How Growjoy Built a Million-Dollar Business Around Newsletter Growth

Growjoy.co is a Norwegian marketing agency that has built a profitable business by helping newsletter publishers turn email subscribers into paying customers. Founded in 2023 and operating from Oslo, the company has worked with established names such as MarketBeat, Refind, Raging Bull, and Jones Road Beauty, developing advertising campaigns that prioritize commercial results over simply accumulating email addresses. Its operating company, GSH AS, reported approximately NOK 5.26 million in revenue in 2025, following substantial growth from the previous year.

While many marketing agencies compete across dozens of services, Growjoy has focused on a specific opportunity within the expanding newsletter industry. Its approach combines paid social media advertising, audience research, and strategic email content to help publishers acquire subscribers who are more likely to purchase products or services. The result is a specialized business serving companies that increasingly treat their newsletters as a central part of how they attract and retain customers.

From a Local Newsletter Experiment to a Specialized Growth Agency

Growjoy was founded by Gunnar Snorri Holm, a Norwegian marketing specialist whose interest in newsletter advertising developed through his own experience building an email audience.

Before establishing Growjoy, Holm experimented with paid advertising to grow a local newsletter in Oslo. In an April 2024 interview on SparkLoop's Send & Grow podcast, he recalled testing campaigns with daily advertising budgets of approximately $20 or less, considerably smaller than the amounts his agency would eventually manage for established publishers.

That early experience introduced him to a problem facing newsletter operators of almost every size. Building a valuable email audience requires a steady supply of new readers, but acquiring subscribers through paid advertising can quickly become expensive without a reliable way to measure the results.

Holm began developing expertise in the advertising strategies needed to attract newsletter subscribers efficiently, particularly through Meta's Facebook and Instagram advertising platforms. Rather than concentrating on traditional website traffic or general brand awareness, his work increasingly focused on growing email lists for businesses that already knew how to earn money from their audiences.

The company behind Growjoy, GSH AS, was established in Norway on June 18, 2023, and formally registered the following month. Norwegian corporate records identify Holm as its sole shareholder, managing director, and chairman, providing a documented starting point for the business.

Growjoy's specialization developed alongside a broader shift in digital publishing. Email newsletters were becoming increasingly attractive to companies looking for direct relationships with their customers, particularly as advertising costs rose and businesses became more dependent on large social media platforms to reach their audiences.

For a financial publisher selling investment research or a business offering premium advisory services, an email subscriber can represent much more than a reader. Someone who regularly opens a newsletter may eventually purchase a subscription, book a consultation, or become a long-term customer.

Recognizing that distinction became central to Growjoy's positioning. Instead of promising businesses the largest possible email lists, the agency concentrated on finding readers whose interests and needs matched what its clients ultimately wanted to sell.

By April 2024, Growjoy was managing approximately $10,000 to $20,000 in daily advertising spending across social platforms, according to SparkLoop. The newsletter growth platform also reported that Growjoy had generated hundreds of thousands of subscribers for clients during the preceding six months, demonstrating how the operation had progressed beyond its founder's initial small-budget experiments.

Growjoy subsequently became a certified growth specialist within SparkLoop's newsletter expert network, establishing a recognized relationship with a platform widely used by publishers to acquire and monetize subscribers.

How Growjoy Turns Advertising Into Newsletter Customers

The service provided by Growjoy is relatively straightforward to understand, although delivering profitable results requires considerably more than creating an advertisement and asking people to subscribe.

Imagine a financial publishing company that sells a premium investment newsletter for $300 per year. It already has an established product and paying customers, but wants to attract more people who may eventually become subscribers to its premium service.

The company could advertise directly to potential customers, asking them to purchase the $300 subscription immediately. However, someone encountering that business for the first time may be reluctant to pay for financial research from a publisher they do not yet know or trust.

Growjoy approaches the problem differently by promoting a free newsletter first, giving potential customers an opportunity to become familiar with the publisher before making a purchase.

The process begins with researching the client's existing customers. Growjoy examines what those customers purchase, why they choose the company, what problems they want to solve, and what makes them interested in a particular offer.

Using that information, the agency develops advertising messages designed to attract similar people through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

For the hypothetical financial publisher, an advertisement might promote a useful market analysis or educational newsletter rather than immediately attempting to sell a paid subscription. Someone interested in that subject can enter their email address and begin receiving content from the publisher.

Once the person subscribes, the business has an opportunity to demonstrate its expertise through regular emails, case studies, customer experiences, and other relevant information. Over time, those communications can help build familiarity and trust before introducing a paid product or service.

Growjoy describes this approach as moving potential customers from an initial advertisement through a period of relationship-building and eventually toward an opportunity to make a purchase.

