Why I cut 11,756 people from my email list

They say you should put a weird number in the title of your articles to make it more clicky. So, I expect this to have a billion views. Meanwhile, there's some stuff I gotta say about growth.

Hi,

I’m the first to admit that the gall of this headline is privileged AF. Most people reading this would probably kill to have a fraction of the people I just cut from my list, but hopefully by the end of this you’ll realize I’m not a special snowflake and you don’t have to be anointed by the growth fairies to grow.

My email game is both strong and very weird. I think I’m better at email than just about anything in my life, but my life is also very weird.

I maintain three main lists, and I consider email as consisting of two parts; newsletters and mailing lists.

Mailing lists are mainly promotional. There is no intrinsic value in any single email because they’re built to sell something. The value is in the offer, not the content.

I maintain both my Wannabe Press and Author Stack mailing lists on Kit. We moved there in May of last year, and my growth has been…weird.

I moved to Kit after Flodesk, one day out of the blue, asked for confirmation for every single person on my list and w…