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Kyle Poyar only quit his job to go all-in as a solopreneur last fall. In his first full year, he’s on track to hit $1.5 million in revenue. This is a story of a high-value B2B audience and a five-revenue-stream business anchored on advertising.
In this episode:
— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor
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From no ads to a six-figure partnership in one call
The first time Kyle Poyar sent a prospective advertiser rates to advertise in his newsletter, Growth Unhinged, they bought more than $100,000 in inventory. They didn’t even ask to get on a call to discuss the details.
Kyle hadn’t even set up an LLC yet; he scrambled to open a dedicated bank account.
"I was honestly, in some ways, testing the waters to see if there was interest," Kyle says of sending that first invoice. "I'd be pretty happy doing this full time if I could get paid for it."
The advertiser who immediately bought in was one of several would-be sponsors who’d been circling for years, waiting for the day Kyle would finally sell.
The lead-up to this sale was four years in the making. Kyle started Growth Unhinged — a newsletter on startups, AI, software pricing, and go-to-market — in 2021, while working at a venture capital firm, where the rules barred him from earning a single cent off the side project.
That same week the ad deal closed, he quit to run his newsletter full-time.
How Kyle grew his audience
Kyle started building his audience in earnest in 2020, on LinkedIn, while stuck inside like millions of other professionals.
"There's a cringe mountain you have to climb on LinkedIn, where if you start posting, your friends reach out to you like, 'What the hell is this? Who have you become?' And that happens for a good couple of months."
He kept posting through the cringe, though, and a year later, he’d built a following large enough that when he launched Growth Unhinged in March 2021, his LinkedIn and Twitter audiences pushed his email list to 2,000 subscribers within a few weeks.
After the initial rush, Kyle’s newsletter growth stalled. It took roughly 18 months to reach 5,000 subscribers — a glacial pace, Kyle recalls, before the line finally bent upward.
He upped his cadence to biweekly issues, added a referral program, and started writing dense, comprehensive guides built to be saved and forwarded rather than skimmed once and forgotten.
The lever he leaned on hardest, however, was collaboration with other writers. Kyle swapped guest bylines with people like Lenny Rachitsky, whose product newsletter is one of the most-read in tech, and cross-promoted relentlessly. Each swap borrowed an already-engaged and trusting audience, which converted far better than paid reach.
In this community, “no one sees themselves as a competitor," Kyle told us; a reader who loves his work would happily read pieces by Emily Kramer and CJ Gustafson too, so why not share their audiences?
Today, after five years of folding successful experiments into a sustainable growth strategy, Kyle’s newsletter has over 85,000 subscribers.
LinkedIn is still the top of Kyle’s newsletter growth funnel. In a newsletter issue published last year — cheekily titled "LinkedIn isn't over, you're just bad at it" — Kyle laid out the playbook behind a platform following that's grown to 110,000, with 14 million impressions in a year:
Engage before you post. Show up in other people's comments first.
Lead with the graphic. His most-shared posts almost all carry an original infographic, built in Google Slides, dense enough that people stop and study it.
Write zero-click content. Say the whole thing in the post; don't make readers chase a link.
Post 2–3x a week. Sundays over-perform.
Find your counterintuitive POV. A real one, not a hot take for its own sake.
Repurpose your greatest hits. The best ideas get another lap.
The relationship between Kyle’s LinkedIn and newsletter is as much about content strategy as it is about growth. He tests an idea on LinkedIn, waits to see what lands, then develops the winners into a deeper newsletter issue — which he promotes right back on LinkedIn.
Like many newsletterists, Kyle cares deeply about audience ownership and directly engaging his readers. At the end of 2025, he migrated his newsletter from Substack to beehiiv, a move he says he wishes he’d made sooner.
(Full disclosure: Creator Spotlight is part of beehiiv. The company is also one of Kyle’s ongoing sponsors, though this interview was conducted separately from that deal.)
On beehiiv, he cites gaining more control over his newsletter's look and data, improved deliverability, and room for automations and digital products.
The move also let him rebuild his paid tier; Kyle launched "Unhinged Perks" — free access and discounts to 19 vetted GTM tools, bundled into his $150-a-year subscription and pitched at up to $40,000 in value. This model articulates the sharpest version yet of his stance on paywalls: subscribers should pay not for the writing, but for what they can act on.
