How Houck Leveraged His Personal Brand to Reach Over 18,000 Founders

Houck's Newsletter offers tactical advice to help over 18,000 founders build, grow, and raise capital for their startups.

Michael Houck created the newsletter last September as a way to create a resource that founders can rely on when navigating the ever-changing landscape of startup investments. He credits his unique perspective, based on his personal experiences, with helping his readership grow so quickly.

Looking at Startups From Both Sides

Houck has had success as both a startup founder and a VC.

"Being a startup founder," Houck says, "is super lonely. It's really hard to know what to do. You have a ton of advice out there from different people on Twitter and on the internet. My co-founders and I have seen things from both the investor side and the founder side, so we know what those early stages are all about — especially in the modern age of investing in startups. We know what works and what doesn't work in that world. I want to share that with all the founders out there who are coming from all around the world and trying to navigate this landscape."

From Social Media to Newsletter

In just a few months, Houck has been able to build a newsletter audience of over 18,000 subscribers, with an enviable open rate that hovers around 60%. "It's growing pretty fast for only a couple of months. The early signals are good, and I'm now doubling down on it."

A good deal of that readership is coming from social media. "Posting on Twitter and LinkedIn is huge for growing the newsletter, or at least it has been so far. I drive a lot of subscribers from posting on Twitter and LinkedIn. When I started writing the newsletter, my Twitter audience was somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000," Houck recalls. "Now it's over 33,000. I also have a LinkedIn audience of about 28,000 — that was about 18,000 when I started the newsletter. "

Houck, who describes himself as "pretty metric-oriented," tracks data on the subscribers coming from each source. "I see that my open rates and engagement are higher for people who come from LinkedIn. But more subscribers come from Twitter because my content tends to go viral more on Twitter than LinkedIn."

Although Houck has been able to build a large readership on social media, he's aware that his audience is ultimately owned by the platform. "The main reason I wanted to move to a newsletter was to own my audience. [On social media] you're on rented land. If you're on Twitter or LinkedIn or any other platform, they can turn you off at the end of the day. But an email list is forever, and email's not going anywhere. So it seemed like a no-brainer as I was starting to invest more on the creator side, and not just on my startup. A newsletter made sense."

A Well-Organized Content System

Houck has created a system for organizing his content across platforms. "I use Airtable for a content calendar and I keep ideas in there. I can use the Airtable base to leverage content across platforms, so I have a content bank. I can schedule that for my newsletter for the week, and then I can schedule it to be a Twitter thread or a LinkedIn carousel the following week. I also track a lot of analytics about how my posts do."

In addition to Airtable, Houck uses some of beehiiv's features to develop his content. "I also collect feedback through the beehiiv poll feature. I'll ask people what they think of the issue. They'll leave comments and vote, and I put all that data in my Airtable base. I also write my newsletter right in beehiiv. I think the editor is pretty useful, so I just write my content right in there."

From there, he developed a referral program offering 1 single reward each month. At the end of each month, it goes away and is replaced by a new reward. This drives urgency for people to make referrals, and also increases the amount of people making at least 1 referral. This has 10x'd his referrals per week.

He’s added custom fields to each subscriber to help better understand his audience. As the automation feature is built out in beehiiv, it’s even more opportunity to look to segment and adjust segments.

“I was already doing this one, but I've gotten almost 4,000 subscribers from beehiiv recommendations. Building a network with other writers who write similarly sized newsletters has been huge.”

Setting the Newsletter Content Apart

Houck is careful not to run the exact same content across all his platforms, though. It's a smart strategy that gives his subscribers a reason to open the newsletter.

"[Offering different content across channels] is something I've thought about a lot, and I've experimented with a couple of things," Houck says.

One method he's used is offering the same content but with more depth in the newsletter version. "One thing that worked well, and got good responses from my readers, was I posted a Twitter thread about red flags in pitch decks. But I posted it on Twitter, and it was maybe six items long. Six red flags. And then I went to my newsletter and wrote about it, but I included a lot more items and additional content."

The experiment paid off for Houck. "That got great responses. People would say 'I found you through Twitter, then went to your newsletter and you had even more. That made me want to subscribe to get [content] I couldn't get on Twitter."

Houck also uses his newsletter to share content that wouldn't work well on social media. "There's stuff you can do with a newsletter that you can't really do with Twitter. I wrote a newsletter post about how to fundraise using tranches, [which is] where you break your fundraise into different amounts. [For instance,] 'I'll raise 500K at a 10 million valuation, and then another 500K at a 12 million valuation once that first 500K is filled up."

It was valuable content, Houck says, because "it's not something that a lot of early-stage founders know to do. But a lot of investors are open to it."

Creating a newsletter post allowed Houck to add an interactive feature he couldn't have included on social media. "I added a calculator as a resource. People could click this link and actually calculate what their tranches should be for their fundraiser with whatever their goals might be. You can't really communicate that the same way [on social media]...