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How ConvertKit Grew
Email marketing platform built for online creators
How did ConvertKit grow?
Summary of the sourced claims below
ConvertKit grew primarily through inbound channels such as content marketing, word of mouth, and building a community around transparency by publishing case studies and revenue numbers. They launched a referral program that turned customers into affiliates, significantly contributing to new signups without upfront costs. The Creator Network enabled newsletter creators to cross-promote each other, driving new subscribers through recommendations within a large ecosystem of creators.
Channels
38 channels · grouped by how ConvertKit grows
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Direct sales
· 8 mentions · 8 sources“the turning point for me was really going all-in on direct sales ... And so in the early days of ConvertKit ... I started doing what I called concierge migrations ... I would try to convince someone to sign up ... And basically what that means then I'd say, okay, I will do it all for you for free...”
highShow 7 more quotes
“Around this time I also started doing direct sales. Previously if I talked to someone at a conference and they expressed interest in ConvertKit, I’d talk to them and then try to remember to follow-up later...But finally I changed that and started tracking every conversation in a ConvertKit Sales ...”
high“My process for direct sales was just to make lists of blogs using MailChimp, AWeber, and Infusionsoft, and then reach out by email. ... If the call goes well then I talk them through the migration process (which we usually do for them).”
high“Then I put $50,000 into ConvertKit, hired a core team, and started doing direct sales. And the short version from there, you know, basically the last two years or so, is ConvertKit went from $1,300 a month to $1,600 to $2,000 to $2,500. And six months after that decision, we hit the $5,000 a mont...”
high“And it was really shifting from that to a direct sales model of kind of this Paul Graham, like do things that don't scale, do anything to get the customer, do custom development work, migrate them all yourself, all that and do these things to inch forward the progress. And that's what turned into...”
high“This is the exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to $98k in MRR in 12 months with direct sales.”
high“First 1,000 Users – Personal Outreach and Direct Sales 1. Direct Outreach: Founder Nathan Barry personally emailed bloggers dissatisfied with Mailchimp. These emails offered free concierge migration services, making switching platforms frictionless.”
high“Doubling down meant investing $50,000, focusing our marketing on the niche of email marketing for professional bloggers, hiring an internal team, and starting direct sales. Direct sales worked. In the first month Kit grew from $1,300 a month to $1,600.”
high -
Affiliate program
· 8 mentions · 8 sources“But our affiliate program definitely helped a lot. ... So AWeber can offer a mediocre product and win out because of a generous affiliate program. What would happen if a great product offered a generous affiliate program? ... We quickly got most of our customers signed up for the affiliate progra...”
highShow 7 more quotes
“and we did a little more affiliate marketing. The growth from there went from that 15,000 a month to 20,000 the next month...”
high“"Affiliate Program Size and Payouts"”
medium“The older flywheel: affiliates Powered the early years at 30%+ of revenue and still drove about 20%: roughly 3,000 paid affiliates at 30% commission, about $250K a month in payouts against $830K of affiliate-driven monthly revenue, with real concentration at the top.”
medium“Affiliates were how ConvertKit grew for a long time, at one point driving a little over 30% of all revenue. ConvertKit paid a 30% commission, about $250K a month in total, and at least 3,000 affiliates were paid at least a dollar in 2020. The channel was still growing but had been outpaced by sea...”
high“Affiliate Marketing Program: ConvertKit launched a 30% recurring commission affiliate program targeting influencers like Pat Flynn . - Flynn’s promotion alone drove $5,000 MRR in one month, showcasing the power of strategic partnerships.”
high“They maintained a wide-open affiliate program ... All affiliates needed to do was sign up. Then they earned a recurring 30% commission for the life of the customer ... Everyone who signed up got a chance to be an affiliate.”
medium“So we decided to build on organic referrals by launching an affiliate program with our customers. The program helped accelerate growth and demonstrate our appreciation for existing customers.”
high -
Email List Growth
· 5 mentions · 5 sources“Last week, we heard from Angel Marie about the importance of building your email list – and a sweet deal to go along with it! Today I want to share with you how I’m using ConvertKit in my own business. We’ll go over why I choose ConvertKit, how I’m using it to get subscribers, and how I’m automat...”
highShow 4 more quotes
“if you have an email list of 5,000 people, then like whatever project you do after that, some portion of those people are going to be interested in it...the audience you built now...everyone should do it.”
