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I hope we’re all having a great week so far and your first month of 2025 was full of momentum and wins.

Getting back into the swing of things after the holidays is never easy, but when you’re excited to continue building or creating, hitting the ground running is the best way to set your pace for the year ahead.

On my end, we’ve had some major strides at CreatorPad, and I couldn’t be more excited to continue building.

What looked somewhat bleak in the late days of 2024, I never imagined that 2025 would bring exactly what we needed to continue building on these foundations that we’ve been creating for the last two and a half years.

That said, I know that not all readers are feeling this momentum, and that’s ok.

Momentum ebbs and flows, and I’m more than sure I’ll hit my fair share of roadblocks this year, just as you’ll reach your strides.

My one piece of advice: keep pushing.

Wins are always right around the corner, you just have to keep walking until you hit that turn. You got this.

-Luke

Losing Followers is as Good as Gaining Them

You’re probably scratching your head at the title of this piece, and I would be too if losing newsletter subscribers/followers wasn’t my norm (but alas).

I’ve been writing this newsletter weekly for over two years. Aside from the occasional holiday break or week off, writing this newsletter on a weekly basis has taught me a lot about myself, and being a creator.

One of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned in the last few months came up when I was talking to a fellow newsletter writer who told me that they “purge” their newsletter subscribers from time to time.

As a small creator, this blew my mind.

I genuinely didn’t understand how removing subscribers/followers could be beneficial, let alone help with growth and brand deals.

This creator went on to explain that not only do they purge their lists and delete subscribers, but they also loved when people unsubscribed. This was the moment where I felt like he lost the plot.

Seeing my confusion, this is when he dove into the concept of “bad subscribers” and explained how it’s led to so much growth on his newsletter.

A bad subscriber is simply a follower/subscriber who doesn’t interact with your content anymore. For email, this means they’ve stopped opening your emails, clicking your links, or even noticing that you exist in their inbox.

For creators on other platforms, these might be “ghost followers” who don’t engage with your posts, or TikTok viewers who followed after one viral hit and never came back. They’re not helping your reach, and in some cases, they might actually be hurting it.

When algorithms (or advertisers) analyze performance, inactive followers can drag down engagement rates, make your content look less appealing, or even signal to platforms that your content isn’t resonating.

Listen, I get it if you’re still hesitant, the first instinct for most creators is to cling to every subscriber or follower, no matter what. I know that’s what I’ve been doing, and I still tend to hesitate to delete when it comes time. We’re conditioned to think that bigger numbers equal more success, but in reality losing the right followers can help you grow.

For newsletters, a cleaned up list means better open rates, higher click-throughs, and improved deliverability. If your emails land in the inboxes of people who genuinely want to read, you’re far more likely to get the results you want, whether that’s clicks, replies, or conversions.

For creators on platforms like IG, YouTube, or TikTok, removing dead/ghost followers can improve your engagement-to-follower ratio, which tells platforms like Instagram or TikTok that your content is worth boosting to new audiences. Brands are also paying closer attention to engagement rates rather than follower counts, so having a smaller but more engaged audience can actually be a selling point (trust me here, when I connect brands with micro/nano creators like myself, I always look for high engagement, and will prioritize even if they have thousands of less followers).

Basically what I want you to take away from this is that growth, strangely, isn’t about chasing bigger numbers. It’s about maintaining a healthy audience. No matter where you’re creating content, your goal should be to engage with people who genuinely connect with what you’re creating.

I’ll leave you with an analogy and little thought experiment. Think about your content as if it’s a garden, and followers as the plants. It might be in our nature to let things just run their course and grow as they please, but that would make us bad gardeners. Sometimes you need to take a birds eye view, cut back, prune, and adjust to allow for even more growth.

So, my fellow gardeners, if you lose a couple of flowers, just know that it’s not the end of the day. The sun will keep shining and you’ll see more buds soon, and if you want to jump start this process, get out there and start pruning. 🧑‍🌾 

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Hope you enjoyed this week’s post. See you next week ✌️