Most publishers treat their email list as a traffic channel. Dylan Redekop thinks that’s exactly backwards. He built a full-time business by treating his newsletter as the product itself — and in this episode of the Paywall Podcast, he shares what that shift looks like in practice for traditional publishers.
Listen to this episode on the Paywall Podcast
In this episode, Pete sits down with Dylan Redekop, founder of Growth Currency Media and co-host of the Growth in Reverse podcast. Dylan started his newsletter as a pandemic side project in 2021, committed to publishing 100 consecutive weekly editions, and turned it into a full-time career working with some of the biggest names in the newsletter world — Morning Brew, The Hustle, and more. He brings nearly a decade of hands-on newsletter experience, and his perspective on what actually drives engagement is a useful gut-check for any publisher relying on conventional metrics.
Publishers Are Measuring the Wrong Thing
Open rates get all the attention. Dylan argues they shouldn’t.
Between Apple Mail Privacy Protection and bots scanning emails for deliverability, open rates have become unreliable. They’re inflated in ways that are hard to account for, and they say nothing about whether a reader actually cared about what they read. Dylan’s preferred metric is the reply. A reply is hard to fake. It means someone stopped, thought about what you sent them, and took the extra step to write back. That’s genuine engagement.
The counterintuitive part: most publishers have never asked their readers to reply. Not once. Dylan’s point is that readers don’t think to respond to a newsletter unless you explicitly invite them to. A simple call to action — “hit reply, we’d love to know what you think” — is the lowest-friction feedback loop a publisher can build.
“Replies are really hard to fake. A reply is, to me, the strongest indication of an engaged reader — even if it’s a reply saying, ‘I did not like this edition.'” — Dylan Redekop
Pete connects this to something publishers used to do well: letters to the editor. The reply-to-newsletter model is a modern version of the same thing. Easier to send, easier to curate, and with AI, easier to turn into follow-up content.
Cross-Promotion Isn’t Just for Creator Newsletters
One of the most practical segments in this episode covers newsletter cross-promotion. Two publishers recommend each other to their respective audiences after someone subscribes.
Dylan spent time at SparkLoop, the platform that connected newsletters for paid recommendations (Morning Brew and The Hustle were spending serious money there). But he’s careful to distinguish between what works for large creator-led newsletters and what makes sense for traditional publishers.
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For a local news publisher, he wouldn’t recommend cross-promoting a competing local outlet. Instead, partner with local businesses trying to grow their own email lists — the bakery, the YMCA, the community theater. A fishing magazine, on the other hand, doesn’t need to avoid all overlap: partner with hunting publications, camping titles, or outdoor gear brands that serve a naturally adjacent audience.
The mechanics can be as simple as a post-subscribe pop-up or as formal as a paid-per-verified-subscriber arrangement. Dylan walked through both, including how to handle the imbalance when one partner has a much larger list.
“It’s all seen as a rising tide lifting all boats — as opposed to ‘I’m going to recommend this other local newsletter.'” — Dylan Redekop
Not Every New Subscriber Is the Same
Dylan segments his subscribers by how they arrived. Someone who found his newsletter organically, clicked through from LinkedIn, sought out his landing page, or made a deliberate choice is a very different reader than someone who checked a box in a post-subscribe recommendation widget and may not even remember signing up.
His approach to the second group: assume they didn’t intend to be there, and say so. His welcome email for referred subscribers acknowledges the likely confusion, explains where they came from (he uses liquid code to dynamically insert the referring newsletter’s name), and gives them a clear, prominent opt-out button. The result: lower spam complaints, stable open rates even as the list grows, and an unsubscribe rate that consistently stays below 0.5%.
For publishers running registration walls or cross-promotions, the same logic applies. A reader who registered to access a specific article and a reader who arrived through a partner pop-up are not starting from the same place. The welcome sequence should reflect that.
On AI: A Tool for Thinking, Not a Ghost Writer
Dylan’s take on AI in the newsletter space is clear-eyed. He uses it as an editing and ideation partner. Poking holes in arguments, tightening prose, and generating show notes. He doesn’t use it to write content.
His reasoning: AI can approximate your voice if you’ve fed it enough of your writing, but it can’t draw on your actual experiences. The memory of being 20 and learning something the hard way, the specific observation from a client call, the connection between two ideas that only clicks because of something you’ve lived; none of that is accessible to a model. And readers can tell.
“When we delegate all of our thinking to AI, we’re not really doing much creating. We’re doing ourselves a disservice, and probably doing our readers a disservice.” — Dylan Redekop
AI is like growing eight arms. You do more, faster. But the thinking still has to be yours.
Dylan built a full-time career on a newsletter about newsletters. A meta project that paid off because he committed to publishing consistently and treated the relationship with his readers as the actual product. The lessons he’s drawing from that experience translate directly to what publishers are trying to build with their email lists, and this conversation is worth an hour of your time.
Watch the full conversation:
