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One person, 120 newsletter sponsors
The sponsor flood
Between 70 and 120 newsletter providers were emailing for copy approval and haggling over CPM rates, and newsletters had no platform to run it all on. The growth lead, who doesn't code, asked Claude Code how to automate it and started by building the system with it. Claude was plugged into email, with scheduled checks at nine, noon, and six, and a Slack message whenever a decision was needed.
Negotiation and setup
When a sponsor emailed, the agent recognized a newsletter request, asked for rates, researched the audience, and handled the first part of the negotiation. A human approved the partner and the contract. After that the agent took in the cost data, wrote the copy, sent the emails, created the links, and set up conversion tracking.
Judging each run
Once the newsletter ran, the agent compared performance with the cost against a target CPM and a target conversion rate, and decided whether to continue with the partner. A run that didn't work out was left to fizzle. Every link's results fed the next round of copy, so each draft was written from the full history of what had worked. It began as a folder of skill and markdown files and grew into a shared system for the team.
Why do newsletters price ads by CPM?
CPM stands for cost per mille, the cost for every thousand impressions, with the M taken from the Roman numeral for a thousand. Newsletters borrowed it from print and display advertising, where audiences were also sold in thousands. A newsletter's count of opens is a shaky basis for it, because Apple Mail Privacy Protection, introduced in 2021, preloads images and registers opens that never happened. Sponsors therefore lean on link clicks and conversions.
How do tracked links tie sales to a newsletter?
Each placement gets its own link with tags added to the end of the web address. The standard tags are called UTM parameters, short for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin was a web analytics company that Google acquired in 2005, and its tags became the basis for Google Analytics. When a reader clicks, the tags travel along, so a later signup can be credited to that exact newsletter.
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