- Zain Kahn and his brother, Awais, are the cofounders of the AI newsletter Superhuman.
- The newsletter brings in six figures in ad revenue monthly and has more than 300,000 subscribers.
- Their team uses AI to streamline processes including writing email subject lines and proofreading.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Zain Kahn, the 29-year-old cofounder of an AI newsletter based in Dubai. It has been edited for length and clarity.
As cofounders of the AI newsletter Superhuman, my brother, Awais, and I lead a team of eight, which consists of six full-time and two part-time employees.
We moved from Pakistan to Canada in 2016, and then to Dubai in 2022, where we launched our newsletter a year later.
Within three months, the newsletter had over 135,000 subscribers, and it’s since grown to more than 300,000 subscribers. Our ad spots are constantly sold out, which brings in six figures a month and makes us a seven-figure-revenue business. Here’s how we built it with the help of AI.
Our newsletter’s growth has been largely organic
When I started building the newsletter, I was working as the head of marketing at an edtech startup. I decided to quit that job to pursue this venture full time in April because I knew an opportunity like this doesn’t come by often.
I first tested the newsletter content in Twitter-thread format, where I have a following of more than 400,000, and it went from there. I’ve been growing my Twitter account for two years by writing threads that simplify topics such as marketing and psychology. Late last year, I started reading a lot about AI and wrote a couple of threads that went viral. I officially started focusing most of my content on AI this year.
We started doing paid marketing two months ago, but readers acquired through paid channels make up for less than 20% of our total subscribers.
My goal is to create high-quality content about AI that educates and entertains my audience
I write the newsletter content myself, and I delegate the research to my staff. Our newsletter is all about AI, so we feature AI-generated images in every issue as well as an AI-created AI tutorial.
We most frequently use ChatGPT, mainly for ideation, such as coming up with email subject lines or different angles for a story, and for proofreading. We also use ChatGPT plugins to do tasks including summarizing or simplifying research papers. This saves us about five to 10 hours every week.
Other AI tools that we’ve used for the newsletter include Bardeen, Midjourney, Gamma, and Flair.
Newsletters are one of the best ways for creators to make money
They offer direct contact with our target audience, ways to monetize through ads, and a platform for selling courses and paid memberships.
I’ve learned that a single newsletter subscriber holds more value than multiple social-media followers due to the opportunity for direct contact and increased visibility they offer. When I launched a course last December, I saw more conversions from my 5,000 newsletter subscribers than I did from my 500,000 online followers.
My day-to-day attention is on metrics related to email opens, read rates, and click rates. I believe in hiring only when there’s an obvious need or when there’s something more valuable that I could be working on. Hiring has helped me monetize ads, grow our subscriber base, and launch our newsletter on Instagram.
We send out emails five times a week from Monday to Friday
We’ve also recently started to offer a premium version of the newsletter for $5 per month, which provides more in-depth tutorials and goes out on Sundays.
When we were only sending a newsletter out once a week, I was the only one working on it. But when we decided to increase to five newsletters a week, we needed five days’ worth of quality content, so I hired a full-time researcher. We use mornings for research, afternoons for writing, and evenings for editing, reviewing, and rewriting.
The primary source of revenue for our newsletter business is sponsorships. I haven’t taken any money for myself from the business yet — all the revenue generated has been invested back into the business. I understand that growth can take a few years, and my current focus is more on building the newsletter than extracting money from it.
Twitter and LinkedIn played vital roles
Twitter and LinkedIn account for about 70% to 80% of our 300,000 subscribers. We also utilized platforms such as Sparkle for subscriber recommendations, and though we’ve tested Facebook and Twitter ads, they haven’t been significantly effective.
I post once a day across every channel, including Twitter and LinkedIn, and three times a week on Instagram. I view my social-media profiles as more of a marketing channel rather than as a platform to express my personal life or views.
I advise other creators to build their audiences and newsletters concurrently to avoid missing out on potential subscribers. I regret not focusing more on growing my newsletter while building my initial audience because this could’ve led to an even larger subscriber base for my newsletter.
I envision AI playing a bigger role in the creation of the newsletter in the future
When I was writing the newsletter in the beginning, I wasn’t using any AI tools. Now I use ChatGPT and Midjourney every day. I’m probably going to incorporate more tools as the tech improves.
As our business has grown, the operations, especially on the financial and sales sides, have become more complex. We regularly reassess and redefine the roles and responsibilities of the team every four weeks to accommodate new work and shifting priorities.
Looking ahead, I believe our newsletter can grow to be much larger. At the current pace, I anticipate hitting a million subscribers by the end of the year.
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