[00:00:00] Back in 2022, when I was barely getting this business off the ground, I ran these tiny little audio pop-up events that would grow my email list by 100 to 150 people at a time. I decided to bring them back. Small, low lift, one every month, and hopefully all of that audience growth compounding over time.

The first one is done and dusted, and I have the real numbers, including the bits that didn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped. So today, let’s talk about it.

Are you a female business owner frustrated with battling the algorithm and looking for growth strategies that don’t involve awkwardly pointing or dancing online or throwing cash at paid ads? Welcome to the Email Growth Show. I’m your host, Kylie Kelly, visibility and email marketing strategist. I grew my email list from zero to almost 10,000 subscribers in less than two years, and the same is possible for you, too.

Are you ready to build your email list and start making more money in your online business? Let’s head into today’s episode.

[00:01:00] Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Email Growth Show. I’m so glad that you are here. Now, if I sound a little bit strange, it’s not because I need a new microphone, it’s because I’m recovering from influenza A. Love that for me. This last week has been a blur of vitamin C, tissues, and throat lozenges.

But I am here, and I am so excited to talk to you guys today. So today I thought I would tell you about the little experiment that I’ve been running behind the scenes, because I think this is one of those things that could easily look much more successful from the outside than it actually feels while doing it. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. It was successful, but there were parts that worked really well, parts that didn’t quite do as I’d hoped they would, and quite a few things that I’m changing or paying attention to as I do the next one.

So today I thought I would pull back the curtain on the August Behind the Biz sessions. This was my [00:02:00] August pop-up audio event, and I’m doing these events monthly around a specific topic. August was all about audience growth. The one that is in two weeks’ time in September is called the Black Friday Case Files, and then I’ve got more planned for October, November, and December.

So I thought today I would talk about why I’m doing them, why I chose slightly scrappy audio instead of creating another big fancy summit, what actually happened with the August event — so the numbers, the sales, what surprised me, what I learned. And then I also want to talk about something I get asked all the time, which is where do I actually find the people to collaborate with?

Because I know sometimes when you see someone hosting events or doing bundles or bringing podcast guests in, it can look like they just magically know hundreds of people. To be clear, I do not magically know hundreds of people. There is a strategy behind it, so we’re gonna talk about that too.

So before we talk about the event itself, I’m gonna talk about why I chose audio. Because technically I could have done this as a summit, right? [00:03:00] I could have had video interviews. I could have hosted live sessions. I could have made beautiful speaker pages that had everyone record 30-minute presentations and gone the whole nine yards.

Been there, done that. Nothing wrong with that, right? But I very deliberately did not want to do that this time. I am in a season where I’m asking myself a lot, like, how can I get the result without making this thing enormous? Like, how can I make something good without it requiring so many moving pieces? Especially because, as you all know, I’ve talked about it before, this season of life, two little kids, life feels very full.

We also have some personal things that are going on at the moment. And so again, in this season of life — with whatever that looks like for me, for you — like how can we make this feel light? Yes, there’s always work involved, but how can we do it in a way that feels really good for us?

How can I grow my audience without creating another job for myself, right? You know, I love a project. You guys know that about me. Give me half a reason and I’ll invent a whole event by lunchtime, right? And sometimes [00:04:00] that is brilliant. Sometimes my multi-passionate heart just loves nothing more than that.

Sometimes though, that’s also how you can end up exhausted because you’ve accidentally created a three-week launch and 19 bases when all I actually needed was a simple collaboration. So with these pop-ups, one of my rules was that they needed to stay small, low lift, easy for me, easy for the speaker, easy for the person listening.

So that brought me back to something that I’ve actually done before, which is Voxer-style interviews. You guys know that I do them every time I host Inside the Inbox — they’re always Voxer interviews. I absolutely love them. Why? Because I’m in Australia, most of the people I collaborate with are not. I’ve got connections in the US, Canada, Europe, the UK, like all over the place, and anybody who’s tried to schedule a Zoom interview between Australia and the US or the UK knows it can very quickly end with somebody needing to get up at 5:00 AM, and no thank you, I have never been a part of the 5:00 AM club, and [00:05:00] Zoom is not gonna make me start.

So Voxer completely removes that. I literally send them a voice note question, they answer when they have time, I reply when I have time, and it goes back and forward asynchronously, right? Then at the end, I download the audio, I clean it up a little, and that’s basically it. There’s no calendar tetris, there’s no Zoom rooms, there’s no like, “Oh my gosh, now my kid is sick and I can’t make it.” Like, “I’m sick, I can’t make it.” There’s none of that. I’ve been on Voxer this week sounding like a man, and I have to be okay with that because it’s what I’ve signed up for. But I don’t need to be on a call, which is my saving grace this week.

