When a founder tells me they need revenue in weeks, not months, I ask one question before anything else: do you have a list?
The answer I usually get is a number. "About 40,000." Or just as often: "No, not really."
Both answers miss the point. The size of a list tells you very little about whether it will make you money. I've seen that from both ends.
The big list
One of the brands I've worked on is a wellness brand I helped launch from zero. Over the years we built a list of around 200,000 people.
Most of our energy went into new customers: funnels, ads, cold traffic. The list grew alongside it. But cold traffic has a speed limit. A new funnel takes weeks to build and months to tune, and some months it didn't bring in enough.
When the business needed cash faster than the ads could produce it, we didn't go to the ad account. We went to the list. An existing product, usually a course or a masterclass between $50 and $150, and a campaign built around it. Each of those campaigns brought in somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 in about a week and a half. From email alone.
It worked because of something we'd done since the first week. We emailed that list every week, whether we were selling or not. A newsletter, every Thursday. And before a campaign, we'd send more, all of it about the topic we were about to sell. If the offer was a detox program, the list spent the weeks before it reading about detox.
So when the offer opened, nobody was surprised to hear from us. They'd been thinking about the subject for weeks.
That list was fast because it had been looked after slowly.
The small list
The second case is a telehealth brand selling prescription medication. It's the one more founders will recognise themselves in.
This business doesn't collect leads. There's no free guide, no webinar. People buy first, then complete a medical intake. So when the brand relaunched this summer, the view inside the business was that there was no list. Just past customers.
There were about 2,200 of them. Nobody had emailed them in eight months.
That's not "no list." That's a list nobody has spoken to.
We had also moved to a new email platform, so the first send was partly there to warm up the new system. After two cleanup emails, around 1,500 addresses were still active.
Then, over two weeks, we sent around four emails of pure value and content. Nothing for sale. We told people we were back and what the brand stands for. We introduced the doctors behind it, explained the medication, and showed what we offer now. The point was to remind them why they had trusted us in the first place.
Only after that did we start introducing products and selling to the list.
A few people unsubscribed. Not many. The ones who stayed open the emails and buy. Every email we send now brings in six to eight orders, at an average order value (AOV) of around $120. For a medical prescription brand, where every order is a real consultation and a real product, that's a very good result.
We started at one email a week. We're at two now. I expect to be at three by November.
The comparison that surprised me
When I put the numbers side by side, I didn't expect them to look like this.
200,000 people, $20,000 to $50,000 per campaign. That's 10 to 25 cents per person, and a campaign is several emails.
1,500 people, roughly $720 to $960 per email. That's around 50 to 65 cents per person, from a single send.
It's not a fair comparison. Different products, different prices, different businesses. But it's enough to make the point: per person, the small list earns more, and it isn't close.
The difference is who's on it. Everyone on the small list has already bought once. They know the product, they trusted the brand, and when it comes back with something useful, they listen. Most of the big list is people who downloaded something once.
So size is the wrong number to look at. What matters is who's on the list, how recently they heard from you, and whether you talk to them when you're not selling.
"I don't have a list" is usually wrong
Most founders who tell me they have no list have something like this sitting somewhere:
- Past customers nobody has emailed since they bought.
- People who registered for a webinar a year or two ago.
- A checkout or subscription database.
- A CRM full of enquiries.
That's a list. It's just been left alone.
It's not ready to sell to, though. If nobody has spoken to those people in months, the first job is to remind them who you are and why they signed up, with emails that give them something before you ask for anything. In the telehealth case that took four emails. Treat that as a starting point, not a rule. A list that hears from you every week is different: you can usually sell to it from the first email.
More emails, not fewer
The other thing founders get wrong is how often they send. Most send too little because they're afraid of annoying people.
On a third brand, a restricted-category business where cold traffic didn't convert at first, the list carried the sales. They were sending one or two emails a week. We moved them to three: Tuesday and Thursday about the product, Saturday a personal email from the founder in his own voice, selling nothing. Revenue went up with the extra sends, and the monthly campaigns to that list brought in at least $50,000 each, over two weeks.
Three a week worked there. It won't be right for every business, so treat it as a hypothesis to test in yours, and watch revenue and unsubscribes together, not opens alone.
A following is not a list
I'll write about this properly in another piece, because I've seen it go wrong in expensive ways. The short version: followers belong to the platform, and the platform decides who sees your posts and when. Your list belongs to you. If you need revenue by Friday, you can email it on Tuesday morning and it goes straight to the people on it. With followers, you post and hope.
What I'd do this week
If a founder asked me where to start today:
- Find the list you already have. Customers, registrants, enquiries. Export it.
- If nobody has emailed it in months, don't sell yet. Send something useful first, and keep going until people are opening again.
- Pick a day, and email that list every week from now on, whether or not you have something to sell.
The fast money is in the list. But only if you've kept it warm.
In the next piece I'll walk through how I wake up a list before selling to it, email by email.