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Social Experiment: The Go-To Voice for Gen-Z Sobriety
How Brooke LeBlanc Created Her Own Lane in a Growing Niche
Darwin Binesh & TG
December 22, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 18 minutes
Table of Contents
Alcohol has been around for thousands of years.
It’s something so ingrained in our culture that it’s considered strange not to drink.
In October 2020, Brooke LeBlanc decided to take the plunge and cut alcohol out of her life entirely.
On her journey, she decided to publicly document her counter-culture experience.
Fast-forward 3 years later, and she’s amassed 30,000 followers across social channels and built a brand called Edge that offers coaching and cohorts to help others on their own path to sobriety.
We recently sat down with Brooke LeBlanc, Founder and CEO of the Social Experiment and Edge Health to discuss the next generation of sobriety, how she’s building a community in the space, and why she recently launched her newsletter on beehiiv.
Brooke was eager to share her journey in sobriety, why she’s optimistic about the movement, and how she’s built a brand and a following around her passion.
If you’re looking for inspiration on creating your own newsletter, building a community-driven brand, or creating your own space within a niche, then keep reading. This Creator Spotlight showcases the myriad of opportunities that open up when you go all in on a niche and provide value day in and day out.
Brooke LeBlanc is a typical 20-something living in New York City. Except, she’s not typical. She’s decided to go against the grain by leaving the world of alcohol consumption behind. And, she’s made it her mission to help others find their own alcohol-free journey.
Now, Brooke is the founder and CEO of Edge, a tech company connecting the world through sobriety. As a leading Gen-Z voice in the space of alcohol-free living, Brooke’s building a community and products to help others cut back or quit drinking to live a healthier lifestyle.
When she went online to share her story of going sober, she didn’t realize it would go as viral as it did. She quickly recognized that she had a real voice in the community and could help others better their lives as well.
Brooke shared, “My own social experiment has been awesome. I never feel like drinking is something that I'm giving up by choosing to not drink, like I'm quitting something. I’ve gotten so much energy back.”
She elaborated, “I don't think that I could have the deeper level of friendships and family relationships as I do now. I don't think that I would have made as many bold life choices as I've made.”
Brooke explained that one of the ‘why’s’ behind her choice to cut out drinking was due to her entrepreneurial drive.
She explained, “Being an entrepreneur is a very exposing, challenging, but rewarding journey to go on. You need to be fully on to manage the workload and also manage to be the person who's in charge of both strategy and execution as a solo founder. I want to have as clear a head as possible to execute and deliver all my promises to customers (we have an MVP program) and then in the future, when we have employees and investors.”
After two and a half years of building community through social media in the sobriety space, Brooke decided to launch a newsletter on beehiiv earlier this year.
Brooke shared, “I've been building a community online and sharing my story and collecting other people's stories in my DMs on social media. So this has been a long time coming to launch a newsletter. I decided to reserve the name earlier this year and I started accumulating signups and I launched it about six weeks ago now.”
She explained how her newsletter is “a head nod to the straight edge
movement” as a part of her company, Edge Health.
Brooke shared how the newsletter is “centered around the ethos in the spirit of cutting back or quitting drinking being a cool thing.”
Rather than looking at sobriety as depriving yourself, she’s “putting a stake in the ground and saying that it's rebellious to go sober, because today in most cultures around the world, it's contrarian to not drink.”
She shared, “The newsletter is designed around viewing sobriety from a cultural lens. So looking at all of the trends that are involved, from why people choose to cut back or quit drinking to the medical perspective and new science that's coming out, to the prolific nonalcoholic beverage market that's exploding and taking over the alcohol sales market.”
Brooke conveyed how she’s going to start featuring information on different cultures, including the history and future of drink. She’s optimistic that alcohol is going to be less of a go-to choice if you’re looking to change your state.
She elaborated, “With the legalization of marijuana and the destigmatization and eventual legalization of psychedelics, we're seeing a massive consumer shift in behavior and it's not just a trend.”
By diving into this topic, Brooke isn’t just looking at one group of people. Rather, she’s aiming to connect with others in the space, such as people looking to start living a sober lifestyle and investors and other founders in the space.
Brooke shared, “[My goal is to] set a bull case for the vision that I see and take all of the learnings that I've had over the past few years in a very small, but growing market underneath the multi-trillion dollar wellness category and share that out into the world.”
By launching her newsletter, Brooke is able to create a marketing engine and community builder to provide value to the niche and build authority in the space.
