A Former Airbnb Product Manager Started a Weekly Newsletter After Leaving: 1.2 Million Subscribers With No Ads, and Over $500K a Year Each From the Newsletter and the Podcast in 2024
Lenny Rachitsky spent seven years as a product manager at Airbnb. After leaving in 2019, he planned to start another company, but first wrote up what he'd learned at Airbnb in a Medium post. It took off, and Airbnb's CEO shared it inside the company. He kept writing, moved to Substack in June 2019, and built his first readers through Twitter and guest posts. Only after about 10 months of writing for free did he launch a $15-a-month paid plan; by August 2020 he had about 15,000 free and 500 paid subscribers, earning about $65,000 a year before fees. In 2022, at someone else's urging, he started a podcast. In January 2024, he told CNBC that the newsletter and the podcast each brought in over $500,000 a year. The newsletter passed one million subscribers in March 2025, and its subscribe page now says 'over 1,200,000 subscribers.' He has no full-time employees, works with a team of freelancers, and never raised venture capital. He says he tried paid ads, SEO and referral programs, and 'none of them have done a damn thing'; growth came almost entirely from word of mouth.
Process
Many people assume making money from content takes growth tricks: viral headlines, paid ads, referral loops.
Lenny Rachitsky tried them all. His verdict: "I've experimented with all the growth levers—paid ads, SEO, referrals, BD—and none of them have done a damn thing."
Yet he turned a weekly newsletter about building products into the world's largest product newsletter, with more than 1.2 million subscribers. In early 2024, he told CNBC that the newsletter and the podcast he later started each brought in more than $500,000 a year. He has no full-time employees and has never raised a cent of venture capital.
Stage 1: Leaving Airbnb, and a Lessons Post That Took Off
Lenny spent more than a decade in engineering and product management, including seven years as a product manager at Airbnb, where he worked on supply growth, guest booking conversion and marketplace quality.
In 2019, he left Airbnb planning to start another company. Before diving in, he asked himself: "What did I actually learn over the course of my time at Airbnb?"
He wasn't totally sure. So he started a list in Evernote and turned it into a Medium post. It did far better than he expected: Medium featured it, it reached the top few hundred posts on the site, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky shared it inside the company, and it even made him a little money.
He took two signals from it: his experience was useful to others, and writing could make money. He wrote five more Medium posts on product management and performance reviews.
Stage 2: Moving to Substack, One Reader Batch at a Time
Someone advised him to switch from Medium to Substack: whether he started a company or kept writing, having his readers' email addresses would be useful. In June 2019, he copied his Medium posts over to Substack and kept the default name the onboarding flow suggested: "Lenny's Newsletter." He later joked that maybe he should have thought harder about the name.
His early growth can be traced almost step by step:
- He tweeted, roughly, "I have a Substack, no plans for it, check it out if you want." A few people with big followings shared it, bringing about 500 subscribers;
- A guest post in a newsletter with his target audience brought another 500 or so;
- He decided to try a weekly advice column for product and growth people, inspired by Julie Zhuo's column for designers; Julie shared it too, bringing about 500 more;
- Another guest post got him to about 3,000 subscribers.
In parallel, he spent hundreds of hours over several months on an eight-part series on how to kickstart and scale a marketplace business. Published in November 2019, it brought about 2,000 more subscribers. Looking back, he found that half his growth came from just two posts, and the other half from his every-week regular posts.
Stage 3: Ten Months Free Before Charging
He had no intention of charging at first. Nine months in, after 36 posts, he realized it was still fun, people were finding it valuable, and he still had dozens of ideas. "I realized then that maybe this could be a real thing."
Adding a paid plan meant committing to at least another year, since people buy annual plans. He committed, and in spring 2020 launched a paid plan at $15 a month. He'd studied the top 20 paid newsletters on Substack and found that "insights" newsletters mostly charged $10 to $50 a month; his readers were tech workers with higher earning power. The Substack team's advice: pick a price that makes you "a little uncomfortable."
In August 2020, he said in a Substack workshop that he had about 15,000 free subscribers and 500 paid, earning about $65,000 a year before fees.
By the end of 2020 he had nearly 45,000 subscribers and about 3,000 paid, having published at least one post every week of the year, 64 in all. He'd also launched a private Slack community, already over 2,500 people. He later wrote that once he hit 1,000 paid subscribers, he could make a real living from the newsletter.
Stage 4: One Feature Bent the Growth Curve
In September 2023, the newsletter hit 500,000 subscribers, which he said made it one of the five largest on Substack.
He boiled success down to two things: quality and consistency. "There's no trick to making something like this grow. Growth comes from publishing something valuable, that people want to share with their friends and colleagues, over and over and over." He spends a median of 10 hours per post, some series take hundreds of hours, and he sees a strong correlation between time spent and how well a post does.
