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Six-Figure Email Businesses Without Huge Audiences
Real-World Examples Of Creators Who Turned Small Subscriber Counts Into Serious Income
Avi Gandhi
May 06, 2025
We’ve all seen those headlines:
“This newsletter makes $1M per year.”
These stories are aspirational, but unhelpful - we don’t have millions of subscribers, we have thousands (or hundreds) of subscribers - so what’s the point? A huge readership seems so far away…
I’m here to tell you that you can still make great money - six figure money - from a small newsletter.
As an agent, manager, producer, executive, and now creator myself, I’ve worked with creators for 15 years and connected with creators of all sizes, from small to large subscriber bases.
The most inspiring stories I’ve come across are the ones where people with relatively small audiences make great money - because these stories mean that personal success and financial freedom really are accessible to anyone.
Here are three real examples of creators who make six-figure incomes from relatively small email subscriberships and the tactics they use that you can too:
📩 Email Subscribers: 3,100
🌍 Total Following: 55,500
💰 Revenue Sources: Affiliate marketing, coaching, brand deals, memberships
LaShonda Brown is a tech influencer with a total of 55,500 followers across social - a nice audience, but not huge by industry standards. Her newsletter has 3,100 subscribers. A marketer would describe her as a “microinfluencer”.
And yet, LaShonda makes great money. She employs a team of six people to generate revenue through affiliate revenue, brand deals, coaching, and memberships. AdSense accounts for just 5% of her revenue and YouTube drives 40% of her business.
The remaining 60% of her revenue is driven by email - one of her smallest audiences.
LaShonda’s email is powerful because it’s her mid-funnel channel. The people who sign up for her email list trust her deeply - and as a result, when she promotes a new software product (for which she will get a percentage of monthly payments, much like with beehiiv’s Partner Program) her audience is more likely to take action.
LaShonda is a great example of a how creators can earn effectively through prosumer and B2B affiliates and referrals. When the product or service you refer can make you a few hundred (or even a few thousand) bucks per customer, you don’t need that many referrals for it to be a very lucrative business.
📩 Email Subscribers: 6,000
👩💼 Paying Members: 600
💼 Revenue Model: Membership community ($500/year)
With 6000 subscribers, Jessy Grossman has a reasonably-sized newsletter - but her revenue is insane. She has 600 women paying $500 per year to be part of her community- Women in Influencer Marketing (WIIM) - and that’s just 40% of her total revenue!
Her overall audience size? Just under 40,000 across social.
Community membership - not just paying for content, but for access to people both online and in-person - can be a powerful monetization tactic for the right newsletters, if…
Your audience is full of people with disposable income,
The community you’re creating can help people self-actualize through revenue or belonging, and
You have the credibility to effectively sell membership through your content.
Jessy takes her use of email one step further - she doesn’t just use it to sell, she uses it to retain. For example:
Be aware that communities are a ton of work to launch, grow, and sustain. I tried to do a paid community and it didn’t work for me…Growth was slow and I burnt out in a matter of weeks.
I cared more about writing my newsletter than putting in the effort to leading my community.For those who are committed to the idea of leading a community, however, an email x community combo can be very effective at driving outsized revenue.
Avi Gandhi (that’s me!)
📩 Email Subscribers: ~5,000
🧠 Main Revenue Stream: Consulting
💸 2024 Revenue: $250,000+
In 2024, I made over $250,000 - most of which came from consulting services. Many of my customers either discovered or built trust in me through my newsletter - but that’s probably obvious. For freelancers, consultants, coaches, and other service providers, email is a tried and true customer acquisition channel.
What’s less obvious is that writing an email newsletter can also increase your luck surface area - i.e. make it more likely that you and your business “get lucky” - by creating opportunities, building relationships, and getting you in front of more people more often.
For example, your readers aren’t your only prospects…your guests are as well.
When I had just 5000 subscribers, I ran into a creator I interviewed at an event a few months later. They turned around and introduced me to someone who ended up becoming a $127,000 consulting client.
That wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t reached out to interview the creator for Creator Logic - I would have never even met them.
By writing a newsletter about whatever it is you do, and talking to other people in that niche, you both build trust with prospective clients, but also increase your luck surface area, setting yourself up to land more, bigger clients.
Final Thoughts: Stop Chasing Scale—Start Building Trust
You don’t need a massive audience to make real money - LaShonda, Jessy, and I are proof of that.
With just a few thousand subscribers, we’ve each built six-figure businesses. While affiliate links, communities, and consulting are the tactics that worked for us, email is the through-line because it builds trust. Trust is much harder to come by than attention, and it leads to much more lucrative outcomes even without scale.
If you’re looking to make money right now, stop chasing scale and instead focus on depth of trust. Trust leads to sales, and (all other things equal) you’ll always make more money selling to someone than you will promoting something someone else is selling.
👋 Want to build your own six-figure email business?
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