She shared, “It's really cool how collaborative of an industry it is in the sobriety space because it's still so new. There's much less competition. We're really fighting against the old guard of the alcohol market. That’s the synopsis of what we're building and why I'm on the platform and beehiiv was the go-to choice.”
Brooke’s not just optimistic about the growing sobriety movement. She’s also optimistic about newsletters built on beehiiv. She already has a few domains she’s secured on the side for future newsletters on the platform.
She elaborated, “beehiiv was really the only platform of choice. I know Tyler Denk firsthand and we had lunch here in the city a couple of months ago. He sold me on the company and he was like, ‘You need to get set up with us. We're the Shopify for newsletters.’ So I'm completely sold on building our platform natively within beehiiv.”
Bullish on the Growth of Sobriety
While people have been consuming alcohol for thousands of years, Brooke believes there’s a shift happening, and sobriety is on the rise worldwide.
Brooke shared, “It's cool to make a bull case and say something that's been around for thousands of years will not be for much longer. People immediately have a resistance to that because the best predictor of the future is the past.”
She continued, “It's really interesting to look at what people are demanding. And there’s a growing demand for healthier alternatives.”
In addition to the growing demand for alcohol-free beverages, Brooke has also discovered that policies are changing around the world when it comes to drinking.
She explained, “Similar to what we saw with cigarettes 10 years ago is what we're seeing with drinking today.”
In a recent newsletter, Brooke shared how Ireland is going to be the first country in the world to legally require a health warning label on all alcoholic beverages and there will be signs required to be put up in bars.
Brooke explained how Ireland's implementation of this policy will have a ripple effect throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
She shared, “They had to get this passed through the EU to sign it into law. Usually what happens in the EU is a trickle-down effect and they're the first domino to fall, but we'll start to see how science, demand from the people, policymakers, and business owners are going to push this shift forward.”
“It’s going to be less and less of an immediate go-to choice to drink alcohol, whether or not you want to change your state and imbibe in something or you don't want to at all.”
beehiiv: A Path to Own Your Audience
For the past 3 years, Brooke has successfully grown to over 30,000 followers across her social media. And, while it’s been a great way to build a community and connect with others, the reality is that it’s volatile.
Social media networks have high risk built in. If the development team decides to change the algorithm, you could lose the majority of your engagement. If you post something that goes against company policies, you could be banned for life. Plus, social networks come and go. And, if you don’t figure out how to bring your audience with you, your hard work will all go to waste.
Brooke explained, “beehiiv is a way to own your audience in a way that you can't on social media. Even just using X as an example. They've had so many changes over the past three months. I've been a creator on that platform and built an audience and I don't know if it's going to go away tomorrow. That makes me vulnerable and susceptible to all the years of work, content, and relationships that I've built on that platform.”
She believes that “every single person” whose goal is to build authority in a special interest niche should have their own newsletter on beehiiv.
Brooke shared, “beehiiv gives you the tools to be able to share your voice online and own your audience.
She continued, “I believe the statistic is people keep their same email for up to 10 years. So newsletters are an incredibly sticky way [to reach your audience] where you're not susceptible to leadership change and a reorg structure. And then you lose your audience and all of the hard work you've put into a platform.”
Why Listen to Me? I’ve built several newsletters from the ground up over the years. My latest publication is The Level Ups business newsletter. I also run support at the fastest-growing newsletter platform, beehiiv.
Brooke clarified how even though she’s seen some success on social media over the past few years, it doesn’t compare to the benefits of newsletters.
Still new to the newsletter game, she has a smaller list of 400 subscribers. But she’s already seeing how even a small list can have a big impact. Not only is she getting 70% open rates (which is one of the highest open rates we’ve seen), but the newsletter has opened up doors to business and networking opportunities.
Brooke shared, “The founder of Seedlip [a non-alcoholic spirits company], is on my beehiiv. We had a meeting in New York and we shared interests in the industry. It’s a highly engaged, targeted following across all channels. It's people who care a lot about the mission of what we're building. They're all potential customers, investors, or employees.”
Brooke explained how creating conversations on social media isn’t the same as it is with newsletters, especially when it comes to monetizing an audience.
She elaborated, “That dialogue — you're able to use social media in the DMs for that, but it's a lot lower conversion rate. I think by getting an email from Brooke every week, people build a relationship with me in a way where if they were just a follower, they might feel scared or get nervous. But newsletters are a way to have a conversation async with people.”
