How Sunday Money Reached 25,000 Subscribers With beehiiv

Situation:

Christian Collard has been building newsletters for years. After running and selling multiple publications, he returned in January 2024 with a new idea: Sunday Money, a personal finance newsletter built around a simple promise and a consistent format.

Each issue is designed to be quick to read and easy to trust, with a curated set of links and bite-size takeaways on making more money, investing, and entrepreneurship. Collard runs it alongside a full-time marketing role, so the system needed to be efficient from day one.

Challenge:

Even experienced operators hit the same early constraints.

• The first subscribers are slow because you do not yet have leverage for collaborations.
• Growth accelerates only after you can prove engagement and consistency.
• Monetization can become a distraction if it requires outreach, negotiations, and approvals.
• Most platforms make you piece together website, publishing, analytics, and ads across multiple tools.

Collard needed a platform that supported fast setup, repeatable growth, and low-lift monetization.

Solution:

Collard built Sunday Money on beehiiv and used a staged growth strategy.

1. Get the first 1,000 subscribers with Boosts and personal outreach
   He started by reaching out to friends, family, and his existing network. To break through the “no leverage” phase, he leaned on beehiiv Boosts to drive early subscriber acquisition.
2. Use partnerships once leverage exists
   After crossing the early subscriber threshold, he began consistent link swaps and collaborations in nearly every issue. As the list grew, he expanded into larger partnerships and co-marketing campaigns with bigger brands and publications.
3. Monetize without ad ops
   Collard used beehiiv’s Ad Network to monetize the newsletter while keeping it free. Instead of doing advertiser outreach and managing approvals manually, he relied on the built-in workflow so he could stay focused on content.
4. Operate as a side project with minimal overhead
   He used beehiiv’s all-in-one setup for publishing, landing pages, archives, scheduling, and analytics. That reduced the time and tooling complexity that usually stops side projects from becoming real businesses.

Results:

Sunday Money scaled to 25,000 subscribers within the first year, with growth driven by:

• Boosts for early traction
• Ongoing collaborations and link swaps
• Larger strategic partnerships once the newsletter had leverage
• A consistent publishing format that readers could recognize and return to

On the business side, Collard used advertising through beehiiv to turn the newsletter into a new income stream while keeping the core product free. He also highlighted the time saved by having publishing, website, and monetization tools in one place.

Start using beehiiv if you want growth tools, monetization options, and newsletter infrastructure that lets you publish consistently and scale without building a complicated stack.