I deleted 60% of my subscribers on purpose

Who: Jakob Flingelli
What: A weekly newsletter featuring a personal introduction and five hand-selected, well-designed products from Europe
Format: Content & media · English, readers from 69 countries
Started: July 2024
Audience: around 1,100 subscribers
Payers: none – not monetized yet
Promotion budget: Around $8 a day on Meta ads (for the past two months), plus approximately $90 for each classified placement in another newsletter, usually three to five times a year
Income: side project – not yet earning
Status: Active and growing
Channels: Newsletter classifieds, collaborations and recommendations, social media, and word of mouth

What worked: Classified placements in carefully chosen newsletters, especially Dense Discovery, brought in engaged readers. A self-built map of European products now doubles as a lead magnet and generates steady growth with a small Meta advertising budget.
The result: A typical $90 newsletter placement brings in around 50 to 60 subscribers. The map and its ads currently generate approximately 160 subscribers a month. After removing disengaged readers, the newsletter now has around 1,100 subscribers, with an open rate of roughly 70 percent and a click-to-open rate of roughly 19 percent.
The catch: Chasing raw subscriber numbers backfired. A promotion through Refind pushed the list to roughly 2,500, but many of those subscribers never opened the newsletter. Most were eventually removed.

I started in architecture and have spent the past 15 years working in marketing and communications. Along the way, I built a couple of small direct-to-consumer businesses of my own: a coffee brand and coffee shop in Berlin, and an online shop for Kokedama plants that I ran with my wife. I eventually sold both businesses.

I spent most of my career inside one large German corporation, followed by five years with a small family company in Italy. Now I'm moving away from the conventional nine-to-five and building several projects of my own: a small branding studio called Okay Grazie, a pressure-cleaning company, and a tutoring platform for South Tyrol.

From Europe with Love started in July 2024 as a side project. More importantly, it was something that was entirely mine.

The first 25 or 30 subscribers were friends and family, which is how these things usually begin.

Most of the next hundred came through a classified placement in Dense Discovery. I also tried advertising in several other newsletters because their audiences seemed like a good match. Most of those placements did less than I had hoped.

My first meaningful jump came from Dense Discovery. Its readers were curious, engaged, and interested in the sort of products I wanted to share.

A classified placement there typically brings in around 50 to 60 subscribers and costs about $90. It remains my strongest acquisition channel in terms of reader quality, although only three to five placements are available each year.

Most of my steady growth now comes from a map I built at map.fromeuropewith.love. It collects the European products and brands I've featured and turns the archive into something people can browse and keep.

The map also works as a lead magnet. I spend around $8 a day on Meta ads pointing people toward it, which currently generates approximately 160 subscribers a month.

The basic idea is working, but I need to test more advertising concepts and formats. I'm not doing enough of that yet.

Refind is the clearest example.

I became too focused on the subscriber count and pushed the list to around 2,500. The open rate fell below 40 percent, and it became obvious that many of the new subscribers were not interested in reading the newsletter.

That wasn't the audience I wanted, so I spent the next eight months making the list smaller on purpose.

I built an automation that has now been running for more than a year. If someone hasn't opened or clicked anything for roughly 80 to 100 days, they receive one final, no-hard-feelings email. They can click to stay. If they don't, I remove them.

It sounds slightly unfriendly, but keeping thousands of people who clearly aren't interested seems stranger.

The process removed a large part of the list and, at one point, brought it back down to around 960 subscribers. Since then, it has started growing again, this time with much healthier engagement. The automation is still running, so the list continues to clean itself.

The original editorial format was another problem. In the beginning, I shared music, projects, links, typefaces, and whatever else caught my attention. It was difficult to sustain because the right mix of interesting things didn't reliably appear every week.

One decision kept the newsletter alive: I gave myself a target of publishing 100 editions.

The goal wasn't a certain number of subscribers or a particular open rate. I only had to show up 100 times. After that, I could decide whether to continue.

At some point, almost every side project becomes inconvenient enough to quit. Having one target made the decision simpler. Publishing every week was something I could control. Subscriber numbers weren't.

I'm at edition 114 now. Apparently, I had already made the decision by the time I reached 100.

The second turning point was choosing a format I could sustain: products.

I already spend a lot of time looking at well-made, unusual objects. Turning five of those discoveries into a weekly newsletter, with a short personal introduction, takes me two to three hours. It feels natural enough that I can imagine continuing for a long time.

The audience is made up of people who care about good design and objects with character. But I think they stay for the filter as much as for the individual products.

We have access to more things than we could ever properly consider, and AI is making the supply of products, images, recommendations, and content effectively endless. Discovery is no longer the difficult part. Deciding what deserves your attention is.

That makes taste and curation more valuable, not less. Taste is not simply knowing what looks good. It is noticing the decision that makes one object more interesting than the thousands of similar ones around it, then being willing to choose it and leave the rest behind.

That is what I try to do with From Europe with Love. I look widely, follow small clues, and choose five things every Sunday: a stationery studio here, a lamp maker there, a small workshop making an ordinary object unusually well. The value isn't that I can show readers everything. It is that I don't.

Cleaning the list made the audience smaller, but also much more real. The open and click rates now reflect a group of people who have actively chosen to keep receiving that point of view.

I haven't monetized the newsletter yet, and that has been a deliberate choice.

I could start selling sponsorships, but I wanted to build an audience that companies might genuinely want to reach first. Selling access to a list is relatively straightforward. Building a list of people who regularly pay attention is much harder.

My experience has made me suspicious of subscriber counts on their own. They are easy to inflate and don't tell you much about whether anyone is reading.

List hygiene, direct access to an audience, and a useful lead magnet feel more durable than the latest growth tactic.

I also think physical media is quietly becoming interesting again. In a world of infinite feeds, a printed object feels increasingly rare. That is something I would like to experiment with.

Paid advertising can work too, but only when it points people toward something worth keeping. Sending people to a generic signup box is not enough.

From Europe with Love is a weekly newsletter for discovering under-the-radar products and brands from Europe.

Every Sunday, I look beyond the usual algorithms and shopping platforms to find objects with character, made by independent European makers who decided to do something differently.

Five discoveries, chosen from thousands.

I scout, you explore.

Website: fromeuropewith.love
Personal site: flingelli.com
Studio: okaygrazie.com
Instagram: fromeuropewith.love

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– Alex, tinyfound