How Sam Got 2,000+ Subscribers in 2 Weeks Using HeyReach

Content projects live or die by their audience. And the best way to grow that audience isn't ads or cold SEO—it's reaching the right people with a genuine reason to connect.

Hi, I'm Sam Classen, a growth marketer, co-founder of startup cookie , AI-native agency, and founder of content hub for growth marketers named Startup Growth.ai.

Today, I'm breaking down the HeyReach LinkedIn campaign I used to grow my newsletter to a couple thousand subscribers in just one to two weeks—a system that fuels both my audience growth and my content pipeline at the same time.

The Foundation: What Is Startup Growth.ai?

Startup Growth.ai is a single landing page packed with AI-powered go-to-market and growth marketing workflows. Each workflow comes with a downloadable implementation guide—a markdown file you can drop straight into Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor and have it build the whole thing for you automatically.

To get subscribers, I give visitors a simple trade: drop your email, download the guide. They get a ready-to-use AI workflow. I get a subscriber. Simple.

The challenge was getting the right people to the page in the first place.

The Campaign: Targeting Early-Stage Startup Founders

The core of my growth strategy is a HeyReach LinkedIn outreach campaign targeting early-stage startup founders—exactly the kind of people who want to know about AI workflows they can use to grow their own business.

Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Define Your ICP

Identify the LinkedIn audience that matches who your content is actually for. For Startup Growth.ai, I filtered for:

• Role: Founders, co-founders, and operators at early-stage startups
• Interest signals: Growth, marketing, AI, go-to-market
• Stage: Early-stage companies likely building lean with small teams

Step 2: Build Your Outreach Flow

I set up a simple two-branch campaign in HeyReach:

If not connected:

1. Send a connection request
2. If declined → send an InMail
3. If accepted → send a standard message

If already connected:

• Send a direct message immediately

The Message: Keep It Genuine

The message that drives results is refreshingly simple:

"Hey, thanks for connecting. I'm looking for AI marketing and go-to-market workflows that I can feature on Startup Growth.ai. Do you have any that you'd want to feature?"

This works because it's a real ask. I'm genuinely looking for workflows to publish. But what happens is that people read it, visit the site, and think—"I want to know about all the future AI workflows I can build for my startup." Then they subscribe.

The follow-up sequence adds two more touches:

• Follow-up 1: Share a live example of a published workflow
• Follow-up 2: A Hail Mary—keep me in mind, here's my email if you ever think of anything

The Subscriber Capture: Beehive Integration

Every campaign reply and site visit feeds into a Beehive signup form embedded on the landing page. When someone downloads an implementation guide, they're added to the newsletter automatically. New content pieces go out over Beehive as a regular newsletter.

No complex tech stack. One landing page. One form. One newsletter tool.

Results

This evergreen content campaign allows me to:

• Grow to ~2,000 subscribers in 1–2 weeks
• Achieve a 25–30% open rate on newsletter sends
• Collect genuine workflow contributions from founders to fuel future content
• Run the same campaign across multiple markets simultaneously

The key insight: because the outreach message is authentic, it works in two directions—it grows the audience and generates the content.

Why This Works

Most LinkedIn outreach is transactional and one-sided. This campaign flips that by leading with a genuine ask. Even people who don't contribute a workflow are curious enough about the site to subscribe.

Set it up once, let HeyReach run it in the background, and watch both your subscriber count and your content pipeline grow on autopilot.