Key Data
Explaining some of the numbers
Operating expenses include all expenses that have to do with running the newsletter business (team, tools, marketing, etc.).
Why EBT(earnings before taxes)? Because it shows the project operations better. This business is doable from anywhere and it’s digital-only. We are headquartered in Vienna, Austria and we didn’t want to include any Austrian-specific tax numbers that won’t apply anywhere else.
Letter From The Crew
If you’re reading this, there’s a big chance you are already familiar with us…
If you’re new, here’s a quick intro to our products.
Stacked Marketer newsletter: a free marketing-focused newsletter with carefully curated news, trends, tech, and actionable advice for the modern marketer… The marketer stacked with a complete set of skills that makes them able to drive measurable key results, for small to big businesses.
Stacked Marketer Pro membership: a monthly membership that includes reports, premium content, courses, and a community to help you discover new marketing ideas, angles, strategies, and tactics. Stacked Marketer Pro gives you in-depth analysis every month so you can gain clarity on what’s working, and what’s not working.
Psychology of Marketing: a free weekly newsletter explaining one psychological effect and showing three tactics for how to use it in your marketing and business.
Tactics: a free weekly newsletter bringing you practical tactics to grow your agency, career, business, campaigns, and online shop. These tactics come straight from our research for Stacked Marketer Pro.
This is our fifth annual report. You can read our past reports below:
Why are we doing this report?
Starting with our very first annual report, we had 4 reasons:
- We want to set the tone for more transparency in an industry where there are plenty of snake-oil practices.
- It keeps us accountable because we will not share only numbers, we will share some of our thoughts and plans for the future as well.
- We wanted to show something of a live case study for a business that started from zero not so long ago and put real numbers out there, whether they are impressive or not.
- We think many of you are very smart marketers and business people who will end up giving us priceless feedback. It’s already been useful for previous years’ reports and we will keep doing it.
FAQ: Isn’t it a bad idea to give away so much information? Doesn’t it give potential competitors an edge against us? 🤔
Our take: There are pros and cons to it and we feel the pros outweigh the cons. While we provide a rather transparent overview of our situation, our plans, and our thought process, the devil is in the details.
How should you read our numbers?
Emails sent – The number of recipients over the year. It’s the product of subscribers times the number of newsletters sent. In 2023, we sent 15.5M emails, including Tactics and Psychology of Marketing (once it was switched to Campaign Monitor from beehiiv).
Open rate – How many of those 15.5M emails were opened. We look at unique open rates, meaning that we check individual openers.
Our 2023 average is 51.4%, lower than the 55.3% average from 2022. Sounds strange? Not really. We will explain after we also have a look at the clickthrough rate.
Clickthrough rate – How many unique recipients clicked on at least one link in the email.
This is not CTOR (clickthrough from opens) but clicks from unique recipients.
Our average for 2023 was 2.6% which is lower than our 2022 number of 4.8%.
If you look just slightly under the surface of publicly reported CTR from newsletters in general, you will notice that they are, in fact, CTORs but not defined as such.
This is why we’ve sometimes used the CTOR number (clearly labeled), which in our case would be roughly 5.1%.
There’s more context needed for our open rates and CTR….
⚠️ Apple Mail Privacy Protection (AMPP) and other bots with automated actions inflate open rates and clicks significantly.
This has been the trend starting with 2022, and in 2023, we double down on the principle of real people with real intent.
We had already been cleaning up our list of inactive AMPP users, and in early 2023, we also removed other bot engagements, especially clicks from spam filters and firewalls.
We first created our own rules and segmentation, but Campaign Monitor introduced a feature that automatically excludes most of such bot clicks from all reports.
When combining AMPP and bot clicks cleanup, we have a new context around our engagement numbers.
It’s a context that makes us look worse compared to other newsletters that share public numbers. Almost all other newsletters include bot engagements because it’s hard work to remove such engagements. But…
Our long-term vision is to focus on real people with real intent.
That’s why we decided this cleanup, although could hurt in the short term in public stick measuring contests, is healthier for our business.
Even with this context, when compared to the average, we positively stand out.