high“Like my life is remarkably easier because I've got 25,000 people on an email list who follow whatever I do. And so when I'm come out with something new, I can email it to them and like 500 people will buy it...”
high“We used this to grow from 0 to 125k subscribers, which scaled perfectly with us. One of the most important tools in our arsenal.”
high“Kit includes unlimited landing pages and email sign-up forms on every plan, including free. There are 30+ landing page templates designed for lead magnets, waitlists, product launches, and newsletter sign-ups. Forms come in multiple formats: inline, modal pop-up, slide-in, and sticky bar. Each fo...”
medium -
Word of mouth
· 5 mentions · 5 sources“for every sale that I made, the next sale got easier. Because people would refer, they would be like, well, who's using you? And then I could name drop bigger and bigger names. And then as we got into, those referrals really started to kick in,”
highShow 4 more quotes
“The referrals from each new customer mean that each sale doesn’t bring in one customer it brings in three or five—potentially more. Bloggers are interesting—they tend to copy what eachother are doing. If you get one then you’ll get a lot more.”
high“ConvertKit fostered a tight-knit community of creators, who spread the word organically through word-of-mouth referrals.”
medium“He published case studies, open-sourced his own revenue numbers, and built a community around transparency that attracted early adopters who felt aligned with his philosophy.”
medium“By July 2015 we were at $15,000 MRR and starting to feel the network effects from our current customers referring their friends.”
high -
Organic social media
· 5 mentions · 5 sources“I would say blogging about everything publicly. Because so many people are writing theoretical blog posts...And instead, I just said, hey, this is what I learned last week...that got attention and that helped a lot.”
highShow 4 more quotes
“"Powered By ConvertKit as a Growth Channel"”
medium“The initial reaction online was equally positive. A few people said they thought ConvertKit was a better name, but they were the small minority.”
high“that list it was from Twitter hacker news I wrote a lot of guest posts”
high“pretty much other than that, you chop it up into clips and put them on social. You link to it from your newsletter. Yeah. like those are kind of the main ways.”
high -
Referral Program
· 4 mentions · 4 sources“The built-in referral engine is a massive growth lever.”
highShow 3 more quotes
“Creator Network Launch: A referral engine drove more sign-ups through cross-promotions.”
medium“In 2017, they launched a referral program where creators could earn commissions by recommending ConvertKit to their audience. That turned customers into an affiliate army. The program now accounts for a significant portion of new signups, and it costs nothing upfront.”
medium“He launched SparkLoop as a referral tool and the catch never showed up. Nobody had tried referrals in that niche. It was that simple.”
medium -
Webinars
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“ConvertKit scaled monthly revenue from roughly $98k to $625k in 12 months by focusing almost entirely on partnership webinars. Darrell picked one repeatable, low-cost growth lever, ran 150+ webinars, and layered an open affiliate program, generous content, a narrow audience, and simple tech.”
mediumShow 2 more quotes
“You can then turn that knowledge into marketing emails, webinars, and other content that sells more effectively. Finally, you can hire a team to do the prospecting, outreach, demos, and webinars that you were doing early on. These days that’s a common part of any SaaS companies playbook.”
medium“Hosted 150+ Webinars: focused on education rather than selling.”
medium -
Freemium
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“And so we launched that free plan and honestly, it's doing so well. In our models, we expected a 3% free to paid conversion rate. We came in at a 5% rate and we're like, that's fantastic.”
highShow 2 more quotes
“"Freemium Plan Launch and Conversion Rates"”
medium“ConvertKit’s freemium plan allowed users to explore the platform without requiring credit card details, encouraging upgrades later.”
medium -
Partnerships
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“The company has gradually expanded its market through strategic acquisitions. In 2021, ConvertKit acquired FanBridge, a service aimed at helping musicians with marketing services. More recently, it purchased Sparkloop, an email referral tool used to grow email marketing programs. These acquisitio...”
mediumShow 2 more quotes
“ConvertKit’s growth re-accelerated to 22% last month with the ad network launches of Creator Network, which lets writers do both free and paid recommendations of other newsletters, and Sponsor Network, which lets businesses sponsor writers.”
medium“Growth re accelerated to 22%, net dollar retention moved above 100%, and the boost was tied to Creator Network and Sponsor Network, which added monetization on top of core email SaaS.”
