A unique referral system to grow your newsletter

Ali Abouelatta shares untold stories, strategies and growth hacks companies deployed to get the first 1000 customers in his newsletter "First 1000".

He grew his newsletter from zero to 60K subscribers in less than 3 years.

He experimented diverse set of growth hacks but his unique referral system is specifically worth mentioning.
It is called "Exploding Referrals," when your referral counter gets reset at the beginning of every month.

His biggest learning is the power of catering your features to your biggest advocates.

Here is how he explains:

"Everything around my current referral system design is how can we get the people that referred 50 people to refer 100 or 200 vs. trying to get everyone to refer 1 or 2 people.
The latter is spammy, has a low ROI and is much more complicated."

He also built a landing page on his own and it rocks!

I summarized some other key highlights from the interview in the below thread.