How The Modern Leader Turned Leadership Lessons Into a Newsletter Business

Situation:

Kelly Vaughn spent most of her career in engineering leadership and built a reputation by sharing practical guidance for managers and tech leads. She did not want to play the usual content game of blogs and videos that demand heavy production and constant distribution.

So she started a newsletter. It began as a more structured format, then evolved into The Modern Leader, a publication designed to be easy to read for subscribers and easy to write for her. The newsletter became the consistent channel where her voice, point of view, and templates could compound over time.

Challenge:

Her early platform choice created friction with what she was trying to build.

• She wanted to own her audience and avoid being boxed into a walled garden.
• She wanted more control over growth and the ability to collaborate with other creators.
• She needed monetization paths that did not require rebuilding her workflow across multiple tools.
• She wanted a setup that would not slow her down, because consistency was the only strategy that mattered.

Solution:

Kelly migrated to beehiiv and built The Modern Leader around three levers: audience ownership, repeatable publishing, and an offer stack.

What beehiiv enabled:

• A smoother publishing system with templates and an editor that reduced formatting mistakes
• Built-in ways to find and run sponsorships without turning the newsletter into a separate sales operation
• Community and creator-to-creator learning through beehiiv’s Slack community, which helped her pressure-test promotion and monetization ideas
• Flexibility to connect the newsletter to broader business initiatives, including premium content and products

She also kept her production process intentionally lightweight. She batch-wrote content, used AI tools for brainstorming and outlining, and protected her cadence so the newsletter stayed consistent without burning her out.

Results:

After the move, The Modern Leader became more than a newsletter. It became the engine for a small business.

• Subscriber growth accelerated after the migration
• The newsletter created steady inbound demand for sponsorships and premium upgrades
• The audience became a reliable path to sell higher-value products like courses and coaching
• Content production stayed efficient enough to run alongside a full-time role

The bigger win was leverage. The newsletter did not just generate attention. It created a repeatable system where each issue strengthened her authority and made the next product easier to sell.

Takeaway

The Modern Leader is a clear example of how newsletters become real businesses when the operator does three things well:

• Own the audience relationship
• Publish at a sustainable cadence
• Build a simple ladder of offers that starts with free value and scales into higher-value products

Start using beehiiv if you want to build a newsletter you own, grow it with less friction, and monetize without stitching together a tool stack.