⚽️ Writing for the love of the game to a global audience

Today's guest exhibits what I'd argue is the most essential trait for any creator: he's obsessed with his niche.

That old saying, "Love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life," isn't really true, is it? Even if you love your work, it's still work.

Here's a more accurate version, especially true for creators: Love what you do, because you'll be working on it almost every day of your life.

The best creators consistently bring that dedication and passion to their work whether writing to 20 subscribers or 20,000.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. As always, please share your feedback, either in a direct reply to this email or by completing the poll at the bottom. I read every single response.

Today's guest is James Copeland, co-creator of a newsletter called LazyFPL. Unabbreviated, that's "Lazy Fantasy Premier League," as in the British equivalent of fantasy football in America.

The English Premier League is the largest football (soccer) league in the world, drawing up to 3 billion viewers throughout the season. Some 11 million people globally play Fantasy Premier League, a relatively simple game where players pick a team of real Premier League players and rotate it each week based on their predictions about which players will perform best.

You likely don't care about all that in the slightest, but you don't have to be an FPL player or have interest in any sport whatsoever to glean something from LazyFPL. It's a sophisticated operation serving some 48,500 subscribers across 80 countries and leveraging savvy growth tactics along the way; entertainment media is serious business.

People frequently ask the Spotlight team for tips on growing their own newsletter audience. There are general rules that can help, but few matter more than this: it depends on your audience and where they hang out.

Take LazyFPL, for example — in nearly two years of existence, around 60% of their growth has happened in a one-month period each year.

This is due to increased audience interest around the start of the Premier League season and the LazyFPL team's strategic concentration of acquisition spend in that period.

We recently spent an hour with James chatting about:

• 💷 Growing from 1k to 10k subs with a £0.10 CPA

• 🥅 The odd growth schedule inherent to the FPL space

• 📢 Why he launched ads before a premium subscription

• 🏠 Making a living through emails

• 🤝 Maintaining the trust of LazyFPL's audience

Read an excerpt of our interview below.

Read enough? Before you go, here are a few quick lessons from James and LazyFPL that are applicable across niches and platforms.

1. Your most effective acquisition strategy will be particular to your niche. FPL interest is heavily loaded into a one-month period each year, so that's where LazyFPL focuses marketing resources. Determine where and when your niche's audience is most concentrated, then strategize around those insights.
   

2. The easiest way to go from 0 to 100 subscribers or followers is to bother everyone you know. This is true for any platform, especially newsletters; almost everybody has an email address. At the very least, getting your personal and professional connections to follow your work should give you accountability.
   

3. Once you've developed platform-specific skills, a smart way to monetize is selling your services B2B. James and his co-creator started a B2B email consulting agency based partly on what they'd learned in LazyFPL's first year. Whether you're using email, Instagram, or any other platform, once you know what you're doing, chances are a business will pay you to do it for them.

P.S. Have more questions for James? He's offered to do an AMA in the comments of this post on Monday, February 12, from 3PM–4PM ET. Add a comment in the meantime and he'll answer it then!

What specific audience did you have in mind at the start, and how did you build the brand around that audience?

We wanted our product to appeal to what's known in the FPL community as "casuals. "The other side of the spectrum would be "die-hards." These are the people who are listening to podcasts every week, who read the articles, who are entrenched in FPL data and analysis. 

Every piece of content in FPL is built around the die-hards. We wanted to create something that appealed to everyone, whether you considered yourself an expert or you're a complete amateur. 

The premise when we started was let's take every FPL podcast, video, and good article and condense it into a three- or four-minute read. We're doing this research anyway, right? We are the die-hards.

How many people work on LazyFPL?

There's three of us running it. Me, Jamie, and The Professor, whose name I can't reveal. I'm not a good enough FPL manager to give advice on the level that he gives. We had another co-founder, Ross, but he has moved on. Originally, it was Ross and I, but then we brought The Professor and Jamie on. 

While it's technically the three of us, our premium WhatsApp community has also become a fantastic resource due to the experts we have in there dishing out advice.

As you grew from zero subscribers to one, to one hundred, one thousand, and so on, what were the inflection points? What have been your primary growth levers?

The first 100 came through my professional contacts in the fantasy football industry. Quite a few more came from my personal network.

We started LazyFPL at the end of the football season, in March 2022, which seems a strange time to launch a fantasy football product. But it meant we could get a feel for how people liked it, almost like a beta launch.

