Fathi SarraffiI spent $2,000 and 4 months so you don't have to

Fathi SarraffiI spent $2,000 and 4 months so you don't have to - Not all leads are created equal.

Not all leads are created equal.

And most people building lists right now are getting the worst kind, and don't even know it.

Somewhere between late summer and the end of 2025, I went down a rabbit hole.

I'd been hearing a lot of noise about list growth. Everybody had an opinion. Run X ads. Post on Reddit. Go viral on Instagram. Beehiiv Boosts will change your life.

So instead of taking anyone's word for it, I decided to test all of it myself.

Nearly 4 months. Just under $2,000 out of pocket. Split tests across X ads, Reddit, Instagram, and more.

I wanted real data. Not theory. Not someone else's case study. Mine.

Here's what I found:

Meta, Facebook and Instagram, won. It wasn't close. The targeting, the volume, the backend quality of the leads... nothing else touched it. I was getting 30-60x the lead-flow per day. The other platforms are shockingly bad when it comes to lead flow. I still get emails from their official team members still trying to chase me down to continue running ads in exchange for ads credit. No thanks.

But the bigger lesson wasn't which platform won.

It was understanding WHY the leads from different sources perform so differently, and why most new list builders are being quietly funneled into the worst option of the three.

Let me break it down.

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The 3 Types of Leads (and which one actually builds a real business)

TIER 1--- ORGANIC LEADS: These are your best leads. Someone found you, chose you, and opted in with zero incentive other than wanting what you offer. The problem? Organic is crowded and dying. And I mean that literally. Anyone with a smartphone, anywhere in the world, can open ChatGPT or Claude, speak to it in their native language, have it translated to fluent English, and publish content that competes directly with native English speakers in Western markets. This is what you’ll see when you log into money twitter/X, extremely low effort value posts by literally everyone. So the playing field isn't leveling. it's already leveled thanks to A.I. In the future, organic reach will be decided almost entirely by who's willing to invest in real-world presence, podcasts, interviews, IRL events, a life worth watching. Social proof you can't fake with a prompt. This is what all high level copywriters and list builders are working on and what I'm currently testing and iterating. Pushing the envelope with long-term organic strategy. Doing hard things that would shame low effort value posters. And sure, lists can be built without any social media presence at all, completely faceless, but the benefits of presence extend to far beyond than just better sales. Presence leads to reputation, notoriety and a level of fame that money can’t buy.

TIER 2--- PAID LEADS (Native Ads): This is mostly where I live now. Yes, I pay around $2.20 CPA(I could probably fine tune them for less). That's not cheap. But these are MY leads. I built them. Nobody else bought them. Nobody else is sharing them. And because I control the acquisition, I control the quality. Dan Kennedy said it best: "Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins." The reason that's true is LTV, lifetime value. If your backend is strong, if your monetization is dialed in, you can outspend every competitor who's scared to run ads. Higher spend tolerance = better leads = better revenue per subscriber = bigger business. And i can afford to spend $3-4K every month without a sweat.

TIER 3--- BORROWED LEADS (Beehiiv Boosts, SparkLoop, Ad Networks, Cross Promos): This is where 99% of new copywriters and list builders are being herded right now, and it's not an accident. Beehiiv has sponsored everything. They're paying creators to funnel people to their ecosystem. A lot of newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels in this space are pushing Beehiiv and it's for a reason. Their Boost network sounds like a shortcut. And it is. But shortcuts come with a cost. The reality about Boosted/borrowed subscribers is that if you can buy them, someone else already has. Meaning these aren't your leads exclusively. They're shared. Borrowed. Recycled. The same subscriber sitting on five different lists is getting pitched by five different people. Your open rates suffer. Your reply rates suffer. Your sales suffer. So the end result is far lower LTV and RPS. And you never actually own the relationship, because the relationship was never really yours. This is like trying to date a girl and finding out she has a roster of X other guys she’s also seeing. COOKED.

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Look, I'm not telling you beehiiv is evil or that ad networks have no place in a growth strategy. I actually think it's a brilliant strategy on their end and they’ve found a way to easily monetize and almost corporatize the newsletter creator experience. But this can be a deficit to the creator. See you can actually make a decent living by being the guy or gal that runs meta ads--->resells those leads via Boost network for a profit then leverages Beehiivs ad network to run ad placements for major brands. It generates a sh!tload of cash for Beehiiv too, so I’m going to guess that a lot of ESPs and new ESPs will start rolling this out in the future.

There’s newsletter operators making 6 figures per month doing this, but it’s short lived and makes it harder to win on the backend, precisely because it fragments the quality of your subscribers.

I'm telling you what 4 months of research and $2,000 of my own money taught me, on top of the $20,000+ of self education and mentoring I've invested to start this business so you don't have to spend yours learning the same lesson.

In any case, the lesson here is that the future belongs to whoever builds real relationships with real leads. And that market maturation will demand more than low effort social media posts.

Run your own ads. Build your own audience. Pay what it costs to acquire a subscriber you actually own. Be willing to pay the most for it or someone else will.

It's a longer, harder game. But it's the only game worth playing.

Fathi