Setting Realistic Goals (Growth, Revenue, or Reach?)

Growth, revenue, and reach sound like they should all move together, more readers means more reach means more revenue, so why not optimize for all three at once. In practice they pull against each other more often than they reinforce each other, and a newsletter trying to maximize all three simultaneously tends to end up confused: too promotional to grow fast, too growth-obsessed to monetize well, too monetization-focused to build the kind of reach that compounds. Pick a primary goal for a given season of the newsletter's life. You can change it later. You can't chase three things at full intensity at once and expect any of them to actually happen.