Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
CB Chenell Basilio Chenell Basilio I reverse engineer how newsletter creators grow to 50k+ subscribers.

“These people are the most excited about your content that they will ever be. And you're showing them this little green box that says success. I highly recommend people redirect that to what I call an almost there page. So it's like, you're almost there, but actually go check your email, go reply, go do this extra action, whatever that ends up being.”

The Nathan Barry Show · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026

“These people are the most excited about your content that they will ever be. And you're showing them this little green box that says success. I highly recommend people redirect that to what I call an almost there page. So it's like, you're almost there, but actually go check your email, go reply, go do this extra action, whatever that ends up being.” — Chenell Basilio, The Nathan Barry Show

Context

Asked for the growth lever almost no newsletter writer works on, Chenell points to what happens right after someone subscribes. She argues the confirmation screen wastes peak attention, and adds that the replies it prompts also help deliverability.

Listen to the episode → More from Chenell Basilio → More Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS quotes →

Transcript

The Nathan Barry Show Around 54:03 into the episode
Chenell Basilio

It's subscriber experience. Okay. You've done all this work. You've created the content. You've positioned it well. You're driving traffic to it. People are converting. But then they subscribe to your newsletter and it's almost like crickets or the experience isn't great. So examples of this. If you

Nathan Barry

say my newsletter, I'm going to cry. I'm just kidding. We'll get into that later.

Chenell Basilio

So someone subscribes, the forum just says success. And then it's like, cool. Okay. These people are the most excited about your content that they will ever be. And you're showing them this little green box that says success. I highly recommend people redirect that to what I call an almost there page. So it's like, you're almost there, but actually go check your email, go reply, go do this extra action, whatever that ends up being. And that is just such a better experience for people than success. And it's like, okay, now then they just, they might get your welcome email, but maybe they didn't go to their inbox to check it because you didn't tell them to. So I really enjoy this kind of thing. Mine is really corny and it's just like me pointing at like, hey, you're almost there, but go click this thing. So that helps a lot.…

Nathan Barry

up using that data later on?

Chenell Basilio

So that's how I can get on calls with people because I'm like, all right, you have a newsletter. I want to talk to people who have a newsletter generally. How many subscribers do you have? How long have you been doing this? And so I can use that to get on calls. I can also use that to segment…

Nathan Barry

Yep. I like that. What else matters in subscriber experience?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Nathan Barry Show

“I was always trying to come up with original content over and over again. What is something that I could say that I have not said before? And that's entirely the wrong lens.” — Nathan Barry, The Nathan Barry Show “Even like the notion of almost gospel around relationships that you should ask people, like, how can I help you? And to me, I think that's incredibly problematic because you're putting the onus on the other person to come up with ways that you can be helpful. And they don't have full inventory of your experiences, your expertise, all that kind of stuff.” — Jayson Gaignard, The Nathan Barry Show