The underlying idea is that acquiring the right subscribers can be more valuable than attracting the greatest number of subscribers.

A campaign that generates 10,000 email addresses at a very low cost might appear successful, but that result means relatively little if those subscribers never engage with the publisher or buy anything. Another campaign could attract fewer subscribers at a higher initial cost while producing more paying customers.

This is why Growjoy emphasizes commercial outcomes rather than relying solely on the cost of acquiring an email address.

The agency also develops and tests advertising content, adjusts campaign targeting, and examines how well landing pages convert visitors into subscribers. A landing page is the webpage someone reaches after clicking an advertisement, where they can usually learn about the newsletter and enter their email address.

Growjoy's work is therefore a combination of customer research, paid advertising, and helping clients move subscribers toward an eventual purchase. It is a managed marketing service rather than a self-service software platform that customers operate entirely on their own.

The businesses most likely to benefit are those that already have an established method of earning money from an email audience and want to increase their subscriber numbers without losing sight of profitability.

Growjoy's Results With Major Newsletter Publishers

Growjoy's growing customer portfolio provides evidence of how its specialized approach has attracted established publishers and businesses operating in different industries.

One of its most prominent customers is MarketBeat, a financial information company that provides investors with market research, stock ratings, and newsletter content. MarketBeat CEO Matt Paulson has credited Growjoy with helping the company develop profitable advertising campaigns on Meta, reporting that its spending on acquiring financial publishing leads increased to more than $300,000 per month.

This figure represents MarketBeat's advertising expenditure rather than revenue received by Growjoy, but it illustrates the scale of campaigns the agency has helped manage.

Another substantial result came from Refind, a service that curates information and reading recommendations for subscribers. According to co-founder Dominik Grolimund, Growjoy generated more than 75,000 new newsletter subscribers over a period of several months while delivering what he described as a strong return on the advertising investment.

The achievement is particularly notable because it demonstrates the agency's ability to attract large audiences for an existing digital publication rather than merely helping a new newsletter establish its first subscribers.

Growjoy has also worked with Raging Bull, a financial education and trading business. CEO Jeff Bishop has described how the agency helped scale the company's TikTok lead-generation campaigns to six figures in monthly advertising spending while maintaining an emphasis on subscriber quality and advertising returns.

Other clients include Jones Road Beauty, the cosmetics company founded by makeup entrepreneur Bobbi Brown. Cody Plofker, the company's CEO, has reported that Growjoy met an agreed customer acquisition cost target during the first month of their collaboration.

These relationships demonstrate that Growjoy's methods are not confined exclusively to publishers selling newsletter subscriptions. Email marketing can also support companies selling physical products, financial services, professional expertise, and other commercial offerings.

One of the agency's more detailed published examples involves Pathos Communications, a business-to-business marketing company whose growth placed it on the Financial Times list of Europe's fastest-growing companies in 2025.

Growjoy reports that a Pathos campaign generated 9,051 leads and 1,452 meetings from approximately $80,500 in advertising expenditure. The agency attributes $645,000 in revenue to the campaign, while Pathos CEO Omar Hamdi has described the work as delivering a twelvefold return on advertising spending.

The reported $645,000 represents revenue generated for the client, not income earned by Growjoy. Nevertheless, the case illustrates why the agency concentrates on the commercial value of subscribers rather than treating email sign-ups as the final measure of success.

Growjoy's client testimonials also include Best Ever CRE, Elite Trade Club, SMB Deal Hunter, and Acquisition Ace. Together, these relationships suggest that the agency has established a foothold among publishers and businesses willing to invest substantially in acquiring engaged email audiences.

A Growing and Profitable Business in Norway

The commercial development of Growjoy can also be traced through the financial statements of its operating company, GSH AS.

Norwegian business records show that the company generated approximately NOK 807,000 in revenue during 2023, its first registered year. Revenue subsequently increased to NOK 3.17 million in 2024 before reaching NOK 5.26 million in 2025.

The increase between 2024 and 2025 represents revenue growth of approximately 66%, an indication that the agency continued expanding after establishing its initial customer relationships.

Profitability improved alongside revenue. GSH AS recorded approximately NOK 644,000 in net profit in 2024 and NOK 2.01 million in 2025, with operating profit reaching approximately NOK 2.59 million in the latter year.

The figures are particularly interesting because Growjoy operates in a service industry where growth often requires hiring additional specialists, managing more clients, and maintaining the quality of campaign execution.

Unlike a conventional software subscription business, which can potentially serve many additional customers through the same underlying product, a marketing agency must balance expanding demand with the human expertise needed to deliver results.