How Kyle makes money
In his first year as a full-time solopreneur, Kyle is pacing toward $1.5M across five revenue streams. Each one is already clearing six figures:
Advertising
Paid subscriptions
Consulting
Speaking
Podcasting
The paid subscription product is tracking around a $125k run rate, but advertising dominates, bringing in five to six times as much as paid subscriptions, which is why Kyle argues that the majority of B2B newsletters have their business model backwards.
"Most newsletters should really be ad-supported more so than subscription-supported," he says.
All five business lines work as a flywheel:
His writing attracts potential consulting clients
Potential clients pay for subscriptions to access in-depth analysis
Kyle draws a hard line about what sits behind the paywall: the newsletter built for readers to skim on their commutes stays free, while the deep, original research a reader would actually act on — the kind an analyst firm might charge five figures for — is what he asks people to pay for.
Paid subscribers often convert to consulting clients. Consulting work puts him "in the room" with the exact people who read his work, which makes the writing sharper
Ads and speaking feed off that momentum
Ask Kyle where he sees his business in three years, and he doesn't reach for a bigger number. "Hopefully," he says, "you're finding someone who's a little more tan and less stressed."
"I don't actually have a huge ambition to grow this to be the biggest, most revenue-generating thing possible," he tells us. What he wants is more room: more than six weeks of vacation a year. Time working from somewhere more interesting than Boston.
This summer, that means two weeks off the grid hiking the Tour du Mont Blanc.
Learn more about Growth Unhinged.
Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn.
A few notes on pricing and packaging ✍️
Few creators can reverse-engineer their own pricing in a real-time conversation; Kyle has a reputation as a software product pricing expert and this past year, as he’s built his business, he’s applied these skills to his own products.
As I listened through this episode, a few tactics stood out:
Price to value, not to your comfort zone.
Kyle advises companies on pricing for a living, and he’s still underpriced his own newsletter ads. When he set his first ad rates, he anchored to a number that felt good to him rather than one tied to what an advertiser could actually earn back.
The takeaway: Set your price against the value you create, then test upward.
“Looking back, I underpriced. I charged what I thought was an awesome rate, that I'd be really happy with. And now I'm like, wow, I should have charged 50% more. But it's the benefit of hindsight.”
Also, when you’re selling ads directly, think bigger than CPM.
CPM means “cost per mille,” or cost per 1,000 impressions. For a niche, high-value audience, cost-per-impression math often underprices the work. Kyle's readers include CEOs of major companies; if one advertiser closes a $100k deal after a quarter running with him, the impression cost is beside the point. He prices solely to the advertiser's return.
For creators with massive audiences working with consumer brands, CPM might make more sense. Niche, high-value audiences are a different proposition.
Make the ads flow seamlessly into your writing or coverage.
Kyle only runs sponsorships he believes will be useful for his audience — brands and products that would organically surface in his writing.
Recently, he published a piece walking through four custom Claude skills he built to run Growth Unhinged — a content editor, a LinkedIn punch-up tool, a B2B newsletter growth skill, and an SEO checker.
It was sponsored by beehiiv, the newsletter platform he (and Creator Spotlight) runs on, and the embedded ad highlights how he uses beehiiv’s MCP through Claude. The ad delivered standalone value, so readers engaged with it instead of scrolling past.
Sell packages instead of ad slots.
Kyle sells his ad offerings on a quarterly basis. Partners get:
Inventory
Category exclusivity that blocks a sponsor's competitors while they run
Ad copy he writes himself in his own, first-person voice.
He caps how much inventory he sells each quarter and gets close to sold out before opening up more, constraining supply and giving him both revenue visibility and the leverage to push prices.
Like the Claude example above, he ties sponsorships to a theme he's already writing about and steers partners toward value-added offers. One webinar promoted in a single send drove 500 signups and, by the advertiser's count, six figures in pipeline.
Write for the save, not just for the open rates.
Kyle started building dense, comprehensive guides "so good that someone's gonna save this and share it." That kind of content compounds — forwarded, bookmarked, and returned to months later. A few from his archive:
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