She continued, “It feels like you're building a stronger relationship and building trust with people, which in turn leads to whatever conversion you want to see on the back end.”
The Core Product: Paid Coaching & Community Platform
At Edge, Brooke is building a paid coaching and community platform from the ground up. The minimum viable product (MVP) is an Edge cohort, which is an online program.
Rather than doing it solo and self-paced, students progress through the program together as a group and have easy access to teachers, coaches, and other students.
Brooke shared, “What we're offering right now is community. So peer-to-peer mentorship and coaching, which is one-on-ones with myself and other industry leaders, some of which subscribe to my beehiiv.”
By building a newsletter alongside her platform, she’s been able to accelerate her business growth, especially when it comes to building connections with others in the space.
Brooke explained, “What's cool is, I'll shout out another creator in space. This happened last week and she responded and said, ‘This was so useful. Thank you for this newsletter. I'm going to put you in my newsletter and link to your newsletter.’ So there's a lot of industry collaboration, even within beehiiv.”
She continued, “So that person is someone who we're going to bring on as a group coach for our MVP. So it's all this fortuitous cycle, this feedback loop of shouting each other out, helping bring people on to our product, and using our newsletter as a way to recruit people for our MVP.”
Brooke explained how the vision is to eventually turn this online community and offering into an app.
She shared, “That's why we're doing that MVP now — to build traction, have money in the bank, and have some sort of findings that we can present to potential investors (if it makes sense to bring on investment. If not, we're just going to bootstrap the app). So. It's all a part of a larger vision, but taking it step by step.”
Brooke mentioned how the cohort is the core product and the “largest call to action” from her newsletter, and she’s already converted customers from the newsletter to her cohort. And while she continued to “push it every week,” the newsletter has opened up opportunities for different revenue streams like sponsorships.
She explained, “There are a lot of well-funded companies in the beverage space, like Liquid Death and Athletic Brewing, that could be really values-aligned.”
Brooke shared, “I'd love to always keep the end reader in mind. So what would they want to see? They might want a 20 percent off discount to a mocktail event in their city of choice. Or there's always a way to incentivize the reader to care about the sponsor that we bring in. So, really having a values-aligned sponsorship is important."
Enjoying this Creator Spotlight? Learn how Mady Maio of Camber App spins her audience from TikTok to her newsletter and back again to build her brand and user base.
With typical emails, the content is for whoever’s on your list at that time. Once you hit send, it’s gone forever. But, when you send out a newsletter to your audience using beehiiv, it’s sent to their inboxes and automatically posted as a web version to your beehiiv website.
This means your readers (and future audience) can come back to that content forever, allowing you to multiply the value your audience receives from your newsletter.
Brooke explained, “I've had a bunch of people in venture capital and private equity (V.C.P.E.) ask me for industry analysis on the nonalcoholic beverage space because that's starting to get funding over the past year.”
“So what I did instead is I created a free newsletter — my last issue — on that topic and included a bunch of analysis that wasn't original. So it didn't take me that much time. I just used resources that already existed out there in the market and put it together in one newsletter issue.”
She continued, “So what I can do moving forward is every time I get an inquiry, I can just send them a link to that beehiiv issue and say, ‘Go check this out.’ So it's also a way to have a lead generation tool for me too.
Brooke divulged how she learned this from others in the industry.
“I’ve seen Snaxshot and Andrea Hernández use that a lot where she would say, ‘Go see issue 1 or issue 50. That's when we talk about the nonalcoholic beverages.’”
She explained, “I think it’s a really smart way to save myself time and to also use my beehiiv as the way people used to use blogs and their own .com. Instead of me having a ‘brookeleblanc.com’ and my own blog, I can just use beehiiv as a tool that I get to customize and change as I grow as a creator.”
Advice for Creators: Create Your Own Lane
Brooke is a great example of someone who found a small space without a voice and decided to have the courage to become that voice.
Here’s an example of her talking about finding the purpose of her sobriety journey.
She shared, “Because it's such a new space and it's so specialized, there's not really an authority today. There's not one newsletter you can point to and say, that's the one that we’re trying to live up to. So we have no shoes to fill. We get to define our own voice in this industry.”
Brooke explained, “The advice I was given by David Perell — I encourage people to be wonky on the Internet. He said that being wonky, which is just another fun word for saying, ‘highly specialized,’ is a way to actually create your own lane and eventually be the go-to resource and contact. So I see in a year from now — based on the energy and the effort that I've put into this as being the go-to resource for Gen-Z sobriety — all of this is a halo effect for anything else we create.”
