5,000 subscribers in three months, building in public

Matt Diehl started Eating Baltimore in March, and when we talked in June he was a day away from 5,000 subscribers. He has a day job and a nine-month-old at home. In this conversation he explains the ads that got him going, the restaurant directory he built for $6, why he posts his numbers on X, and what he saw when he copied the format into a smaller town.

Newsletters first, then Baltimore

Matt has been in the newsletter business since 2016. He started with Agora, the financial newsletter publishers, handling email development and marketing for a few of their companies until 2020. After that he spent almost five years running marketing for a small batch wine club that sits near the same financial newsletter world.

Local came later. He had been following Ryan from Nap Time Scoop for a while, and had made a couple of earlier attempts at kickstarting a newsletter. Last year he turned a Baltimore restaurant week guide into a lead magnet and ran ads to it. That brought in about 1,000 subscribers in roughly a month. He also tried a golf trip newsletter using a gift card as the hook.

Gift card ads, then a plain pitch

Eating Baltimore's first ad offered a chance to win a $50 gift card every month. Those ads started around 50 cents per subscriber and drifted toward a dollar. At the same time he ran ads for the Facebook page, which reached about 4,000 likes before he paused them.

Then the algorithm started serving him ads from other local newsletters. He went through their Facebook ad libraries and made his own ads for the Baltimore area. He turned off the gift card ads and stopped mentioning the prize in the emails, where he had been using it to fight churn. Nobody brought it up. Today he runs subscriber ads only.

A $6 directory that started it all

The directory came before the newsletter. A couple of months before he launched, Matt was diving back into SEO and saw a video about restaurant directories. He took a screenshot of a directory he liked, described what he wanted, and built the site in Replit for about $6. The restaurant data came from Outscraper, pulled from Google Maps.

He says the same build would have taken him months with a developer, and he only knows basic HTML and CSS. He added SEO pages such as top restaurants in a given neighborhood. When we talked, Semrush showed traffic up about 100%, to roughly 167 visits a month. The directory has since taken a back seat. He says it kickstarted the newsletter, and that the directory is really an SEO play that sends people to the signup.

An award email that builds backlinks

For backlinks, Matt copied an idea from another person on X. He scraped the email addresses of restaurants around Baltimore, loaded them into a cold email tool and told them they had won a top restaurant award. Restaurants that replied got a badge to put on their site, with a link back to Eating Baltimore.

We joked that nobody actually voted on the award. Matt agreed the point is backlinks to Eating Baltimore, and the campaign is still running on a slow drip. His domain authority has gone from 2 to 7 so far.

Why he posts his numbers

Matt had never built in public before. He watched Ethan, who had been on the show, call himself a "watchreneur" and decided to try it. A mutual friend had grown his X following that way, so Matt followed the same idea.

He wants to show that anyone can do this, even someone with a day job and a nine-month-old. He tweets zero sponsors on purpose, because he knows it is a long game and thinks it is funny. Without X, he says, he is probably not on this podcast, and he would not have met some of the people he talks to now. He told listeners there is not much bad that can come from putting yourself out there.

Sponsors, coupon books and the realtor math

Matt's first goal is simply one sponsor. Longer term he sees room for local coupon books. He thinks billboards and the ValPak are fading, and a newsletter lets a business track what it spends.

His pitch borrows from SEO. If a business pays $1,000 a month for local map pack work, it expects ten times that back. One client for a high-end realtor, he says, could pay for an annual sponsorship. Business owners are slow to move, though. In Baltimore he knows a plumber who spends about $20,000 on Google and Facebook ads and billboards, and other plumbers will not move until the leader in their category does.

He also met a realtor sponsoring a local directory who spent close to $10,000 on different advertising with little return. The realtor liked to say he had 14,000 Facebook followers. Matt looked at the page: no posts since February and two to four likes on a post.

A second newsletter in a smaller town

A month before we talked, Matt launched a second newsletter in a smaller area of about 50,000 people, versus roughly 800,000 around Baltimore. It reached about 1,600 subscribers in around a month. The format is the same, minus the directory, and each issue takes him an hour to an hour and a half. He copied one ad over with the background sound still on, so seagulls play in it. The ad's conversion rate is around 50 to 55%, similar to Eating Baltimore.

The smaller town engages more. His Baltimore events reel gets 150 to 200 views on average, and 500 is good. The same reel in the smaller town gets about a thousand, and his best was 2,200. Subscribers there also write in more about supporting local businesses, which he calls the heartbeat of the town. His one regret is the name: Eating Baltimore boxed him into food, and he thinks he should have picked something broader.