We did a whole pre-season's worth of weekly updates where we would talk about things like player transfers, managerial changes. I posted those updates on the FPL subreddit, which brought in maybe 200 subscribers.

By June, we had about 1,000 subscribers, which validated our idea. 

It won't surprise you to learn that enthusiasm for fantasy football is at its peak at the start of the season. The first game of the season is usually in early August, so you have this month-long phase around that, which is enormous for acquisition in the fantasy football space.

We decided that if we can send newsletters every week leading up to that, we will look like a legit operation that's been running for some time.

In that period, we hit 10,000 subscribers, which had actually been our end-of-season goal, but by the time we got to gameweek one, we had hit 10,000 subscribers.

We got the vast majority of our subscribers in that start-of-season period by paying content creators in the space to plug us.

Approximately how much money did you spend on acquisition for those first 10,000 subscribers?

I will share this data happily, but I should caveat it by saying we got mates' rates a lot of the time because we had preexisting contacts in the industry who were happy to do us a favor.

We were working towards a £0.10 cost per acquisition [CPA] — incredibly low. We found that content creators in fantasy football were happy to give us a series of tweets for, say, £100.

Rather than spending throughout the summer, we compiled our budget and concentrated it on the weeks leading up to the start of the season, when we knew we would get the most eyes on our ads. And £0.10 was approximately the CPA that we ended up at. We spent less than £1,000 to acquire about 9,000 subscribers.

We didn't always have to spend, I hasten to add. For example, there's a great newsletter called The Upshot. They have over 100,000 subscribers, but at the time, they had about 35,000, and they just gave us a plug for free. We had about 3,000 subscribers, and they had 10 times that. 

We drove a lot of growth by pulling in favors and asking nicely. By the time we had 10,000, we were a legitimate enough operation to strike partnerships more successfully.

Acquisition being concentrated around August proved true again this season. Between September 2022 and around June 2023, we gained 4,000 or 5,000 subscribers. So we ended our first full season with around 15,000 subscribers, and then that August, we hit around 35,000 subscribers — nearly a 20,000 increase in a couple of months compared to a quarter of that in the 10 months prior.

Between now and June, we are not expecting to grow much. Our target over the next four to five months is to get to 50,000, which is only a 1,500 increase. It doesn't sound like a lofty goal, but it will be harder and harder to get those subscribers as the season goes on because more and more people give up.

We're pooling our resources for that late July, early August period. That's when we'll get the majority of our year's acquisition.

How do you monetize LazyFPL?

I used to co-run an online FPL merch store called fplmerch.com, and the newsletter was started purely as a sales vehicle for that merch.

We quickly learned that the more conventional ways of monetizing a newsletter, i.e., a premium product and ads, were much more profitable and easier to sell to our audience. 

So, we started with ads. Generally speaking, I recommend that most newsletter founders start monetizing with ads before premium products. 

We calculated our ads based on a £15 CPA — I just Googled "what's a typical CPA for a newsletter" and read it was somewhere between $15 and $20. So I thought, okay, £15 is right in the middle. That was where we started. 

I started the ads process when we got to about 5,000 subscribers. We were only charging around £50 for an ad in one newsletter, but it was a way of understanding how our audience would respond to the presence of ads. Building these early relationships with brands was also important, knowing that if we did scale, we could potentially maintain those relationships.

I was quite hesitant about launching a premium product. What if we've just spent all of these resources and committed ourselves to sending all of these additional emails for the sake of £50, £60 a month in subscription revenue?

I decided that when we get to 10,000 subscribers, we'll try premium because even if we only convert 0.5%, if we're charging £3 or £4 a, that's still a few hundred quid.

Luckily, we converted at about 2% and continue to do so now. We also know that when we come back around to the summer, we'll get an influx of premiums; people are just more interested in paying for a fantasy football product at the start of the season.

Fantasy football is simply a fun hobby that people play with their mates for bragging rights. And that has a ceiling in terms of how much people are willing to pay to get better at it.

How does LazyFPL figure in your personal income and your survival? Are you making a living off of it?

I am all for transparency here because this information is quite hard to find. 

We have nearly 900 premium subscribers. We have a yearly and a monthly subscription; premium subscribers either pay £3 a month through the annual or £4 monthly. We're making about £3,000 in premium revenue each month. 

If we have a good, proactive month finding ad partners, that comes out to around £1,500 more per month.

If we stay at the number of subscribers we have, this is currently about a £50,000-per-year revenue newsletter. Which sounds awesome, at least to me. That's far more than I ever imagined we might make from creating fantasy football content.

