Creator Spotlight: Justin Schnell

What is Creator Spotlight?

Each week we'll feature a newsletter on beehiiv that's experiencing tremendous success with their content and growth. It's a two part initiative packed into a single day:

1. an email showcasing their content, tips, and goals (this email here)

2. and a live Twitter Spaces today where you can join the conversation and ask questions directly

Tell me about Even the Odds

Even The Odds previews 1-2 sports games a day, from an “intro to betting” perspective. We give easy to digest updates on the league to set the scene, then dive into each team and their players. It’s all tied together by providing our readers with easy to understand betting lines

The sports betting space is extremely crowded right now; there’s so many companies pushing algorithms, recapping betting trends and using social media to stay relevant at all times of the day. We’re trying to carve out a different lane of giving you one quick, easy to digest sports read, with betting information lightly tied in. Hopefully it differentiates us over time and helps all levels of sports fans stay in the loop

What sports are covered?

We cover all sports, the core is football and basketball. We built our team of freelancers so that we have writers who are specialists in the sport(s) they cover and we’ll continue to do that. We’ll be going a little rogue starting in July when sports slow down, we’ll focus on soccer, tennis, and baseball. There’s not anything we won’t cover. We’ve covered golf and we will do it again. We haven’t done NASCAR but we would. It’s more important to have the internal capacity, we want writers who know the lingo and betting framework.

Our goal is to make all newsletters interesting, how do you turn an average sporting event into the most exciting thing in the world? We’ve picked the two worst teams playing and figured out how to make it feel relevant. On the flip side, when it’s really busy, we rely on our instincts and the fact that we have a pulse on the sports world to steer our coverage to the most relevant games to cover.

What have you found to be most impactful in scaling Even the Odds?

We’ve been testing multiple channels, such as podcast ad-reads, Facebook ads, Twitter promotions and collaborations with other newsletters. The email capture ads have definitely been our most consistent method of growth, but the biggest bumps in subscribers have come from promotions with larger brands.

Can you tell us about some Even the Odds’ promotions?

We connected with a network of college bookstores because we have been looking to bump up our college audience. The bookstore has a distribution list of 500,000 emails from campuses across the country. We had about 5,000 subscribers sign up with a 46% open rate and only 650 unsubscribes. The beehiiv segmentation feature is really helpful in this scenario, we can measure the quality of subscribers. It allows for better engagement, we can target those who have opened a hundred newsletters and reach out and thank them. It lets us know whether what we’re doing is working.

We just launched another big promotion in partnership with the Just Women’s Sports newsletter, in conjunction with an our dedicated WNBA post. They have a list of 60,000, of the new subscribers; a day after the part 1 of the promotion, we’ve received 100 new subscribers with a 65% open rate. Part 2 will be more conversion oriented.

Advice for other writers

Continue to test different methods of growth. Growing your newsletter is a long game, and you won’t know….