Aakash Gupta
Product and growth writer with a 16-year PM-to-VP career who built Product Growth into a 100k+ subscriber newsletter by treating distribution as a measurable engineering problem. Positioned at the personal-monopoly intersection of B2B growth, B2C growth, and careers; scaled with a free-list-first sequence, a paid-subscriber northstar, and a Substack recommendation flywheel of 1,100+ newsletters as his single largest acquisition channel.
- The Personal Monopoly Is the Niche — positioned at the B2B/B2C/careers intersection only his path covered, so he competed alone
- Post Where the Audience Already Is — the same essay died on his site and took off on LinkedIn; venue, not quality, was the lever
- Build the Free List Before Switching On Paid — distribution first, a ~60K free list next, paid only after
- Write for the Internal Share — reverse-engineered guides built to pass around inside big companies with L&D budgets
- The Paid-Subscriber Northstar — ranks every piece by net new paid subscribers, not free signups
- One Deep Dive Many Spokes Best Saved for Paid — one paid deep dive atomized into spokes, with the best withheld behind the paywall
- Audit Every Channel by Its Net Effect on the List — measured the podcast as net-negative to the list (~150 unsubs vs ~10) and cut it
- Engineer the Hook Separately From the Post — treats the hook as a separate component, generated and narrowed from many AI candidates
- The Substack Recommendation Flywheel — 1,100+ newsletters recommending Product Growth = his single largest acquisition channel