And I want to add, from the speaker’s point of view, it’s a really easy yes as well. And that matters to me too, because when we talk about collaborations, we often think about what’s in it for us. How many subscribers can I get? How much exposure will I get? Will they be promoting me? [00:06:00] And of course, that is the motivation behind creating these audience growth events. Of course it is. But I think the easier that you can make a collaboration for the other person, the easier it becomes to get really good people involved.

And with these interviews, I’m not asking someone to create a presentation. I’m not asking them to make slides or rehearse a workshop. I’m just saying, “Hey, come and connect with me on Voxer, and let’s have a conversation about this one thing you know really well.” Right? Like, it’ll take 15 minutes. That is it.

And I think another reason why I love this Voxer format — which is a bit harder to explain until you listen to it — but the audio’s not perfect, and I actually like that. It sounds like Voxer. It sounds like voice notes. There’s pauses, there’s background noise, [00:07:00] one of us stumbles over a word. It does not sound like two people sitting in a podcast studio, and I used to think that was something I had to fix. Like, maybe I needed to make it cleaner or more polished. But I actually think the roughness is kind of part of why it works, because it feels like you’re listening in on a private conversation.

It feels like two business friends sending voice notes backwards and forwards, and you happen to have access to the conversation. And when the topic is something like audience growth, or particularly this next one, all about Black Friday, where I’m asking people to share real numbers and talk about something that worked or something that completely flopped, I actually want it to feel like that. I don’t want it to feel like a conference presentation, right? Because people say different things when they feel like they’re having a conversation. You get the bit where they go like, “Oh my God, can I tell you what really happened?” Oh, that’s the good stuff. That’s the stuff I want. I want the real life.

And so I clean up the recordings a little bit, yes. But I do leave a lot of that natural texture in there because I think it’s what makes the whole thing way more human, which I love.

Okay, let’s talk about what happened in the August event. So it literally just wrapped up last week, and I’m really excited to share with you the numbers. So just like normal, I wanna give you the real numbers, the real story, what really happened, because again, it is not just the highlight reel over here.

So the audience growth event ran last week. I had 303 people sign up for the free event, which [00:08:00] I was really happy with. You gotta keep in mind that we had eight speakers, so it was really small, really quite intimate — it’s not this massive summit campaign, right? Like, I wasn’t running around for six weeks promoting it. It was literally eight of us, and they all sent one email, and that was kind of it.

So 303 people saying, “Yes, I want access to this little audio series,” fantastic. The podcast feed itself got over 370 downloads, and that doesn’t include people who listened directly through the webpage I created, so the actual listens would’ve been higher than that. Again, really happy with that. That tells me the consumption was there. They weren’t just signing up and then not getting to it. They were signing up with the intention of, “Oh, let me tune into this,” which I think is really great. I never want to host something where people just sign up and disappear. I want them to consume it because it’s really valuable information. I never put out anything that’s not, right? Like, there’s no point. We don’t have enough time. I’m not gonna waste yours by putting out something without any meat in it. I always put out something that I would [00:09:00] find really valuable in one part of my journey or another.

If you think about it in terms of numbers — if you have an event where 2,000 people register but only 47 people listen, I’m not sure we’ve actually built much of anything. Whereas when a good percentage of the people who opt in actually spend time with your content, now we’ve got something. They’re hearing my voice. They’re hearing the voices of the speakers. They’re learning something. They’re becoming more familiar with my world. That’s relationship building. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Then we have the season pass. Now, this is where the story gets much less impressive. So the season pass was an idea I had, a little bit late, mind you, but I had a few people asking, “Oh, how can I get ongoing access to this? Do you have anything I can buy to get access after the end of the week?” So I was like, “Oh my gosh, amazing opportunity, I’ll create a season pass. I’m doing these events monthly. The season pass will give them lifetime access to all of the interviews forever, for all of them. All five events, they get access to [00:10:00] all of the things.”

I sold one. One season pass. I announced it on the opening night to roughly 100 people at that point. It was a little bit over 100 people when the event kicked off. More came throughout the week, but it was about 100 people. One person bought it, and I know the person really well. Shout out, Colie. I really appreciate you. But yeah, one person. Ta-da. Massive launch, right? $97.