According to beehiiv’s State of Newsletters article, average across the board is 38.7% open rate with 1.8% CTOR, while for marketing newsletters, the average is 29.7% open rate and 1.4% CTOR.
We know the source article says it’s CTR but from our experience using beehiiv, they define CTR as clicks from open, so to avoid any ambiguity, we clearly label this as CTOR.
Unsubscribe rate – How many unique recipients unsubscribe from our emails with each campaign.
There’s been an increase to 0.15% here, which we think is partially because of the growth channels we used, more specifically SparkLoop’s Upscribe, which meant more people tried our newsletter but those who didn’t find it interesting unsubscribed quickly as well.
We also know that ~33% of those unsubscribe because they no longer work in the industry so it’s difficult to retain them, similar to previous years, and it’s challenging to significantly improve this number.
Revenue – Quite self-explanatory, it’s all the income from newsletter sponsorships and partnerships, and Stacked Marketer Pro.
Operating expenses – This includes a mix of tools that we use, team salaries (including founder/management salary), technical development, marketing, and occasional T&A expenses.
Our biggest investment is still the team, but in 2023, we also focused extra on technical developments to our products.
The goal here is to improve our internal workflow and also user experience for all readers.
In the end, the better our content, the more improved our overall stats will be as well. That great content can only be created with a phenomenal Crew.
Average revenue per user per month – We look at how much revenue per subscriber we generated in 2023 on a month-to-month basis. The number is based on our revenue for the month divided by the subscriber number at the beginning of the month when our media kit is renewed.
Our sponsorship packages are pre-sold, therefore we present our current subscriber numbers to sell advertising placements for the future. We connect our average revenue per subscriber to the day the sale was made and not the day the newsletter goes out.
2023 Goals vs Reality
Big difference.
We are confident that 2023 was the least predictable full year of business for us.
The only less predictable year was perhaps 2018, the year when we started the newsletter.
Let’s compare our goals and actual results, and share our thoughts for each.
Reflecting on revenue
- Target: $1,000,000
- Result: $715,000
Way under our target. Even though our reach grew, most of our revenue comes from newsletter sponsorships.
And, since you work in marketing, you know that budgets have been significantly cut both at the beginning of 2023, but also later during the year.
With companies spending less money on advertising, it’s natural that the revenue per subscriber decreases compared to 2022. That also means that the total revenue missed the goal for us in 2023.
For 2022, we said we didn’t face any challenges as the “COVID boom” slowed down, but this changed for 2023, where higher interest rates meant less access to funding for companies, thus less marketing budgets along with tighter performance requirements meant less ad dollars spent.
Reflecting on subscriber base
- Target: 80,000+
- Result: 60,000+
Another miss but once we saw revenue target was significantly behind pace, we also reduced our own paid media budget, which then affected our growth.
We do want to share some extra context here… This is the subscriber number for our daily newsletter. When adding up subscribers across Stacked Marketer, Psychology of Marketing, and Tactics, the total goes to just under 100,000.
While we missed our target for the daily newsletter, we were able to grow our overall reach with our products.
For 2024, we are still looking for opportunities for strategic acquisitions, just like we did with Psychology of Marketing (which remains its own newsletter), and like we did with The Funnel (which was merged into Stacked Marketer).
Reflecting on EBT
- Target: $250,000
- Result: -$67,000
First full year in business when we are in the red here.
We could have massaged our numbers and show some “adjusted EBITDA” here but that’s not the point of the report.
We posted a $67,000 loss, driven by our tech developments and acquisitions.
If we “adjust” for those, we would be in the green, but still far from our target of $250,000.
The main lesson from 2023?
Sometimes, things don’t go as expected, and it’s important to adjust quickly.
We think we didn’t adjust everything as quickly as we should have in hindsight but we take that lesson with us into 2024.
What did we improve on compared to 2022?
Content: With the addition of Psychology of Marketing and Tactics, our content has more variety and depth. In December 2023, we also started publishing “data stories”, which put more focus on data analysis and data visualizations. You can see our first such “data story” here.
Engagement: We know the numbers went down but we’re as close as we’ve ever been to our often repeated goal of real people with real intent.