medium -
SEO
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“SEO drove about 40% of all new ConvertKit accounts. A key tactic had been commissioning local photographers to shoot creator stories, releasing those photos on Unsplash as a ConvertKit creator collection, and then doing outreach to sites using the photos to request backlinks. This had generated m...”
highShow 2 more quotes
“"SEO Strategy and Creator Photo Link Building"”
medium“The result was a backlink engine welded to a brand-building engine welded to a content library — by the interview, Ahrefs showed roughly 70,000 organic keywords, 120,000 monthly organic clicks, and 10 million+ backlinks. ... 40%of all new accounts driven by search, per the December 2020 tape”
medium -
Content marketing
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“I tried really early on to do it through content marketing Because that was the thing that I knew Selling software through content marketing is really hard selling early-stage software Through content marketing is like near impossible early-stage software. That's not very good ... There can be be...”
highShow 2 more quotes
“He put up a page with a signup form and started writing blog posts about his philosophy on email marketing. Within a few months, he had a couple hundred people on the wait list... He also wrote relentlessly about the problems these creators faced. So content marketing became the primary growth ch...”
medium“For ConverKit, they use their podcast network as a powerful machine that feeds into their content ecosystem as a whole. Rather than starting from scratch on a specific topic, they can turn to their collection of episodes to pull insights from to build their next piece of content, be it a newslett...”
medium -
Referrals
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“Continue to provide incredible support and concierge migrations to move these professional bloggers over to ConvertKit and help them grow their lists faster and sell more products. That’s what we’re best at.”
highShow 2 more quotes
“SparkLoop added a way to help creators get those subscribers through creator to creator referrals and paid recommendations.”
medium“Kit's Creator Network is a built-in recommendation engine connecting its 600,000+ creator accounts. When a subscriber joins one newsletter, they see curated recommendations for other Kit creators in related niches. You can also actively recommend other creators to your audience, building reciproc...”
medium -
Online Community
· 3 mentions · 3 sources“But it really changed in 2015. When he started really focusing on ConvertKit community building and that first team retreat in 2016 when they paid out their first profit sharing to employees of $100,000”
mediumShow 2 more quotes
“3. Community Engagement: ConvertKit fostered a tight-knit community of creators, who spread the word organically through word-of-mouth referrals.”
medium“is there a sub-Reddit? Is there a LinkedIn group, a Facebook group?”
medium -
Building in public
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“ConvertKit started out as something that I called the Web App Challenge. And that was basically, hey, I want to start a SaaS company and I'm going to do it all in public because I'm going to blog about the entire process.”
highShow 1 more quote
“We talk about specifically how making ConvertKit more of a public case study when he originally started it really led to some of the early success...”
medium -
Newsletter
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“Hosts my personal + Write with AI paid newsletter (~$400k/yr). The built-in referral engine is a massive growth lever. For simple newsletters with monetization potential, nothing beats it.”
highShow 1 more quote
“You link to it from your newsletter. Yeah. like those are kind of the main ways.”
high -
Social media mentions
· 1 mention“Ultimately, even with the negative criticism, my Facebook feed and text messages were packed full of people saying how much they loved the new name.”
medium -
Guest posting
· 1 mention“So it is a blog post that goes out on the website. That's item. Number one, those blog posts get reformatted into these books ... the third format is video ... the fourth is audio ... ends up being the short form podcast ... fifth ... for all the written stories, original photography ... we have ...”
high -
Lead magnets
· 1 mention“I have 2 lead magnets. For the freelancers, a PDF that outlines 5 Tools to help you build websites faster, and for podcasters, the podcast workbook – a guide to help you launch your show, with prompts and checklists.”
high -
Video content
· 1 mention“if you go to youtube.com slash Nathan Barry, I've got two videos from at the ghost town and I explain a little bit more.”
medium -
Twitter
· 1 mention“I'm clicking that on Twitter. Someone says that, you know, I'm clicking that I'm coming through ... rather than like I was on another podcast. I talked about the same five things and I always talk about, yeah, it's not nearly as interesting.”
medium -
Tik Tok Ads
· 1 mention“Then the next thing that I would do is whatever shows come out the other side, we're like, okay, let's say we make two or three shows out of this. I would have them record at least five episodes, if not 10 episodes before publishing anything. Okay. Because the fun momentum is like, oh, I recorded...”
