Rowan Cheung

We just launched the Reddit for AI use cases.

A place for builders to learn from other builders on how they're using AI to get ahead in life, work, and business.

The submissions have been INCREDIBLE so far.

A few of my favorites:

Personal news: I’m joining Sound Ventures as an advisor.

Fun story, Guy Oseary first reached out back when The Rundown had 150K subscribers.

I had no idea what I was doing, and I’m still not sure why he took the call...

But we’re at 3.5M now, and I’ve learned he has a real gift for spotting talent early, whether that’s in music or through early investments like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Fortunate to be on the receiving end of that, and even more grateful for his mentorship along the way!

What makes Sound different is how much they focus on brand, marketing, storytelling, and distribution, which in my opinion is the most important thing right now.

It’s never been easier or cheaper to start a company, but the flip side is that new startups pop up in the same categories every day. What makes one stand out is the ability to tell its story.

I’ll also be getting a closer look at what’s coming before it’s obvious, and I’ll be sharing what I’m seeing with you.

Excited to join my friends Roberto (@rpn) and Tiff (@TiffinTech_ ) as advisors alongside a deep bench of marketing and media minds.

Let’s go.

Top 5 learnings growing The Rundown to 3.5M total active subscribers and 55%+ open rate:

1. Email is its own platform, treat it like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter

Super readers (open every email, click ads, and stick around for years) genuinely like email as a medium. We have millions of readers who don’t use social media. Best way to acquire them is through other newsletters, referrals, or being the reason they stop using social media.

Barely anyone is building for this audience. I’m more bullish on email than any other platform (long-form YouTube is a close second).

2. The newsletter industry lacks innovation

Look at mobile apps, ecom, edtech. Custom quiz onboarding, a landing page for every ad, hundreds of new creatives a day. Meanwhile most newsletters, including some of the biggest in the world, have a basic landing page and standard onboarding.

We built an onboarding quiz funnel that, at one point, got us close to negative CAC with hundreds of thousands a month in ad spend. That’s what let us scale aggressively and outbid competitors.

With AI coding and platforms like beehiiv, there’s no excuse not to build new experiences for your readers. The opportunity here is wide open :)

3. Newsletter sales is mostly an education problem

We still run social partnerships at a significantly higher CPM than our newsletters, yet the newsletters convert better and get way more clicks.

A lot of advertisers don’t understand newsletters as they do with influencer marketing, so at scale it becomes an education game.

Once advertisers get it, they stay. We’ve been booked out at multiple ads a day for the last 3 years, months in advance.

4. Stay lean, fast, aggressive

Other newsletters have built large sales and content teams. I think it’s better to stay small and pay high-quality people to do very good work.

Revenue can increase with more employees, but the opportunity cost of not moving fast in the AI era is a long-term net negative.

For example, we constantly test new growth experiments and new forms of media. Most don’t work and that’s fine. The point is we can pivot the same day because we're lean.

5. Lastly, don’t listen to people who say email is dead or that you shouldn’t run paid ads. That’s ignorance and lowkey skill issue.

3.5 years in, and The Rundown is approaching the 4M total newsletter subscriber mark 👀

Grateful for the journey so far, so much more to come

The only moat left is the ability to move faster than the pace of change