Why We Buy: Subscribers Up 1.4x, Revenue Up 3.3x — the Structure Behind a ¥150M Year in 2024

This is a case where the premise that more subscribers equals more revenue breaks down. Canada’s Katelyn Bourgoin, who runs the marketer-focused newsletter “Why We Buy,” grew her subscriber base by about 1.4x from 2023 to 2024, while more than tripling revenue. Dollar figures in this article are also given as reference values converted at ¥150 to the dollar, for the sake of comparison within the piece.

Lining up the numbers first

The monthly revenue in the frontmatter is a simple average of the $1M annual revenue divided by 12. Actual month-to-month sales swing far more widely, for reasons discussed below.

Doing the division reveals the shape of it. In 2023, revenue per subscriber was about $6.0 per year. In 2024, about $14.3. Subscriber growth was capped at 1.4x, while per-subscriber revenue grew 2.4x. The bulk of the growth is explained not by list expansion, but by a change in the rate of monetization from existing readers.

What the publication actually sells

“Why We Buy” is a newsletter covering the psychology of why people buy, published twice weekly on Tuesdays and Fridays. Its intended readers aren’t market-research specialists, but marketers on the front lines. The editorial policy is to translate involved psychological concepts directly into examples readers can use tomorrow, and Bourgoin herself has said, “Many of the topics I write about in the newsletter, I learned just weeks before publishing. I’m learning alongside my readers, in public.”

Revenue sources fall broadly into three: newsletter sponsorship slots, digital products (Clarity Call Cheatsheets, the Golden Nugget Review Mining System, and others), and high-ticket one-on-one consulting (hot-seat calls with a general sale price of $750, among others). The “Un-Ignorable Challenge,” run together with Neal O’Grady of Demand Curve, sold out its 127 slots in 6 minutes.

What happened in the year revenue tripled

This publication has two turning points, differing in both timing and character, so they need to be looked at separately.

The first is an audience turning point that arrived in December 2021. Triggered by a post from Amanda Natividad recommending Bourgoin as an “account to follow,” followers grew by 10,000 within 24 hours. From December into the following January, followers moved from 24,000 to over 40,000. The denominator built here became the supply source for newsletter subscribers going forward.

The second, the subject of this article, is the revenue turning point, which isn’t a single event. The revenue growth of over 3x from 2023 to 2024 is explained not as the result of adding tactics, but of cutting them down. Summed up in her own words: “less is more”. The key to success wasn’t doing more, but concentrating on what worked and cutting the rest.

What’s cited as the concrete moves that worked are the use of flash sales and reader segmentation. Flash sales are short, concentrated sales campaigns, explained as smoothing out month-to-month revenue variance. Segmentation is the precondition for selling to a narrowed target rather than sending the same offer to the entire list.

Why “cutting back” raises revenue

What’s worth understanding as a matter of structure is the asymmetry that sponsorship revenue has a ceiling, while product revenue doesn’t.

Sponsorship revenue as of 2023 was about $25,000/month, simply multiplied by 12, that’s about $300,000 a year, roughly the same scale as that year’s total annual revenue. Given a physical cap of 8–10 slots a month with twice-weekly publishing, doubling this revenue would require either doubling the slots or doubling the unit price. Adding slots degrades the reader experience, and unit price is bound by subscriber count and reader quality. Which means the growth in 2024 can’t be explained while staying within a sponsorship-centered structure.

This is the part that in-house products and flash sales carried. Redesigning who gets sold what and when, against the same list of 70,000, can raise per-subscriber revenue without increasing the number of sponsorship slots. The shift from $6.0 to $14.3 per subscriber is exactly the difference produced by this redesign of monetization.

The logic behind “doing less” leading to more revenue sits on the same line. For an individual-scale publication, the scarcest resource is the writer’s own time, and the more channels or products you add, the thinner the design density you can devote to each one. Keep only what’s working, and the execution quality of what remains goes up. That subscriber growth looks capped at 1.4x reads naturally as the result of shifting resources from expansion to monetization.

What this case doesn’t show

What should be noted is that the public information skews toward the results side. The breakdown of revenue (the mix of sponsorship, digital products, and consulting) isn’t disclosed, and how much of the 2024 $1M came from flash sales specifically can’t be identified. While flash sales are described as “smoothing out variance,” short, concentrated sales pushes can also tire out a list, and no mention is made of the backlash from running them too frequently.

A game-like newsletter experiment named Friyay is also said to be underway, but it’s still at the stage of measuring performance indicators, not yet something that counts as a proven success.

And the biggest caveat is that this revenue rests atop the foundation of the accidental exposure from December 2021. An event where one person’s post adds 10,000 followers in 24 hours isn’t something you can deliberately reproduce. It’s precisely because there’s a follower base of over 170,000 combined on X and LinkedIn that a twice-weekly publishing slot can command $2,500–$3,100 per placement.

What can be reproduced, and what can’t

What’s transferable is the design on the monetization side: stop chasing list size and switch your metric to annual revenue per existing reader. Deliberately run a capped-revenue channel like sponsorship alongside an uncapped one like in-house products. Sell to a narrowed target rather than sending the same offer to everyone. These three can be executed even at a scale of a few thousand subscribers.

Finer operational touches (screenshotting reader recommendation posts and re-posting them around publication day, or not mentioning the perk at signup and only revealing the “gift” in the welcome email to prompt a reply) are also the kind of workarounds that don’t depend on scale.

What’s hard to reproduce is the underlying conditions. Katelyn has founded four companies, and shut one down after conducting 300+ customer interviews for a women’s software product that failed. The product of “teaching customer psychology” is funded by that very failure. On top of that, she has experience running a branding and PR agency, and the visual consistency of purple-and-yellow branding rests on that accumulation. That B2B marketers are a niche with high sponsorship unit prices is also not a condition that carries over directly to other genres.

Related reading

• Photo AI (levelsio) — a representative case of an individual developer converting an existing follower base into revenue.
• PDF.ai (Damon Chen) — a case tracking, in numbers, the method of building while gathering readers in public.