Why we run our own newsletters

This industry is full of advice from people who have never shipped an edition. Growth consultants who have never watched a sender-reputation dip, sales advisors who have never fulfilled a sponsorship they sold, strategists whose deliverable is a deck. The pattern is common enough that publishers are right to be suspicious of everyone — including us.

Our answer to that suspicion is not a pitch. It's a portfolio. MMG operates its own newsletters — Waveform Transmitter in underground electronic music, ETS Now in regional Quebec news, The Home Wire launching in home and lifestyle — on the same stack, the same acquisition channels, and the same economics we run for clients.

Run on our own send buttons

The newsletter playbooks we sell run on our own properties every week: subject-line frameworks, welcome-sequence timing, acquisition-source quality scoring. When a growth lever misfires, the downside lands on our send button, and the fix is in the playbook before it reaches a client's audience. The knowledge flows the other way too — the paid-acquisition discipline we built managing seven-figure client spend is the engine behind our own brands' growth. Operating on both sides of that exchange is the point: every claim we make to a client has a receipt somewhere in the portfolio.

The question clients should ask

The obvious objection deserves a direct answer: if you build your own brands, aren't you eventually our competitor? It's the right question, and the honest answer is that audience businesses don't compete the way it assumes. Advertisers with real budgets don't want one placement in one property — they want packages across several audiences in a category, bought through one relationship on standard terms. Every property added to the portfolio, owned or client, makes the combined inventory more valuable to the brands buying it. When we pitch an advertiser in a category where we operate alongside a client, the client's inventory is in the package — the network sells with our clients, not against them.

Density has a second dividend: data. Operating multiple properties in adjacent verticals produces category-level knowledge — which sponsors renew, what placements clear at which rates, where CPAs break — that no single publisher can assemble alone. Clients inside the network price and sell with that information. Publishers outside it are negotiating blind.

We think the ratio of operators to advisors in this business is badly out of balance. We would rather be judged by properties anyone can subscribe to than by claims on a website — including this one.