We also know that if we hadn’t been as obsessed with this goal, we could have posted better-than-expected engagement and growth but that’s not how we roll.
An important highlight of 2023: We acquired two other newsletters. Psychology of Marketing on 1st April 2023, and The Funnel on 1st December 2023.
It was the year when we started acquiring other newsletters that we thought were a good fit for us.
What could we have done better?
Revenue: We could have adjusted several things faster in hindsight. Lessons learned and we’re taking them with us into 2024.
Growth: It is something connected to our revenue, but it’s still something where we reacted slower than we should have.
💡The lesson of 2023 for us was that we’re in a rocky period for ad budgets (and not only that, but it’s what has the biggest effect on our business).
We also learned this is something shared across multiple industries, so we made one strategic decision here that we think will help us take advantage of certain opportunities these tough times could bring.
Raising €250,000
On 1st October 2023, we closed a €250,000 investment at a €3,000,000 pre-money valuation. You can read more details about this here.
To give you a summary of it:
- We wanted to be faster and more predictable with our developments.
- We wanted to be able to take advantage of opportunities like we did with acquiring Psychology of Marketing.
- We didn’t take money off the table. On the contrary, a big portion of the investment was from existing Crew members, while the rest was from newsletter readers, and friends.
Q4 2023 already saw our plans in motion, but the results will be visible in Q1 2024.
What is the outlook for 2024?
We don’t think marketing budgets will recover quickly so we think the challenges we first encountered will stay in 2024 too.
What we have to do is deliver a better product for readers and sponsors alike, because if advertisers get profitable results quickly, they will advertise more.
Our 2024 outlook is split into two stages.
1. Big product upgrades
In the past 4 months, we’ve been working on several upgrades that will be rolled out together to make it one big upgrade by the end of Q1 2024.
We don’t want to spoil too much, but we can say it will enhance the Stacked Marketer experience for everyone.
2. Optimization
Once our upgrade is rolled out, we want to make sure we optimize the ins and outs.
So, optimizing any workflow adjustments we will have made, optimizing the platform experience for all readers and members, and last but not least, optimizing our business economics where it’s still possible.
Not to say we are not always thinking about optimizing things but it will be a bigger focus with such a big change in place.
Let’s look at growth, revenue and content in more detail.
Growth: We have certain channels that we plan to continue, such as SparkLoop and Meta Ads, but we want to continue exploring acquisitions of other high-quality newsletters.
You might be wondering “Why does acquiring other newsletters make sense?”. We can explain…
Having good quality content and having a good business are two different things. We see more and more good content struggling to monetize. On the other hand, monetization has been one of our strengths relative to other newsletters.
In other words, we think that being part of the Stacked Marketer ecosystem will generate more revenue for most newsletters.
It’s also a faster way to grow our reach, because newsletter readers read newsletters, so people are already familiar with the concept.
🤝 💸 If you have a newsletter for marketers that you’d consider selling to us, hit us up!
Revenue: We don’t think there’s a big bounce back in 2024 when it comes to marketing budgets, so we don’t think there’s likely to be a huge increase in revenue per subscriber for us. That means growth has to come from more ad placements and non-ad sources.
Content: We’ve been focused on written content because it was, and still is our biggest strength. In 2024, we want to improve and increase the quality of visual content too, starting with “data stories”.
Aside from that, courses for Stacked Marketer Pro are also a big priority. We want to create a library that can help a marketer of any level improve.
Compared to when we previously tried any kind of visual or video content, this time we are not messing with the working system that is our written content. Instead, we have other Crew members and partners work with us on the non-written content.
After a big miss in 2023, what are our goals for 2024?
- $1,000,000 revenue in 2024.
- 150,000 subscribers across all newsletters.
- $200,000 EBT result, which means roughly 20% EBT margin.
As mentioned before, we don’t think 2024 is a big bounce-back year. We wouldn’t mind if it were, of course. We think we are much better prepared to benefit from more favorable market conditions than we were 3 years ago.
One thing is clear to us: We have the best readers of any newsletter out there. The type of insightful replies we get and the discussions we have remind us of that every time. And we will try our best to make Stacked Marketer an even better experience for you! ❤️