medium -
Video Ads
· 1 mention“we actually hired like a major marketing agency to produce like video brand ads for us.”
high -
Advertising on social media
· 1 mention“we have not spent much on advertising as a company. Year we're like, okay, we're going to double down and we're going to spend aggressively on, you know, brand and product advertising. ... We spent a bunch in the first half of the year ... we doubled down further in the second half of the year .....”
high -
Backlinks
· 1 mention“we've been doing these creator stories where we profile creators, tell their story, and we've been paying for photographers to come out ... But then what we also did is say, hey, we have this Unsplash collection of creator photos...what's interesting is on all the popular sites that use them and ...”
high -
Press
· 1 mention“Brent and John, the two main owners, you know, let's say the founders of the project are both PR geniuses. Okay. So the town has been covered in like, if you had to name any publication, I guarantee they've run a story about Cerro Gordo, whether it be New York times, guardian, you know, LA times,...”
medium -
Leveraging existing platforms
· 1 mention“One sort of the powered by ConvertKit. In fact, in one of your Twitter tweets, you said, hey, why did you upgrade? And there were folks when we wanted to pay to remove the powered by ConvertKit. So you get obviously some free clicks and a lot of free traffic from that.”
medium -
LinkedIn
· 1 mention“is there a sub-Reddit? Is there a LinkedIn group, a Facebook group?”
medium -
Guest posts
· 1 mention“I wrote a lot of guest posts. I probably wrote 25 guest posts, but I like to create every day.”
high -
Lead Nurturing Sequence
· 1 mention“ConvertKit’s onboarding email sequence helped users achieve early wins, encouraging them to upgrade to paid plans.”
medium -
Answer A Direct Intent Question
· 1 mention“A key tactic had been commissioning local photographers to shoot creator stories, releasing those photos on Unsplash as a ConvertKit creator collection, and then doing outreach to sites using the photos to request backlinks. This had generated millions of photo downloads and a large volume of inb...”
high -
Podcasting
· 1 mention“Nathan and his team created a network for ConvertKit where they currently run 3 different podcasts. Nathan is also a veteran of the podcast guesting world, appearing on dozens of shows to spread the word about the brand.”
medium -
Brand collaborations and giveaways
· 1 mention“We’ve built an incredible brand telling stories, hosting live concerts, and helping over 100,000 creators earn a living.”
high -
Events
· 1 mention“Craft + Commerce, our annual conference in Boise, Idaho, was a great opportunity to make sure we spread the message exactly the way we wanted to. So it would become the “one more thing” in my update on where we are at as a company.”
high -
Conferences
· 1 mention“In 2017 we were able to bring many of these to life through an annual report showing behind the scenes of nearly 1,000 businesses, hosting 300 amazing creators for an in-person conference, and traveling across the United States filming a documentary telling the stories of these creators.”
medium -
Inbound
· 1 mention“The early inflection point in 2015 came from shifting away from content-only growth to a direct sales model: doing custom development work, personally migrating customers, and doing whatever it took to inch forward. This Paul Graham-style approach was credited with turning the business from flat ...”
high -
Integrations
· 1 mention“Kit has 100+ native integrations including WordPress, Shopify, Teachable, Squarespace, WooCommerce, Patreon, Webflow, Thinkific, Zapier, and many more. The WordPress plugin is particularly strong, letting you embed forms and manage subscribers from your site.”
medium -
Cold outreach
· 1 mention“The focus on authors also enabled us to start reaching out to potential customers. Since technical authors did well with ConvertKit, we contacted all the top sellers on LeanPub and Udemy. Out of about a hundred personal emails, we picked up 5-7 customers.”
high -
Founder-led sales
· 1 mention“This is the exact flywheel that I used to scale ConvertKit from $2k to $98k in MRR in 12 months with direct sales.”
high
How 3,049 businesses grow
Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each —
ConvertKit’s highlighted.
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Referral/Word-of-mouth67% ◀
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Social media63% ◀
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Search/SEO58% ◀
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Email48% ◀
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Community37% ◀
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Content/Inbound35% ◀
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Partnerships33% ◀
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Events25% ◀
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Paid ads24% ◀
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Outbound/Sales19% ◀
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Press/PR18% ◀
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Marketplaces/App stores11% ◀
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Podcasting4% ◀
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Building in public3% ◀