We asked Brooke to give us a day in the life when it comes to crafting the Social Experiment newsletter as a solopreneur.
She shared, “It's just me behind the scenes. I've set myself a deadline to post every single Monday. I’m still A/B testing what times people are most receptive to receiving the email on Mondays. I'll have a draft running throughout the week of ideas and things that I think we should cover.”
“Luckily, I started my newsletter after I [acquired] some personal experience and some professional experience in the industry. So I have a lot of ideas already of books I've read, of people that I've met, and of trends that are happening in the market.”
One way Brooke gets the creative juices flowing for her newsletter is by diving into her other passion: running.
She explained, “I'm on walks a lot and I go on runs and I'll just stop, do voice-to-text, and just put an idea out there in my Apple Notes. Then I'll put it into the beehiiv editor, edit it, then send a test email a few times. I'll send a test to my work email, run through it, and make sure everything looks right.”
Brooke shared how her background in journalism has been a major help with editing her newsletter.
“I usually edit a lot. I like to be very succinct in my writing and keep everything brief, to the point, readable, and fun. Even if we have a high open rate, people might only have 10 minutes to check it. If we have a 30-minute read, I want to make sure I'm highlighting, underlining, and italicizing what's important. I'm hyperlinking all of our sources because there's a lot of data in there and I want to make sure people get credit where credit is due.”
She continued, “I studied journalism in college, so I know AP formatting and what's fair in terms of how to paraphrase and how to put things in quotes. So I use all of the fun beehiiv features like the quotations and the call to action button. I use everything, every trick in the book. And then I'll just send it out.”
Putting Yourself Out There Is Worth It
For most people, hitting send is often the hardest part of running a newsletter. It can be easy to get lost in the grind of perfecting a newsletter, and waiting until it’s just right before sending. While it’s important to create high-quality content, going too far down that path can lead to delayed send times, overthinking, or worse yet, not sending at all.
The last step of Brooke’s newsletter creation process is to simply hit send and walk away.
Brooke shared, “I usually walk away from my computer while it's sending because I just want to let it go out into the world and it’s very scary, especially as you grow a bigger audience.”
She explained, “Newsletters are a big business for creators. It can be your full-time job as a creator to acquire other relevant newsletters and create one house for it. It’s really nerve-wracking to send 40,000 or 60,000 emails at once.”
She continued, “It's that startup mentality of just shipping, getting something out there, and then building trust with yourself and holding yourself accountable to whatever you told your audience to expect is creator 101. It sounds a lot easier than it is, but it's really hard.”
Despite the challenges that come along with being the sole writer behind a newsletter, Brooke can already see the value and return on investment it provides.
Brooke shared, “I don't think that I would ever hire someone to replace myself for the newsletter in at least the next few years, because it's such a great way to say, ‘I'm the founder. I'm controlling the narrative, this is what we're about. This is what we're building. Here's the freshest update on us.’”
She continued, “I think it's crazy high ROI value to keep that connection and conversation really pure. I would replace myself in terms of social media. I think creating daily content on other platforms is a lot to have to manage, but there's something really, really special about putting your voice as the founder in words and sending that out to the people that matter most in your industry.”
Advice for Those on Considering beehiiv
We asked Brooke to share some advice for anyone on the fence about starting a newsletter with beehiiv.
She shared, “I would tell them that domains are the real estate of the internet. You should sign up today and get the domain that you want because I have a few accounts on beehiiv for newsletters I want to start in the future.”
“Just post. You don't have to put yourself on a timeline and say, ‘I'm posting weekly.’ If you're a student in college, you can say, ‘Every month I'm going to write about my college football team,’ and then send it out to your friends in your dorm room and build a newsletter list that way.
Brooke continued, “I read a lot about content creators like Marie Forleo and Amy Porterfield, who have been around for quite some time. They've built multi-million dollar brands off their digital products and what they say is that the number one mistake they've had as a business owner is that they didn't build their list sooner.”
She closed by stating, “It’s just an obvious way to have a conversation with whoever you want, and it's also a way to position yourself in a new space and own your audience.”
If you want to follow along with Brooke and learn more about the next generation of sobriety, you can sign up for the Social Experiment or read some recent newsletters like The Story Behind Dry Challenges or The Bull Case for Non-Alcoholic Beverages.
You can also follow Brooke on X or join her waitlist to be a part of the next Edge cohort if you’re interested in taking a step forward in your lifestyle toward sobriety.
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