Growjoy's approach is to specialize in a narrow category of marketing work, allowing its team to concentrate on similar challenges across different clients rather than developing entirely separate capabilities for every new engagement.

Its commercial model is built around providing professional advertising and growth services to newsletter businesses. Clients pay for the agency's expertise in research, campaign development, optimization, and related work, while advertising expenditure is used to purchase attention on platforms such as Meta and TikTok.

This creates an important distinction between the agency's own revenue and the much larger advertising budgets it may manage. The fact that a customer spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising does not mean Growjoy receives that money as company revenue.

The financial records, however, establish that its specialist service has developed into a profitable business with meaningful growth since its establishment in 2023.

Why the Newsletter Industry Creates Opportunities for Specialists

The emergence of agencies such as Growjoy reflects a broader change in how businesses view email newsletters.

For many years, newsletters were primarily treated as a way to distribute company announcements, promotional offers, or occasional updates. More recently, they have increasingly become standalone media products and important channels for acquiring customers.

A financial publisher might use its newsletter to sell research subscriptions, while a professional services company could use an educational email series to attract consultation bookings. Online retailers can develop closer customer relationships through useful content, and independent creators can use newsletters to promote paid communities, courses, or other products.

What these businesses share is a need to attract people who are genuinely interested in what they offer.

Growjoy competes with other newsletter growth specialists, conventional performance marketing agencies, and in-house advertising teams. Businesses can also manage their own campaigns using the advertising tools available directly through Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms.

Its differentiation lies primarily in its concentration on newsletter subscriber acquisition and the financial results that follow.

One particularly interesting element of its methodology involves recovering part of the advertising costs before subscribers purchase the publisher's main product.

In his April 2024 SparkLoop interview, Holm discussed how paid newsletter recommendations could help clients offset their acquisition spending. Under this arrangement, a publisher that attracts a new subscriber can recommend another relevant newsletter and receive compensation when that person also subscribes.

For example, a publisher might spend $2 acquiring a new reader but recover some of that cost by earning money from a relevant newsletter recommendation during the sign-up process.

Holm described campaigns in which clients were recovering between 50% and 100% of their advertising expenditure through SparkLoop recommendations. In one publicly discussed example, approximately $46,000 in advertising generated 26,791 subscribers while producing around $41,000 in recommendation revenue.

This approach can change the economics of newsletter growth because publishers do not necessarily need to wait until readers purchase premium products to begin recovering their advertising investment.

It also helps explain why specialist knowledge matters. Running advertising campaigns is relatively accessible, but understanding how subscriber acquisition, advertising expenses, recommendation revenue, and later customer purchases interact requires experience with the business models used by newsletter publishers.

Growjoy's partnership with SparkLoop places it within an ecosystem of tools and services designed specifically for companies building audiences through email.

The wider opportunity extends beyond publishers that sell newsletters directly. As more businesses recognize the value of having their own customer audiences rather than relying entirely on social media distribution, agencies capable of delivering measurable email subscriber growth may find demand across additional industries.

Building a Business Around the Value of an Email Subscriber

One of the more interesting aspects of Growjoy's development is how a narrowly defined marketing service has become the foundation of a profitable business.

Its early growth was built around a clear commercial problem rather than the introduction of an entirely new technology. Advertising platforms already existed, email newsletters were widely used, and businesses had long understood the importance of attracting potential customers. Growjoy's opportunity came from combining those familiar elements into a specialized service for companies seeking more predictable growth.

The company's experience also illustrates how expertise acquired through relatively small experiments can evolve into work for much larger organizations. What began with modest advertising budgets for a local newsletter eventually developed into campaigns involving established publishers and substantial monthly advertising expenditure.

As the newsletter industry matures, the economics of acquiring readers are likely to receive even greater attention. More publishers competing for the same audiences can make advertising increasingly expensive, while businesses selling higher-value products may place greater emphasis on attracting subscribers who are genuinely likely to purchase.

For Growjoy, this creates an opportunity to deepen its specialization while expanding into customer segments that share similar commercial needs.

Its performance will ultimately be shaped by its ability to maintain strong customer relationships, continue developing effective advertising strategies, and adapt as social media platforms change how advertising reaches potential subscribers.

The broader lesson from Growjoy's growth is that building a successful digital business does not always require inventing a new platform or attracting millions of consumer users. Sometimes the opportunity lies in understanding a valuable problem better than the competition and developing the expertise to solve it consistently.

By concentrating on the commercial value of email audiences rather than their size alone, Growjoy has established a distinctive position in the newsletter industry, demonstrating how a focused marketing service can grow into a substantial and profitable business.