I recently crossed 100 newsletter subscribers for SmallBizAI.au. I wrote a behind-the-build post over there about the milestone. But that post is for an audience of Australian small business owners.
This one’s for here.
It started with Moira
Subscriber #1 was my wife.
That’s not embarrassing – it’s accurate. When you launch something new and hit “publish” on your first newsletter, you need someone to receive it. Moira subscribed before I’d told anyone else the thing existed. Then Billy. Then me, twice, under two different email addresses to test the flow.
The first subscriber who wasn’t family or a friend was Mikaela, then Tracy from Nuovo Insights. I have no idea how Tracy found it. That’s the moment it felt real.
Why MailerLite
I picked MailerLite for the obvious reason: it’s free up to 1,000 subscribers, and I had no idea if I’d get to 10.
Six months in, it’s still the right call.
What works well:
- Free tier is the real deal. Not crippled, not a bait-and-switch. Up to 1,000 subscribers with campaigns, automations, and landing pages all included.
- The API is solid. I’ve wired it into the SmallBizAI site so that Gumroad purchases automatically add buyers to the right subscriber group. That took about two hours to build and has been running silently ever since.
- The mobile app. I check it more than I expected. Subscriber activity, open rates, who just signed up – it’s all there and it’s fast. I use it most days.
What I’d change:
- Sending is stubbornly manual on the free plan. Every issue requires me to sit down, paste the HTML, tweak the preview, check mobile rendering, set subject line and preview text, verify links, then schedule. Each step is fine in isolation – it’s the accumulated knob-twiddling that adds up to about 30 minutes per issue. Creating and scheduling campaigns via the API is available, but it’s a paid feature. Fair enough – that’s how free tiers work – but it’s the thing I’d pay to unlock first.
The data
As of September 10, 2026: 121 total ever subscribed. 107 active. Nine people unsubscribed (fair enough), four bounced (bad addresses), one is unconfirmed. The rest were a bunch of test accounts I created and unsubscribed
Growth by month:
- March: 8
- April: 23
- May: 20
- June: 13
- July: 34 🚀
- August: 18
- September: 4 (partial month)
The chart makes the July spike obvious:
July was driven almost entirely by one post: “1,000 Posts. 115 Days. One AI Agent. Here’s What We Actually Built.” It went wide. Sixteen new subscribers in the first week of July alone.
Breaking down the 96 real external subscribers (the other 11 are me, family, and test accounts):
- 72% are based in Australia (69/96) — for a newsletter called SmallBizAI.au, that’s exactly right
- 44% use a business or custom domain email — not gmail, not hotmail. Nearly half are subscribing with a work address.
- 27% have never opened a single issue — not unusual for a list this age, but a number worth watching
- 5 Gumroad buyers in the list, plus 4 Beyond Prompting ebook buyers and 3 State of AI report downloaders — people who paid for something before subscribing, or subscribed and then bought
Countries outside Australia: United States (10), Netherlands (3), New Zealand (3), Malaysia (2), United Kingdom (2), and one subscriber in Jersey. It’s a global list built around a hyper-local topic.
The most recent issue (#24, sent 7 September) went to 107 addresses. Open rate: 44.86%. The top clicked link was the AI search visibility piece, 4 unique clicks, 7 total. That’s the audience I want: people who click on “46% of AI search answers skip local businesses” and actually read it.
Aggregate click-to-open rate over the last six months sits at 58.67%. That means of everyone who opened any issue, more than half clicked something. I’ll take it.
The LinkedIn overlap
I have about 7,800 LinkedIn connections. A raw email cross-reference doesn’t work – LinkedIn only exports email addresses for connections who’ve explicitly enabled that setting, which turns out to be about 160 out of 7,800.
But I keep a CRM of the people I interact with, and I’ve been tagging subscribers as I identify them. Cross-referencing that against my LinkedIn connections export gives a real number: 75 subscribers are people I’m already connected with on LinkedIn.
That’s roughly 70% of my active subscriber base coming from an existing network – some going back almost 20 years. Ben connected with me in 2005. Beth in 2016. Leanne in 2018. Tracy subscribed in May 2026, the same month she connected.
The other 30% are people who found SmallBizAI through search, a shared link, or a Gumroad purchase – people I’ve never met. That number is the one I’m trying to grow.
The archive approach
Every issue of The SmallBizAI Brief has a permanent home on the site. Not locked behind a login, not rotting in an email client – a real URL, indexed, linkable, findable.
Issue #1 is at smallbizai.au/newsletter/newsletter-issue-1/. It’ll still be there in five years. I think that matters. Email newsletters have a nasty habit of disappearing – the platform changes, the list migrates, the old issues are lost. I wanted the writing to outlast the delivery mechanism.
There’s also a newsletter archive page that lists every issue with a summary and send date. I regenerate it automatically whenever a new issue goes out.
Content philosophy
The SmallBizAI Brief is narrow by design. It covers AI as it applies to Australian small business owners – tradies, cafe operators, consultants, retailers. Not AI research. Not startup funding rounds. Not “the future of work” hot takes aimed at enterprise CTOs.
I made that call early and I’ve stuck to it. Every issue asks the same question: what does this actually mean for someone running a small business in Australia? If I can’t answer that question, the topic doesn’t make the cut.
After 24 issues I have a reasonable dataset of what actually gets clicked. The all-time top performer: a piece on the 2026 Privacy Act changes and what automated decision-making means for small business – 9 unique clicks, 20 total. That’s the highest total click count of any single link across all 24 issues.
The pattern across 200+ link clicks is pretty clear:
- Legal and compliance content punches hardest. The Privacy Act piece is the all-time leader. Subscribers click on anything with a regulatory deadline or a “here’s what this means for your business” frame.
- How-to and practical guides are the reliable workhorse. 26 unique clicks across the back catalogue – second only to hub/index pages. The EOFY AI guide drove 19 total clicks from just 3 unique readers. Someone read it five times.
- The 15-Minute Win series gets clicked every time it appears. The category page, individual posts, both get traction. Short, practical, time-bounded content works for this audience.
- AI search visibility is the current hot topic. The most recent issue (#24) had three of its top four links on the same theme – how Australian small businesses show up (or don’t) in AI search results. That’s not a topic the tech press covers at this level of specificity.
What doesn’t get clicked: news recaps (zero clicks across all 24 issues), external links to other sites (2 clicks ever, both in issue #1), and product links without a strong narrative hook. I included a Gumroad link for the Tradies prompt pack once with no context. Zero clicks. The same ebook promoted in issue #19 with a full story around it drove 6 clicks.
The takeaway I keep coming back to: subscribers click when they can see the direct line between the content and their own situation. “Here’s what the Privacy Act changes mean if you use a chatbot to handle customer enquiries” lands. “AI regulation is evolving” doesn’t.
It’s also a one-person operation. There’s no team, no editorial calendar with six weeks of runway, no sponsorship to justify a particular angle. I write what I find interesting, filtered through that “Australian small business” lens. Some weeks that’s a deep dive on a tool. Some weeks it’s a contrarian take on something everyone’s excited about.
I’m not trying to be the biggest newsletter in this space. I’m trying to be the most useful one for an audience that gets ignored by mainstream AI media. So far, a 58.67% click-to-open rate suggests that’s landing.
If you’re not subscribed, you can fix that here: smallbizai.au/newsletter/
And if you’re curious about how I built the site that sits behind it – 1,300+ posts, fully automated publishing pipeline, AI-assisted research and editing – the Behind the Build series covers all of it.
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