Owning CAC - Four Months of Nightly Twitter Replies
The Story
To get his first 1,000 subscribers, CJ Gustafson decided to “own” a single phrase. “In the early days of Mostly Metrics, CJ decided he wanted to ‘own’ a phrase. Essentially, when anyone mentioned that phrase, he wanted his content or his profile to show up. And to start, he decided that ‘CAC’ (aka customer acquisition costs) was that phrase” (Source 1).
He wrote a comprehensive post about CAC on his own site, then went to Twitter and started replying to every post that mentioned the term. The selection criteria were specific: “His criteria were that it had at least 20 likes, was posted in the last week, and it made sense for him to post his content below it” (Source 1).
He told Simon Owens in a 2024 podcast appearance that “he did this every night for about 4 months and that’s how he got his first 1,000 free subscribers” (Source 1).
The Niche Pursuits version describes the same play but with a wider keyword list: “He created a list of 20 finance-related terms and phrases. Every night, he searched Twitter for those terms and left insightful comments while linking back to his newsletter. This method helped him grow from 1,000 to 10,000 subscribers” (Source 2).
CJ’s own description on the Rough Draft podcast: “He had a list of 15 finance-related terms (e.g., ‘net dollar retention’) that he wanted to absolutely own. By responding to comments and questions, and linking back to his writing, he gradually built an SEO flywheel that steadily drove traffic to his newsletter” (Source 3).
The Stock Options run is the clearest example of the strategy compounding with timely news. He wrote a piece on employee stock options, then “started doing this commenting strategy. Companies started laying off tons of workers, and that can really impact someones stock options… He said these stock options comments ended up getting him hundreds of subscribers because it was such timely content” (Source 1).
Lesson for Creators
The hardest milestone in a newsletter is the first thousand. CJ didn’t grow there by going viral; he grew there by going somewhere specific and showing up every night for four months. The mechanism is unglamorous: write one authoritative piece on a term your audience searches, then plant that piece under every public conversation that uses the term. The volume of work is intentionally larger than what most creators will do, which is why it works. You’re not winning the algorithm; you’re winning a small phrase one reply at a time, and a phrase compounds into a list.
Related
- Owning a Phrase on Twitter — Alex Garcia: the same “own a term” pattern at scale
- Audience hacking — the general pattern of inserting yourself where attention already lives
- Engagement hacking — adjacent tactical pattern, low-cost daily engagement work
- The “Mind If I Add You?” LinkedIn DM — Nathan May: parallel cold outreach script grounded in social proof
- Post and Ghost to Community Builder — Charlie Hills: engagement-not-broadcast as the growth lever