Good morning! I want to start this week with a shout-out to our badass team member, Izzy. Over the last two weeks, I've asked you to vote for her in her pursuit of the Lauren Holiday Impact Award (a very big deal in the NWSL). Thanks in part to your support, SHE WON!
Not only that, but she made the Sportscenter Top 10 this weekend by scoring a rare Olimpico goal. Wild stuff! Thanks for voting and helping make this a special week for her.
And she's just one member of the Creator Science team that has been hard at work behind the scenes, reopening The Lab for the first time in three months and ramping up our content game again. I feel like we're about to hit a new stride.
Lots to share this week, so read on!
— Jay
Are LinkedIn newsletters the easiest way to grow your list?
What we learned from an experiment by Lab member Vojtech Vosecky
I was a beta user of LinkedIn's newsletter function several years ago. At first, it felt like a cheat code! My LinkedIn newsletter was growing hundreds of subscribers per week—and I wasn't really doing anything to make it happen.
LinkedIn was clearly leaning into these newsletters. Every issue I sent not only arrived in subscribers' inboxes, but in their push notifications too. Dedicated push notifications and an email for every article published through the newsletter felt like such a boon of attention.
But then I soured on it.
The product was really underdeveloped. Formatting options were limited (and frustrating), and the analytics were virtually nonexistent. There was no visibility into which links were being clicked (or how often). And, of course, there's no direct access to these subscribers' email addresses—LinkedIn owns the relationship.
As visible engagement (reactions, comments) on these newsletters declined, I started questioning whether the juice was worth the squeeze. Eventually, I gave up on my LinkedIn newsletter despite having more than 40,000 subscribers.
But a couple of months ago, a member of The Lab shared how he had "cracked email growth" for his Kit newsletter by leveraging LinkedIn newsletters.
Kallaway’s EXACT System For Going Viral (Over and Over Again)
Meet Kallaway, the creator behind the Kallaway Marketing channel and the founder of Sandcastles — an AI research tool that helps creators find and validate viral video topics before they ever hit record.
Kallaway started 4 businesses. All 4 failed for the same reason: no one knew who he was. No audience meant no customers, no leverage, no second chances. So he made it his mission to understand how audience growth actually works.
He cracked short-form content at scale after years of building online businesses, and he built the research system he wished he’d had from the start. Now he has over a billion views, a 50% viral hit rate, and he built a tool to help other creators do the same. This episode is the full system.
In this episode, we talk about:
Content minutes — the framework for mapping how much trust your audience needs before they’ll buy at each price point on your offer ladder
The modern content stack: why short-form and long-form both need to funnel into email, and why that’s the golden goose
The 3 metrics that actually matter for content creators — ranked in order of importance, with views coming in third
A live walkthrough of Sandcastles: channel watchlists, outlier score, deep video analysis, and how to use the MCP to run research through Claude
By the end of this episode, you will have a clear research system for finding validated, high-trust video topics — and a framework for staying creative while using data to de-risk almost everything else.
As you may or may not know, I've been doing a lot of research and writing on how we earn trust online. I haven't published much of that yet, but that's changing this week.
I partnered with my friends at Senja (the best tool for capturing and displaying social proof) to create a free, email-based course on building trust—that I'll share this week.
They're making a special offer for Creator Science readers, too.
So keep your eyes peeled!
Keep going,
Jay
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