A little while back I wrote out, step by step, how I grew the accounts to ~70k. People still message me about that one more than anything else, and almost all of the messages are a version of the same question: okay, the followers came. So where is the money?
Here is the uncomfortable truth I wish someone had told me at 3,000 followers. A follower is not a subscriber, and a subscriber is not a buyer. They are three different people, and the entire game is quietly walking someone from the first to the last without them ever feeling walked.
A follower double-taps a photo of Nora loafing on a radiator and keeps scrolling. That is worth something, but it is worth almost nothing on its own, because you don’t own it and you can’t email it. Most pet pages have thousands of these and make zero dollars, and then conclude they need more followers. They almost never need more followers. They need a way up.
The thing nobody draws for you: it’s a ladder, not a switch
The mistake I see constantly, and the one I made for a year, is treating money as a switch you flip once you’re “big enough.” Post the dog, post the dog, post the dog, then one day post “buy my thing” and wait. Nothing happens, and it feels personal. It isn’t. You just asked someone on rung one to jump to rung four.
It’s four rungs, and you cannot skip one:
Stranger → Follower. They trade you a tap of attention for a good post. The currency here is attention, and it is rented from an algorithm.
Follower → Subscriber. They trade you an email address for something genuinely useful. The currency is an email, and unlike a follow, it is yours. This is the rung almost everyone skips, and it is the one the whole business is built on.
Subscriber → Warm reader. They open what you send, reply, click. The currency is trust, built by showing up more than once and being worth opening.
Warm reader → Paying. They hand you money, because by now the thing you’re selling is obviously for them and you’ve already helped them once for free. The currency is, finally, money.
Every rung you try to skip, you pay for later in trust. The good news buried in that: you do not need a huge audience to make this work. You need a small number of people standing on rung three. A page with 2,000 real, warm readers out-earns a page with 80,000 strangers, every single time. If your page has the attention and none of the offers, that is a positioning problem first, and I took it apart in Why Brands Scroll Past Your Page.
The one free move that turns followers into subscribers
If you do nothing else after reading this, do this: give people a reason to leave the rented land. One free thing worth an email address. A checklist, a mini guide, a single genuinely useful PDF that solves one small problem for your exact person.
That is rung two, and it is the highest-leverage twenty minutes of work in this entire newsletter, because it converts a follower you can lose in an algorithm change into a subscriber you can reach forever. Everything upstream of that email is rented. Everything from that email onward is yours.
The specific ladder, the four-email welcome sequence that warms a new subscriber up, the two ask scripts (the soft one and the direct one), and the exact founding-subscriber note that got my first real yeses are all below. But even just the sentence above, acted on this week, is worth the read.
🐾 Helping animals is the whole reason we’re here. If you’d like to help too, you can chip in to our shelter fundraiser for Animal Haven — every little bit helps an animal in need. Join us. 🩷
And if you’d rather just watch the girls be spectacularly unhelpful about all of this, we’re on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
That’s the map. The exact moves on each rung are below. The part that turns a follower into a buyer starts here. 🔒
Inside the paid half, you’ll get:
🪜 The full four-rung ladder with the one specific move that gets someone up each rung
🎣 Five free things actually worth an email, and how to pick the one you will finish
🧭 The quiz that sorts new subscribers into four types, and why it beats a PDF
💌 All four welcome emails written out, subject lines included, ready to adapt
🤖 The prompt that drafts all four emails in your voice, and critiques its own weakest one
🗂️ The whole system on one screen, built to screenshot
💬 The two ask scripts, word for word: the soft ask and the direct ask, and when to use which
🕰️ The three moments money actually changes hands, so you ask then and not before
🧾 The too-early launch that cost me most of a list, and the exact fix
🎁 30% off The Petfluencer Playbook, paid subscribers only
📚 Every paid post plus the full archive
Come join me on the inside 👇