Now, I’m telling you this because I could have very easily left that number out, right? I could have just said, “We had 303 people register, over 370 downloads. Look at this fabulous event that I hosted that was really easy.” But if we are actually talking about business and marketing, I think the useful question is: did it make money? Technically, yes, I had one sale. But no, the season pass itself did not suddenly become this enormous revenue stream.

Now, that doesn’t actually reflect anything on the event. It doesn’t mean the event failed. And this is something that I really wanted to mention because sometimes we [00:11:00] accidentally judge something against a job it was never designed to do. We make a free event and then go, “Oh, well it didn’t make $10,000, so it was a waste of time.” Was making $10,000 the job that you gave the event? Like, was it a revenue-generating event? Was that the main purpose? Because if it wasn’t, that’s kind of a weird scorecard to keep, right?

As an example, when I created these pop-up audio events, there were three things that I wanted them to do. One was nurture. I wanted a reason to give my list something fun, something different, something useful, something that I was hosting — not another PDF, not another training, but something they could go for a walk and have a quick listen and learn something. Something they could listen to when they were driving or picking up the kids or making dinner, and it did that.

The second thing was that I wanted to test a repeatable event format that didn’t wipe me out. This is actually a bigger goal for me than it might sound. I have hosted a lot of events. I know how to make a big splash, but I am trying to get better at creating things that compound without me needing to [00:12:00] summon launch-level energy every time. Because again, I have pretty ambitious list growth goals, right? I wanna double my email list by the end of the year. And here we are in September and I am nowhere near where I wanna be yet.

So rather than throwing that goal away and saying, “Well, maybe I’ll do it next year,” I’m looking at the remaining months and thinking, “Okay, what levers can I pull? What can I repeat? What can I test? What can I create once and make easier every time I do it?” And these monthly pop-ups are one of those levers. Now, thanks to AI, they’re getting even easier to create a system around and make rinse and repeat, which is so exciting.

So my plan over the next few months, right — I ran one in August. I’m running the Black Friday Case Files in September. The link to join the waitlist is in the show notes. I’m running that in September. I’m running another one in October, then November, and then December. Now, I’m not [00:13:00] judging one event. What I’m actually doing is building a little growth engine, and that is very different.

Often we want one giant answer. We’d love to have one giant launch or a lead magnet that suddenly explodes or a collaboration that brings in 5,000 subscribers at a time or whatnot. And I mean, that would be great, fucking fantastic. I wouldn’t say no. But a lot of growth actually comes from stacking small things. 303 here, 150 there, a podcast interview that brings in 40 people, a freebie swap that brings in 70, another event might bring in 200. And suddenly you’ve added 1,000 people without any one thing needing to become the thing. That is much more how I think about audience growth, right? It’s not one door. It’s lots of doors. We’ve talked about this a lot over the last few weeks.

Now the last reason that I ran this August event was that I had my Instagram mini-course coming up. So I created a mini-course called Break Up With [00:14:00] Instagram. I’m so proud of it, I must say. Every time I create a little course I’m trying to make it better than the last one.

50 A Day, fantastic, absolutely loved it. Break Up With Instagram, oh, it’s just that little bit better. Better tools, just a little bit better step by step. I think every time my teaching gets better.

But I thought the audience growth event could act as a bit of a warm-up for that mini-course launch, which made a lot of sense on paper, right? People are listening to conversations about growing their audience, then I have this offer about breaking up with Instagram. Nice little bridge. And did it work? Kind of. About 30% of people who bought the Break Up With Instagram mini-course had listened to the event. So there was definitely overlap. It absolutely warmed some people up, but I would’ve really liked that percentage to be higher, and I think that’s really useful information because now I can look at that and ask, “Okay, was the bridge between the event and the offer strong enough? Did I actually talk about the course enough? [00:15:00] Did people see the relationship between those two things?” Or perhaps Breaking Up With Instagram was too narrow of an offer for an event that was about audience growth more generally, right? So there are the questions that I’m asking now.

So the launch for Break Up With Instagram is just about to end. So what I normally do after any kind of launch is I sit down a few days later with a nice hot cup of coffee and I do a debrief and look at the numbers, look at everything. The people that bought, where they came from, what emails they got, what emails they bought from, the heat maps from the checkout page where people were clicking. I look at everything because more than anything, we just need information. And this is why experiments are so useful, because they don’t need to be perfect, but they give us a lot of information. They give us a lot of data. That’s what I now have after this August event.

So I can definitely say the August pop-up did a really nice job of nurturing. It did a pretty decent job of growing the audience. It was genuinely low lift, and it did some warming up for the launch. But if I was thinking about it in [00:16:00] terms of a sales funnel for the course, I definitely wouldn’t call it a win. And I’m okay with that, right? ‘Cause it was never created just to do that.

