Earn it.Then scale it.
Turning organic attention into paid subscriber growth
Don’t guess what people want.
Watch what they respond to.
- 01Come up with an ad
- 02Put money behind it
- 03Hope it works
We decide what the audience should care about before the audience ever sees it.
Then we pay to find out whether we were right.
That’s backwards.
Let organicdo the testing.
Every piece of organic content is a free market test.
Put the stories out. Watch what happens.
The audience tells us what matters.
Then we act on it.- What gets watched?
- What gets shared?
- What gets saved?
- What creates comments?
- What gets sent to somebody else?
- Columbus?
- Cleveland?
- Cincinnati?
- Indianapolis?
- Pittsburgh?
Find the outliers.
We’re not looking for content that’s simply “good.”
We’re looking for content that overperforms relative to normal.
- Cory’s typical piece gets 20K views — and something gets 100K20K→100KPay attention.
- A story generates 3X the normal shares1X→3XPay attention.
- Something disproportionately takes off in ClevelandNormal→OutlierPay attention.
- The comments suddenly fill with “This is exactly where I’m at.”Pay attention.
That’s a signal.
Don’t make an ad.
Amplify whatalready worked.
Take the story, hook, person, idea, or creative that earned attention organically and turn it into a paid test.
Sometimes that means amplifying the original creative. Sometimes it means cutting a tighter version. Sometimes the winning idea becomes the basis for several ads.
The creative starts with demonstrated audience behavior.
Not our opinion.
Put $50behind it.
Keep the first test intentionally small.
Take a proven organic winner.
Target the geography where we’re seeing heat.
Put a small amount of money behind it.
Does attentionturn into action?
- Click.
- Visit.
- Subscribe.
We’re buying information.
Now we havetwo filters.
Did people care?
Organic tells us.Did people act?
Paid tells us.Move on.
Great content.Weak acquisition.
Potentially valuableperformance creative.
Rocket fuel.
Pour gas on it.
When something earns attention and drives subscriptions, stop treating it like an experiment.
Scale it.
Small money finds the fire.
Big money feeds it.
- $100
- $500
- $1K
- $5K+
- Expand the audience.
- Expand the geography.
- Create variations.
- Retarget engagement.
- Find adjacent audiences.
- Keep spending while the economics work.
Now connect itto the region.
Imagine Cory visits a gym in Pittsburgh. We publish six pieces of content. One story dramatically outperforms the others — especially around Pittsburgh.
Take the winning creative. Run a small paid test around Pittsburgh. Does it create traffic? Does it create subscriptions? If yes: scale Pittsburgh.
- Pittsburgh story
- Organic signal
- $50 test
- Subscriptions
- Scale Pittsburgh
- Columbus
- Cleveland
- Cincinnati
- Indianapolis
Content shows us where the heat is.
Paid media tells us whether we can turn that heat into customers.
- 01Create
- 02Publish
- 03Listen
- 04Find the outliers
- 05Test with small dollars
- 06Measure subscriptions
- 07Scale the winners
- 08Create more of what works
- Back to the top
The content team isn’t separate from the growth team anymore.
Don’t put money behind what we think will work.
Put money behind what people have already told us they want.
Throw rocket fuel on it.
