, we’re in. We want [to sponsor] the first six newsletters. They didn’t know if I had anyone [subscribed]. This was before I got a thousand people. That was on a Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, I had a thousand people signed up from a tweet and this LinkedIn post that I shared with the audience that I built.”

“I was seeing beehiiv pop up everywhere. This is almost a year ago—right when you guys launched, and I said, ‘Let me take a look.’ I launched it [on beehiiv] and had 1,000 subscribers before I sent my first newsletter and had a sponsor secured. It's been 45 weeks since then, and every single newsletter is sponsored.”

If you want to launch, grow, or monetize your newsletter on a platform built for growth, sign up for beehiiv today.

He Gave His Followers The Right Hook With His Newsletter

Eli shared how he decided to take a different approach to share marketing wisdom by being vulnerable and transparent by sharing his personality through his tweets.

“My following is really, really strong, because I'm myself as much as I possibly can be. I think that's what gave me the leg up. If I had done things differently, if I was not me on Twitter, I don't think I would've gotten a thousand people signed up before I launched.”

Providing value to his audience, rather than getting too salesy with them, was important for Eli.

“So the newsletter was the first thing I ever asked from my audience, right? I'm not the guy that's like, ‘Buy my course! Buy my course! Buy my course—now! Sign up for my newsletter!’”

“It was so much give, give, give—like the Gary V “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.” This was my first right hook. This was the first thing I ever asked people for. I said, ‘If you enjoy my content, if you enjoy me nonstop complaining about the current [CX] situation, and how I think we can make it better, sign up for this newsletter.’”

The 9 to 5 Lie

While many people are hesitant to start a newsletter because they’re still in a 9 to 5, Eli shares how it’s actually an advantage for his newsletter to keep his day job.

“[The newsletter] works because I have a nine-to-five job [in CX]. If somebody's sitting across the world writing about CX, but they don't work CX, That’s not interesting. The reason why it's fascinating for people is because I'm doing it all day.”

“This is my job. This is my life for the last eight years, and I'm writing about the things I'm seeing in real-time, which actually makes writing a newsletter easier because you have consistently new things to talk about based on what's working and what's not working.”

High-Quality Subscribers = High Engagement

Eli shared how his newsletter has grown early on primarily because of word of mouth, and more recently, beehiiv’s Recommendations feature. But, for him, it’s not so much about how big he grows, but about focusing on the right audience.

“Prior to beehiiv recommendations, growth has been 90% word of mouth from people in my ecosystem. It’s marketing direct consumer (DTC) people and people that found me on LinkedIn. I did two or three newsletter swaps. But it's predominantly word of mouth. In the last couple of months, I've had beehiiv Recommendations, which has been crushing it.”

“When it comes to every single quality person that joined my newsletter, not just people that signed up and signed out—they're all word of mouth. My open rate is consistently 55% plus because these are all people that are genuinely interested. I'm going for quality.”

Enjoying this Creator Spotlight? Learn how The Neuron newsletter grew to 10,000 subscribers in the first month!

The Weiss Advice on Newsletter Content Creation

Eli Weiss has plenty of golden nuggets to share with other creators about running a successful newsletter. His tactics involve valuable advice about coming up with content your readers love and focusing on the right subscribers.

Coming Up With Sticky Content: It’s All About the Topic

Eli shared that the majority of his content creation effort is placed in the ideation phase rather than writing on its own.

“95% of the work is a topic. I tell this to my wife all the time, ‘If I can come up with a topic, everything else is easy.’ I could spend an hour and a half formulating a topic and the writing can take the same amount of time. The topic is by far the hardest part.”

“I'll start writing it on Monday, finish it on Tuesday, have somebody look it over on Wednesday, send it to the sponsors and have them look it over. It goes live Thursday. By Thursday afternoon, I come up with a bunch of ideas, knock them because I'm very ridiculous, and then I'll finally come up with an idea that feels somewhat sustainable.”

“Now, where does [the topic] come from?