To learn, and I’m excited ’cause the next event is in two weeks’ time. It’s called the Black Friday Case Files. It’s running from September 14 to 18, and I am ridiculously excited about this one, because the premise is really simple. I’ve invited business owners to come on and talk about one Black Friday promotion — either that worked really well or that went horribly.

And I actually wanted both, right? I didn’t just want, “Oh, I made 80K in four days and everything was perfect.” Cool, I’m really happy for you, amazing story. But I also wanted the ones that were like, “Oh, I tried this and it went horribly wrong. I spent three weeks building it and made two sales.” There’s so much to learn from those stories too. I wanna know, like, what would they do differently? What was the offer? Was it the timing? Was it the audience? Was their list not growing before the offer? Did they make it too complicated? Did they discount something that didn’t need [00:17:00] discounting? Did they wait until Black Friday itself when they should’ve started promoting earlier?

Like, these are the conversations that I wanna hear, and I’m so excited because I’m having them and I get to share them with you as well.

So like I said, the waitlist for that event is in the show notes, or you can just go to listen.kyliekelly.com to read all about it. Now, as we wrap this up, one of the questions that I’ve gotten a little bit in my inbox since hosting the August pop-up is like, “Where do you find all these collaborators?” And fair question. There are a few things that I do.

The biggest one is that I’m very conscious about not continually collaborating with the exact same people all of the time. Now, of course, I have people I adore working with, and of course I will collaborate with them again. I’m not saying you need a brand-new group every single time, but if every summit you do has the same 20 people, and every bundle you do has the same contributors, and every freebie swap you do is with the same five friends, eventually you are all talking to the same audience over and over again. You are circulating people around [00:18:00] that same little ecosystem. And if the point is audience growth, that becomes a problem.

So I deliberately look for new circles. One way that I do that is incredibly simple. Whenever I am in a bundle or a summit or a collaborative event as a participant, I pay attention to who else is there, because those people are already collaboration-friendly — they’ve already said yes to being in a bundle or a summit or whatever they’re in, they understand promotion, they understand borrowed audiences, and maybe I haven’t personally worked with them yet.

So I’ll look through the speaker list. Who do I like? Whose topic makes sense? Who has an audience that overlaps with mine without it being exactly the same? Who feels like somebody my audience would enjoy learning from? And sometimes that person goes into my world for six months before I ever invite them to anything. I might subscribe to their emails. I might listen to their podcast. I might reply to something. I might follow them on Threads. I’ll see how they talk to people, because — and this is a really important part for me — I don’t wanna work with somebody simply because they [00:19:00] have an email list. I wanna know, do I actually like how this person runs their business? Do our values line up? Would I feel comfortable introducing them to you? Do they teach in a way I respect? Because when you invite someone into your event or to do something with you, you are lending them some of your trust, and I take that really fucking seriously. That is why I’m probably slower about collaborator outreach than some people.

I’m not usually cold-emailing 100 people with, “Hey, do you wanna join my summit?” I want some relationship built there first. And people often hear like, “Oh, relationship before pitch,” and assume that means it’s just a tactic to get a yes. It really isn’t for me. Of course it helps the pitch. It helps if somebody knows who you are. They’re more likely to open their email and say yes. But I’m also using that relationship period to decide whether I want to pitch them. There are plenty of times when it’s a no for me.

So there’s that. Another place I find people is literally while I’m scrolling. Now, I [00:20:00] know I teach a lot about not relying on social media. That doesn’t mean I think social media has no use. It can be brilliant for discovery for this reason. So sometimes when I’m scrolling on Instagram, or if I’m over on Threads, rather than mindlessly consuming, I’ll be looking for people that are saying something smart, who keeps showing up in replies, who has a bit of a different perspective. Even other friends that I have — who do they keep talking about? I use it for research. You know I’m not creating 47 reels over there, but I’m looking for humans.

And often I’ll do this just on occasion when the kids are watching TV or eating dinner or something, and they want me to sit with them, but I probably don’t wanna be watching SpongeBob SquarePants anymore. So I’ll do some research. And when I find somebody I get a bit curious about, I’ll go and join their email list. If they have a podcast or a website, I’ll go and check them out a little bit, because whilst I might discover them on social, it’s usually not where I want the entire relationship to live. So that’s something else I’ll [00:21:00] do to find new people that are outside of my circle.