The other push came from the platform. Substack launched Recommendations, letting writers recommend other newsletters to their readers. Lenny says the day it launched was the day his growth curve turned into a hockey stick. By 2025, more than 5,000 newsletters recommended his; without the feature, he estimates he'd maybe be at 500,000 subscribers. But he stresses that others only recommend you if your work is worth recommending, so it still comes back to word of mouth.
Stage 5: Talked Into Starting a Podcast
In 2021, he taught a product management course on the online course platform Maven, ran it twice and stopped. The course went well, he said, but "it just wasn't bringing me enough joy"; teaching felt like performing and sapped his energy.
In March 2022, he was a guest on Harry Stebbings' podcast 20VC. After they stopped recording, Harry told him: "Lenny, you need to do a podcast." That "pushed me over the edge."
He spent months reading books about interviewing, buying equipment and pre-recording about 10 episodes. Lenny's Podcast launched in June 2022, with first guests Julie Zhuo, former VP of design at Facebook, and Shreyas Doshi, a former Google product manager.
Advertisers came quickly. Companies had long wanted to advertise in the newsletter, and he'd always said no; once the podcast launched, he reached out to them, and some were willing to sponsor the show instead. He later realized that to be competitive in Apple and Spotify rankings, it was best to publish twice a week, so he did.
In January 2024, CNBC reported that the newsletter had 574,000 subscribers and brought in "over $500,000 a year," and that the podcast also brought in "more than $500,000 per year."
Stage 6: One Million Subscribers, and a Team With No Full-Time Employees
On March 4, 2025, the newsletter passed one million subscribers. Today the subscribe page says "over 1,200,000 subscribers," with paid plans at $20 a month or $200 a year, plus a $400-a-year Insider tier, and annual plans bundle free access to a set of tools. Substack shows "tens of thousands" of paid subscribers. He hasn't disclosed current newsletter revenue; a rough estimate from tens of thousands of paid subscribers at $200 a year would be around $2 million, but that is this article's estimate only.
The audience has changed too: roughly half are product managers, over a quarter are founders, and the rest, the fastest-growing segment, are engineers, designers, growth, data and other adjacent roles.
He has no full-time employees, a deliberate goal, but he has an "all-star team of freelancers and contractors." He does all his own writing, 10 to 30 hours per post, with an editor, a copy editor and a designer; two boutique agencies handle podcast editing, titles, thumbnails and sponsor coordination; a community lead plus contractors and volunteers help run the community; and an assistant and an engineer help across everything.
What surprises many people: the podcast takes less work and generates more revenue than the newsletter. Each episode takes him 3 to 5 hours, each post 10 to 30. But he also says the podcast would hardly have broken through without the newsletter's huge audience.
To keep content fresh, he increasingly brings in top practitioners for guest posts, spending 10-plus hours with each author over five or six drafts. Most of his most popular posts are now guest posts.
As for an eventual exit, he admits: "I have no idea how this story ends." He's experimenting with more guest posts, incubating new podcasts with other hosts, and giving himself more time off.
Thinking
1. Write down your experience, and content and readers will find you. Lenny first wrote just to sort out what he'd learned at Airbnb. Because it was real experience, people wanted to read and share it. The best content often comes from the area you know best.
2. Prove you can keep going before you charge. He wrote for free for 10 months, until he knew he was still interested, readers found it useful and he had more topics than time. Charging is a commitment, and charging too early makes it easy to quit halfway.
3. There are no shortcuts to growth; quality and consistency are the core. He tried ads, SEO and referral programs, and none worked. What worked was valuable content every week that readers wanted to share. Platform features like Substack Recommendations can amplify word of mouth, but can't replace it.
4. You can price higher than you think. Many people only dare to charge $5. Lenny studied comparable pricing, considered his readers' earning power, set $15 and later raised it to $20. If insight content truly solves problems, readers will pay more.
5. A large audience can incubate a second revenue stream. The podcast grew fast and landed sponsors right away because of the existing newsletter audience. Once you have an audience, expanding into new formats costs far less.
6. A one-person business doesn't mean doing everything yourself. He has no full-time employees, but hands editing, design, podcast production and community work to freelancers, focusing himself on writing and interviewing. That lets him stay small while steadily raising quality.
Action
1. Start by writing up your own lessons. Ask yourself: what are the 10 most important things I've learned at work in the last few years? Write them up, publish, and see how people respond.
2. Go where your target readers already are. Share your ideas on Twitter, LinkedIn and similar platforms, and write guest posts for newsletters with overlapping audiences. In the early days, each guest post can bring hundreds of subscribers.
3. Set a steady publishing cadence and stick to it. For example, one post a week. Steady long-term output builds more trust than an occasional hit.
4. Occasionally make a "big" piece. Alongside regular posts, invest time in an in-depth series. Half of Lenny's growth came from two big posts.
5. Launch paid only once you know you can keep going, and price carefully. Look at comparable newsletters' prices, consider your readers' ability to pay, and ask a few readers whether they'd pay at that price.
6. Outsource non-core work. Once your content is steady, hand editing, design and video editing to freelancers, and keep your own time for the core creative work.