How Superhuman built the largest newsletter ads business in AI with Passionfroot

Superhuman: the world’s biggest AI newsletter

Superhuman is one of the biggest and fastest-growing AI newsletters globally, helping over 450,000 readers from companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, to leverage Artificial Intelligence to boost their productivity and careers. The Superhuman newsletter features the latest AI developments, new AI technologies, and curated newsletter content that keeps you ahead in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.

Founded by brothers Awais and Zain Kahn in December 2022, the Superhuman newsletter started with a shared love for AI tools, and the ways they benefit everyday workers in their day-to-day lives. By March 2023, the publication had grown to 100,000 subscribers. Today, they have reached 450,000 readers.

Both founders have also amassed large social followings on X and other platforms - with over 1,000,000 followers on LinkedIn alone.

As their business scaled, the team at Superhuman recognized the need to better organize and coordinate their sponsorship processes. In January 2023, they partnered with Passionfroot to supercharge their sponsorships and build the biggest AI newsletter.

The Problem

As Head of Operations, Awais primarily manages sales, and organizing sponsorships for the newsletter.

The problem?

He previously used Notion and Excel to track tasks such as organization and tracking payments. This took time, and was largely inefficient and inconvenient.

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The Passionfroot Match

At this time, the team at Superhuman came across Passionfroot. Instantly, Passionfroot enabled them to streamline inbound sales, centralize outobund sales, and automate collabs from requests to payments. This enabled Awais to focus more on business growth rather than admin.

So, how does Superhuman use Passionfroot?

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How Superhuman sells ads with Passionfroot

Since joining, they’ve increased and streamlined their inbound sales through their Passionfroot storefront. The storefront showcases their audience stats, products, and has integrated booking forms.

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Superhuman have three products in their storefront.

• Primary, found near the top of the email.
• Secondary, located in the middle of the email.
• Featured, where the ad is found in the “5 AI Tools of the Day” section.

They automate ad scheduling by setting up pre-scheduled slots that sponsors can book in their storefront.

How Superhuman sells 7 figures in ads

To fill their sponsorship slots, Superhuman uses both inbound and outbound strategies to maximise potential sponsorships. Inbound leads for their sponsorship slots are generated by a featured CTA (Call To Action) toward the end of every newsletter, where they outline previous sponsorships and redirect the reader to their Passionfroot Storefront.

As the business scaled, Superhuman decided to employ world-class salespeople to generate outbound leads, who all use Passionfroot as their base of operations. The team send Passionfroot proposals with dates attached, to streamline scheduling and payments once sales are completed.

“As a newsletter you can’t just rely on inbound - you need to do outbound and get a sales team. Our team works in Passionfroot, offering white glove copy creation with bigger sponsors”.

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Passionfroot Calendar

Once the Superhuman team joined Passionfroot, they immediately got access to a selection of tools, including Passionfroot’s calendar.

The calendar gave them a central source of truth to see all of their ad business in one place. The calendar lets their team work together on sales, ad creation, and payments and even get more money out of their schedule. By filtering based on which slots are booked/unbooked - they can see where they need to get more sales. They can also quickly check in on the status of any collab’s copy creation and payment status by hovering over the ads in the calendar. Hence, managing their sponsorships went from Excel, Stripe, and Google Calendar to one central hub.

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Streamlining payments

Another benefit Awais found with using Passionfroot was its streamlined system for collecting payments from sponsors. Each time he accepts a request or sends a proposal - an accounting compliant invoice is generated for his sponsors with all billing and tax info needed. Getting him paid, faster.

“Instead of me having to create an Excel document where I have to track all of these payments, it’s just nice that everything lives in Passionfroot. I really value the Tax ID and smart billing info features - those things matter for financial professionals like me.”

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So, who are Superhuman’s sponsors?

The majority of companies that advertise through Superhuman are located within the tech space - but that doesn’t mean that they are solely aimed at the tech industry.

More than 30% of Superhuman’s audience identify as entrepreneurs and marketers, with their most successful sponsorships coming through from AE Studio - a studio helping startups implement AI tools and processes in their company - as well as an Israeli product tour video company called Guidde.

“They’ve seen really good results because they’re talking to entrepreneurs, who are often looking for AI solutions to level up their efficiency within their businesses”.

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Superhuman’s top tips to work with sponsors:

A few lessons that Awais has learned from working with sponsors:

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Recruiting A-players

Awais recognises the importance of employing superb individuals to do the most important jobs as you are scaling as a business.

“You cannot rely just on inbound. We didn’t have any salespeople, and so when you go up, you need to hire really world-class salespeople.”

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Effective communication

Superhuman emphasizes strong communication with its sponsors. And with tools like Passionfroot, the process becomes a whole lot easier.

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Superhuman’s Favourite Passionfroot Features

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Passionfroot’s Calendar

Awais cites Passionfroot’s calendar as a step up from competitors because of it being purpose-built for creators and much faster than alternatives - ”It’s a Notion-like calendar but built for ads.”

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Center of operations for his team

After working solo for a while, Awais brought his sales team on board to work directly in Passionfroot. This move saw the business reduce miscommunication and increased its work output.

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Streamlined Payments

Awais found Passionfroot particularly useful in organizing workflows - with the ability to control advertisements, payments, and scheduling, all in one place. Topping everything, Awais especially loves the automated billing system - that was introduced to Passionfroot upon his request.

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”Not having to build out an invoice every time is pretty nice. The fact that the company name, the address, the VAT information, everything is going into it is pretty awesome.”

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Want to kickstart your growth?

Superhuman is one of the premier AI newsletters globally - securing just under half a million readers in under a year. If you want to grow your newsletter ads business and earn more, easier, faster - get access to Passionfroot now for free.

We’d love to help you grow!