And then the other place as well is Facebook groups. So I don’t normally use Facebook groups that often, but occasionally, if I just have a few speaker spots open, I will drop a post in a few collaboration or speaker Facebook groups. So as an example, for the Black Friday Case Files, I had a couple of guest spots open. I wanted some fresh voices. So I posted in a Facebook group and was basically like, “This is what I’m doing. This is what I’m looking for. This is the topic. If you’ve got an interesting Black Friday story, let me know.” And it worked. I found two people who had never been involved in one of my events before, which is exactly what I wanted.

Now I wouldn’t do that for every spot, particularly ’cause I’m keeping these events small and curated. I don’t want 30 speakers, right? Like I want five to eight that I personally would vouch for. So that was really helpful to lean on to fill those last couple of gaps.

Okay, so if you’re listening to this thinking, “Okay, Kylie, that sounds lovely for you because you already know people,” I do wanna push back on that slightly, because yes, [00:22:00] at this stage of my business, I do have a network, but the network exists because I have been building it for years. It did not just appear.

I want you to be thinking that every collaboration that you’re in has the potential to create another relationship, right? Every summit you participate in puts you next to another group of business owners. Every podcast you guest on introduces you to the host. Every time you’re in a bundle, there are 20 other contributors that you could potentially connect with. Your network compounds too, and this is why I get a little twitchy when people approach collaborations purely as, “Ooh, how many subscribers can I get?” Sometimes the subscriber number is not the bigger result or the biggest win.

Sometimes you might join a bundle and get fuck all subscribers. It might not be a good fit for that. But you might meet someone in that bundle who later invites you onto their podcast and then introduces you to somebody else, and six months later, you run an event together and you bring in 400 subscribers, right? You cannot always measure the value of a relationship in the week that it starts. That [00:23:00] is why I love this style of growth, right? It has layers. It gives you the immediate audience growth, but it grows your network, it creates future opportunities, it makes business feel a lot less lonely.

It’s honestly the best way. It’s the best way to grow your business. That’s where I’m at with these Behind the Biz sessions. One event down, 303 registrations, 370-plus downloads, one lonely little season pass sale. Again, thank you, Colie. Some core sales that were definitely warmed up through the event. A format that I now know I can run without wanting to throw my laptop out of the window, and four more months to test it.

And I don’t know what the final verdict on this will be, right? Maybe by the end of the year I’ll be like, “Oh, this was the best thing that I did in my business in 2026.” Who the fuck knows, right? But what I can guarantee is I’m gonna learn a lot. I’m testing so many different things each time, I’m gonna know a lot. I’m gonna have a lot of information and data to look at to make decisions then for 2027, which is really exciting.

So if you are [00:24:00] starting something new right now, I want to encourage you: experiment. Look at the numbers. Keep what works, change what doesn’t, and then try it again. That is what business looks like for me most of the time. It’s not like I discovered this seven-step secret, and now everything works perfectly. It’s never that easy. It’s always like, “Hmm, this part worked, that part didn’t. Let’s try it again. Let’s do another version.” So for me, the next version is the Black Friday Case Files running September 14 to 18.

And then I’m gonna keep sharing these results as we go throughout the year, because I think it’s gonna be really fun to see what happens when we have four or five of these to compare, instead of judging everything from one event.

And maybe there’s something in this episode for you too. Maybe you don’t need to build a giant summit. Maybe your version is three people in a private podcast feed. Maybe it’s four experts answering one question. Maybe it’s a tiny email series. Maybe it’s a collaborative workshop. Maybe the thing you need isn’t bigger. Maybe it just needs [00:25:00] to be repeatable. And maybe instead of asking, “What could I launch?” the better question is, “What could I run again?”

Okay, I will leave you with that.

Thank you for listening to this nasally version of myself. Again, if you want to see the Black Friday Case Files in action, the link to join the waitlist is in the show notes. And if this episode has made you realise that you need some fresh people in your collaboration world, maybe spend 10 minutes today doing something really simple. Look at the people sitting beside you in the bundles, the summits, the communities and events you’re already a part of. Not just the host — the other contributors. There are probably some really good relationships sitting right there that you haven’t started yet. Send a message, make a connection, and just trust that it will all grow from there.

All right, my loves, I love you so much. I hope you found this interesting, and I will see you again next week. Bye for now.

[00:26:00] Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Email Growth Show. I hope you found valuable insights into the next steps you can take to grow your email list and boost your business without relying on social media or paid ads. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show and share it with others. Your feedback helps me reach more female entrepreneurs just like you, who are ready to say goodbye to social media and leverage email marketing to grow their business and make a bigger impact. Thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode.