How Jasper Polak 5x Subscribers Moving to beehiiv

After launching on Revue, Jasper Polak migrated to beehiiv and has seen his newsletter scale considerably.

Jasper Polak is a project manager and content creator based in Oslo. His Twitter audience has grown considerably over the past year. Most of his tweets provide actionable insights about project leadership, but he also discusses the world of newsletters, tech, startups, and more.

He launched his newsletter, The Minimum Viable Project, as “an experiment” on Revue back in June 2022. After leaning on his Twitter audience for the first ~1,500 subscribers, he made the decision to migrate to beehiiv in October 2022 to double down and accelerate his growth.

In just the three short months since then, Jasper has 5x his audience size, revamped the aesthetic of his newsletter (and website), and is making more informed content and acquisition decisions based on the tools and dashboards the beehiiv platform provides.

The combination of consistently delivering value-packed content, and tapping into the suite of tools available on beehiiv, formed the accelerant he needed to jolt his newsletter into a serious player in the space.

And I’m about to reveal his playbook.

Grow Your Audience With Recommendations

The beehiiv recommendation network allows creators to select and promote other newsletters to new subscribers after they sign up. They can also drop a recommendation directly into their newsletter for readers to sign up via a 1-click Magic Link.

Pro Tip: we have seen the recommendation feature be most effective when 3-4 tangential newsletters all form some sort of group and choose to cross-promote each other via recommendations. The rising tide lifts all boats (boat emoji + sunglass emoji).

Jasper is very selective about what newsletters he chooses to recommend but has found the perfect balance of quality and effectiveness. He breaks down his rationale and dives into the numbers in this tweet thread.

Most importantly—the subscribers from recommendations are high quality. Using both segmentation and/or 3D Analytics, users can deep dive into the quality of different cohorts of subscribers. It’s no surprise that recommended subscribers are some of the most engaged readers in the ecosystem.

Impress Subscribers With Top-notch Design

The Minimum Viable Project is a super clean and sleek newsletter–it looks great in the inbox and makes for smooth reading for his audience.

What stands out for us–the simple, clean color scheme and overall design consistency make it super simple to know exactly where to look and what to read next.

Jasper provides his thoughts on how to create a great theme and format in his thread here. The biggest takeaway? Get started. Don’t obsess over the details (even if the beehiiv theme editor is amazing). The important thing is just to write–you’ll gain clarity on your style and design as you go.

Need more inspiration? Check out our blog on design here for a look at some seriously sleek newsletters.

7 Simple Steps To Boost Your Open Rate

The number of subscribers on your list isn’t the most important metric—it’s the number of people who actively open and read your newsletter.

There are plenty of strategies to boost your open rates, like adding a Gmail sender pic, or testing different subject lines, send times, preview text, etc.

Jasper breaks down how he’s utilized beehiiv’s tools and experimented on his own to boost his open rates–here’s a quick rundown:

1. Optimize headlines

2. Be approachable–write like you’re talking to a friend, not a crowd

3. Add a display picture

4. Respect your audience

5. Optimize your welcome email

6. Add resources to your emails

7. Optimize for deliverability

Check out his tweets here for more details.

Keeping an Engaged List

Related to keeping open rates high, it’s important to churn unengaged readers from your list to ensure your email deliverability remains in good shape. I recommend taking a glance at our deliverability guide for more context.

Using segmentation and automation, beehiiv makes it simple to identify unengaged subscribers and churn them from your list.

Jasper shows how he leverages these tools to keep The Minimum Viable Project at the top of his reader’s inboxes here.

Looking Ahead…

While Jasper’s 5x growth of his newsletter in just three months is impressive, it’s really just the tip of the iceberg. Jasper has yet to launch a referral program to help incentivize his readers to share with others. There are also plenty of opportunities for him to tap into automations and send targeted automated emails to keep his readers engaged.

If you’re looking to learn from the best and turn actionable ideas into profitable projects, subscribe to Jasper’s The Minimal Viable Project for free.

And if you’re looking to take your newsletter to the next level, consider migrating to beehiiv. You can get started for free, and we’ll whiteglove the migration process for you.