How Office Party leveraged a partnership to skyrocket growth & revenue.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

That’s how Colton Sakomoto describes why he’s running a newsletter with a partner.

Colton and business partner Tyler Parker have successfully grown Office Party, a career-focused newsletter, to 10K subscribers in 8 months.

(How the partnership obviously started ↓ )

Most newsletters are one-person operations. So what’s it like growing and managing a newsletter with a partner?

More importantly, should YOU consider it? (It’s worked out pretty well for Office Party given their rapid growth and success…)

These are all great questions—and we’re answering them in

In this week’s Friday Feature, you’ll learn how Colton and Tyler:

1. Leveraged each other’s social media presence to get initial subscribers
2. Are acquiring subscribers for free
3. Collaborate for ultra efficiency

Ready? Let’s dive in!

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#1 - Leveraging your partner’s audience

Before partnering and launching Office Party, Colton and Tyler were unknowingly building their audience foundation: they were each consistently writing about recruitment and career-related topics on LinkedIn.

They say, "Two heads are better than one." When it comes to growing newsletters, two audiences are better than one.

So, when they decided to launch Office Party, they had the power of both Tyler & Colton's LinkedIn audiences to share it with. Combining forces helped them get their first 1000 subscribers fast—and for free.

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🧐 Why it’s awesome

→ Growing 2X faster: A solo operator can only promote their newsletter to their audience. But, a partner duo can capitalize on each other’s audiences, growing quicker.

→ Free organic subscribers: Sharing your newsletter with your social media audience will help you get more subscribers organically. That’s one way some of the biggest newsletters have grown.

For example, brothers Zain and Awais Kahn grew Superhuman AI to 300K+ (now 500K+) readers by sharing their newsletter on LinkedIn and Twitter.

🙋 How Office Party does it

Colton and Tyler shared (and still do) the newsletter on LinkedIn every time they write it.

But they also leveraged other growth hacks:

→ Changing Role Title. Colton changed his title to “Chief Party Officer” and Tyler to “Chief Vibes Officer.” When you change your title on LinkedIn, it notifies people. So, they plugged the newsletter under that post and asked people to subscribe.

→ Personalized DMs. They DM’ed their connections to subscribe to the newsletter.

→ Post in Relevant FB Groups. Tyler joined career-related Facebook groups and engaged with the members. He gave career advice, solved people’s doubts, and then plugged the newsletter. Every time he did that, 5–10 people subscribed.

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✏️Steal this for your newsletter​

→ Be a team on social media: When posting content, tag your partner to increase visibility among your respective networks. You should also like, comment, and share your partner’s content to give it some extra algo juice. Bonus tip: include your co-founder’s LinkedIn profile in your About/bio and encourage your followers to connect with them.

→ Promote your newsletter: Once you and your partner build a loyal follower base, start your newsletter and ask your followers to subscribe.

→ Incentivize readers: Alex Xu consistently hosts giveaways to persuade readers to subscribe to BytebyteGo. He even offers lead magnets like free templates, PDFs, eBooks, and more in exchange for the reader’s email.

Similarly, you can host joint giveaways, offer a lead magnet, and provide exclusive content to incentivize people to subscribe to your newsletter.

🎧 Bonus: Learn more about how Colton & Tyler execute this strategy in our recent chat →​

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#2 - Getting Paid to Grow

Colton and Tyler’s LinkedIn audience helped them land their first subscribers.

But they wanted to scale the readership faster. So, they invested in FB ads.

With zero FB ad experience, how do you think that went? Yeah not great

But it got a lot better.

(SPOILER: they figured out how to recoup 100% of their ad spend 👀)

​Anthony Castrio used the same strategy to grow his newsletter to 20K readers and $50K in annual revenue.

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🧐 Why it’s awesome

→ Targeted audience acquisition: Paid ads allow you to filter audiences looking for the solution you’re selling. These are more likely to be highly engaged readers. Bonus tip: create a Partner Program with SparkLoop and only pay for high-quality, engaged subscribers.

→ Scalability: Use FB ads to reach an audience with similar characteristics to your existing readers at scale.

→ Self-sustainable growth: SparkLoop’s Upscribe feature helps you recover your ad investment and can even add to your profits, ensuring sustainable growth.

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🙋 How Office Party does it

When they started FB ads, Colton and Tyler were spending $8-9 per subscriber. Not exactly sustainable (as they admit in our recent chat)…

So, they optimized their ads and got their CPA down to $1-1.50 per subscriber.

At the same time, they added the SparkLoop Upscribe paid recommendation widget to their landing page.

And were earning money for every new subscriber:

Colton even shared that during a week-long span, they were paying $1.74 per subscriber through FB ads, but were earning $4.54 per subscriber with via Upscribe paid recommendations.

That's a profit of $2.80 per subscriber 🤯 ​
​
Talk about arbitrage!

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✏️ Steal this for your newsletter

Know how to run a proper FB ad campaign and have an ad budget? Then follow Tyler & Colton's lead and get started.

If not, hire an expert to do it.

Either way, get started earning today: add SparkLoop’s Upscribe widget to your sign-up page (like Colton and Tyler) and get paid to recommend the world’s best newsletters.

Create your free account within minutes and increase your revenue. Get started here.

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#3 - Collaborating for ultra efficiency

Colton and Tyler have created a system to co-run the newsletter. It helps them split work responsibilities, set goals, brainstorm ideas, and communicate consistently.

It’s also just more fun.

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🧐 Why it’s awesome

→ Efficient Workflow: A proper system ensures partners have responsibilities based on their strengths. It avoids confusion and gets the work done efficiently.

→ Zero distractions: When you have set a process to meet your goals, you can focus only on high-priority tasks and eliminate the rest.

→ Accountability check: Partners can hold each other accountable and provide feedback wherever necessary.

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🙋 How Office Party does it

Here’s how Colton and Tyler have created the perfect collaboration workflow:

#1 - Tyler focuses on content research, and Colton’s job is to take all that and write the newsletter.

Here’s how that works:

• Tyler has subscribed to several career-related newsletters and is always reading to find stories that will resonate with their readers. He puts all that research into a shared Notion file.
• Colton then uses the research to write the story and schedules it to send to the readers.

#2 - They meet weekly for 30-60 mins to share feedback, discuss growth opportunities, and plan for the next week.

#3 - They’ve set and agreed upon a clear plan that they’ll work on this newsletter on a long-term horizon. In doing so, they’ve decided to reinvest every dollar back into growth.

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✏️ Steal this for your newsletter

→ Choose the right partner: Never compromise on three characteristics while looking for a newsletter partner:

1. Integrity
2. Complementary skills
3. The same vision

According to Tyler & Colton, it’s best to partner with a friend or someone you already know and trust.

→ Divide roles and responsibilities: Share roles based on strengths. But be flexible.

→ Have clear communication: Set a date to review progress consistently. Have a clear agenda of what you’ll discuss in the meeting—so you don’t waste time..

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Adding it up…

Colton and Tyler’s approach offers valuable perspectives on co-running a newsletter. And they’ve got big plans for the future, including a product (or two) to better serve their subscribers.

Given how well their partnership has worked out over the past 8 months, no question they will be going far, together.

Here are 3 things to do next:

• Check out our podcast chat with Tyler & Colton...
  • Video →
  • Audio →
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• ​Check out the Office Party newsletter →
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• Give us your take: what newsletter is doing something different and innovative we should feature next? Maybe it's yours... EMAIL US and let me know!