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Cut Anyone Inactive for 50 Days

The Story

After the AutoGPT merger, Mindstream sat at 110,000 subscribers with an open rate of 27-28%. The subscribers from the merge had joined an open-source project, not a newsletter, so engagement was always going to be soft. Most operators would have either lived with the diluted metric or run a one-time re-engagement campaign and called it done. Adam set up a permanent automation that hunted dead subscribers every day.

“if anyone didn’t um engage like open or click on our list in I think it’s 50 days we took them off the list completely”

“we were like actively and manually scrubbing our list with an automation that was happening all the time”

The 50-day window was the calibrated answer to a real tradeoff: too short and you cull subscribers who simply did not open last week’s issue; too long and your sender reputation drifts down because Gmail and Outlook see the dead opens. Fifty days catches anyone who has functionally unsubscribed without unsubscribing.

The deliberate consequence was that Mindstream’s topline subscriber count grew slower than it could have. Adam openly acknowledged he could have inflated the headline to whatever he wanted and pushed CPMs higher.

“our topline number of subscribers could have been almost really as high as we wanted to. But again if you if you do that and inflate your prices as such you can end up suddenly being um unviable for these advertisers”

The compounding consequence was an open rate that climbed from ~27-28% to ~46-47% over the year, which is what made the long-term advertiser deals from Card 5 honest. Buyers who renewed were buying genuinely engaged eyeballs, not a number on a media kit.

Lesson for Creators

Aggressive culling is the unsexy infrastructure behind a sustainable ad business. A 50-day no-engagement cutoff makes the open rate you quote to advertisers the actual open rate they will see on their first send. The marketing-team instinct to maximize the headline is the right instinct for impressing investors and the wrong one for keeping advertisers past month two.

Quotes

  • “if anyone didn’t um engage like open or click on our list in I think it’s 50 days we took them off the list completely”
  • “we were like actively and manually scrubbing our list with an automation that was happening all the time”
  • “our topline number of subscribers could have been almost really as high as we wanted to. But again if you if you do that and inflate your prices as such you can end up suddenly being um unviable for these advertisers”

Sources