Building someone's list while building your own

How giving compounds

A few months back, I watched two creators start newsletters in the same niche, roughly the same month, with roughly the same skill level.

One spent the weeks doing everything the growth guides tell you to do: optimizing headlines, running referral programs, posting consistently, studying what performed.

The other spent that same period doing something that looked, from the outside, like a worse strategy: she spent a meaningful chunk of her time talking about other people’s newsletters. Quoting them. Recommending them to her own readers. Showing up, genuinely, in their comment sections and their inboxes.

A month later, her list was larger. Not slightly larger — meaningfully larger, and growing faster. And full of people who resonated with her messaging.

Why the “inefficient” strategy won

The first creator was playing a zero-sum game against an algorithm and a finite pool of attention. Every gain had to be wrestled out of the system directly.

The second creator was playing a different game entirely. Every time she championed someone else’s work, she did three things at once: she put her name in front of that writer’s audience, she signaled to her own readers that she was generous and well-connected rather than self-interested, and she made a real ally out of someone who — eventually, unprompted — returned the favor.

She wasn’t gaming a system. She was building a network of people who actually liked her, which turns out to be a far more durable growth engine than any single tactic.

The part that takes faith

This approach is slower at the start. There’s no dashboard that shows you “generosity ROI” in week two. You’re trusting that the relationship you’re building now matters more than the open rate you could be chasing instead.

But compounding never looks like much in the beginning. It just looks like you, showing up for someone else’s work, again and again, until one day a whole network of people are showing up for yours — and you realize you didn’t just grow a list. You made friends along the way who’d help you regardless of what your numbers looked like.

That’s the trade. It’s a good one. And it’s fun!