Of course, there are three of us involved here, and we're very mindful that for this flywheel to work, we need to reinvest the vast majority of our revenue into subscriber acquisition. 

Too answer your question directly, I have never taken a penny from LazyFPL. Neither have any of my colleagues — only to fund expenses. We don't really intend to until we reach 100,000 subscribers. Of course, we'll still siphon off quite a lot for subscriber acquisition.

TheInboxClub, my email marketing agency, is what makes me money I keep and live on.

Did you start the Inbox Club before LazyFPL or at the same time? How did you learn how to do newsletters enough to start an agency doing that?

I started TheInboxClub after LazyFPL. It's only one year old, actually, and I've only been working full-time on it since October. My co-founder and I are now in a position where we can live off it. We're even looking at hiring new people. 

I started the agency predominantly because, having worked in various content and marketing roles in my life, I've had endless frustration with how terrible many brands are with email marketing. It's a very underestimated platform.

Email has more monthly active users than TikTok and Facebook combined, yet so many of a brand's resources will go into those platforms instead. Most brand emails come off as the digital equivalent of a greasy salesman who comes around your house and tries to sell you air conditioning.

TheInboxClub was set up off the back of that frustration, to make the inbox somewhere people actually want to hang out.

What does the next year to five years of LazyFPL look like for you?

I want to scale in a way that maintains strong open rates and good click-through rates and keeps our audience as valuable as it is at the moment.

So I'll resist saying we want 500,000 subscribers or whatever and instead say, in five years' time, I would be very disappointed if I can't live off LazyFPL. When I say if "I" can't, I mean all three of us involved.

If I'm really blue-sky thinking, taking the format of LazyFPL and applying it across different verticals would be really cool. There's a world in which my full-time job is to oversee and contribute to LazyGolf, LazyNFL, and LazyFPL. 

Ultimately, FPL is a silly game that can mean a great deal to the people who play it. Your work, by extension, has real meaning in your subscribers' lives. What is your responsibility to that audience?

I remember sending a newsletter a couple months ago that had three errors in it. One was confusing two Premier League players with the same last name, and the difference between them was pivotal.

I remember feeling gutted — so much so, in fact, that I sent an apology email saying I was wrong. I never go off-piste. Usually, you only hear from me in our regular emails. But this time, I thought: I've made enough errors there that I'm going to have to send an email. 

One of our key principles is accuracy of information; LazyFPL only works if we are totally accurate with everything we say. It's our job to be accurate with all available, objective information. That's a responsibility I take seriously. If we are inaccurate too many times, the whole foundation of the newsletter comes crumbling down and nobody wants to read it.

Beta-test your content.

This applies whether you’re considering launching a net-new content product, a new section of a newsletter, or a spinoff series — it doesn’t matter.

For example, say you want to add a new section to your newsletter, but you’re unsure how your audience will react. Create a new segment within your subscriber list, send a version featuring that new content section only to that segment, and add a relevant poll or request for feedback to that version.

LazyFPL’s early issues look very different than today’s. The important thing is getting the content out — if people don’t like it, you’ll know. Learn and keep going.

P.S. Have more questions for James? He's offered to do an AMA in the comments of this post on Monday, February 12, from 3PM–4PM ET. Add a comment in the meantime and he'll answer it then!

Content we've been thinking about. Yes, there’s a theme this week: ads.

• It’s the Super Bowl this weekend and influencers are becoming more important for advertisers looking to capitalize on the big game. Question: what’s the different between an influencer and a creator?

• beehiiv launched a monetization guarantee — in the form of guaranteed ad placements — for all users on a Scale plan. The platform’s ad network launched in September 2023 and has paid out over $1 million to participating newsletter publishers.

• Spotify renewed contracts with infamous podcasts “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “Call Her Daddy,” with a few crucial changes. Why? To make more money selling ads.
  

Thank you for reading. While FPL boasts around 11 million players worldwide, I imagine the overlap with our 200k subscribers is quite small. Our goal, as always, is to find lessons in surprising places. I hope you can learn something from James and LazyFPL, regardless of your niche or interest.

On to next week’s issue, featuring a unique perspective on the “building in public” genre that’s become increasingly popular with founders, CEOs, and other tech-savvy leaders.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. One small request: Mind taking a moment to complete the poll just below? Your feedback, especially when blunt, is incredibly valuable as we work to improve this newsletter.