Jonathan Goodman simplified his email marketing and found the freedom to focus on what matters most: writing books and building genuine relationships with his community of 66,000 subscribers.
Jonathan Goodman considers himself a writer obsessed with authorship first and foremost. He’s written 12 books— his most recent, published by HarperCollins—and owns the Online Trainer Mentorship, a high-end program for the top 1% of online fitness businesses. Over the years, his company has sold business development materials to over 65,000 personal trainers in more than 125 countries.
But here’s what makes Jonathan’s story different: his business isn’t about chasing vanity metrics or algorithm-driven growth. It’s about something deeper.
Becoming who he wants to be and becoming a better human along the way
Maybe it’s not the expected answer, but the mission behind Jonathan Goodman’s business is personal exploration. Not market domination. Not seven-figure launches. Not building an empire.
“The mission behind my business is to explore ideas and themes that help me become more of the human that I want to be: a better spouse, a better father, a better grown-up son, a better leader of my team and also in my community.”
This isn’t just nice-sounding copy. It’s how Jonathan actually thinks about his work.
His next book, Unhinged Habits, is what you’d get if you mashed together Essentialism, Atomic Habits, and 4000 Weeks—all books about living deliberately, making intentional choices, and becoming more of who you want to be.
How Jonathan built a 66,000-person email list
For Jonathan, writing isn’t about chasing bestseller lists. It’s about processing ideas that matter to him personally. Ideas that make him a better human.
And his email list—those 66,000+ subscribers who show up in his inbox every Friday—gives him the space to explore those ideas out loud, get feedback, and refine his thinking before it becomes a book. Having that space to explore is what has allowed him build an email list as an author while staying true to his own mission and goals.
“I’m a father of three. I’m madly, deeply in love with my wife. Fitness has always been incredibly important to me,” Jonathan says. “Everything is going to link back to those things, and if you like it, you’re like me. If you don’t, probably won’t.”
This is the opposite of growth-at-all-costs thinking. Jonathan isn’t optimizing for the largest possible audience. He’s building a community of people who share his values—people who care about the same things he does.
And here’s what makes this approach work: authenticity attracts the right people.
The only thing we really own these days when it’s easy to create content are our stories, our experiences. You attract the right subscribers by gaining a wide-ranging variety of experiences by going out and doing sh*t, interesting sh*t, writing about it, telling those stories, talking about how those stories link back to your deeper values, and then, sure, give the tactical advice.
His email list isn’t just a marketing channel. It’s his thinking partner. His sounding board. The community that helps him become more of the person he wants to be.
How Kit helps him stay focused on writing
Jonathan had been using ActiveCampaign since 2013. He’d built complex automations and integrations over the years. But when ActiveCampaign raised his legacy plan price 6x, he faced a choice: pay significantly more for a tool that had grown too complicated for what his business actually needed, or simplify.
“When the business became simplified and focused, I wanted a much simpler and more focused solution,” Jonathan explains. “Kit was the obvious choice for me there.”
The migration to Kit forced him to rethink his entire email marketing system—and that turned out to be exactly what he needed.
“I’m happy that I did it because it forced me to simplify my email marketing system.”
The email growth philosophy for new authors
Jonathan could use his 66,000-subscriber email list to run aggressive promotions. He could segment by purchase behavior, test every subject line, optimize every call-to-action for conversion.
But he doesn’t.
I’m not a heavy growth user. I don’t market much with email, like I don’t go and sell much with email because my goal is to build a long-term community so that I can continue writing books.
Read that again. His goal isn’t to maximize short-term revenue. It’s to build a long-term community that supports his ability to keep writing.
Building relationships that support the work
This pattern shows up again and again with professional creators: they care about more than money. They care about impact, relationships, and doing work that matters. They didn’t become creators to get rich—if they wanted that, they’d work on Wall Street.
They do this work because they believe they can help people.
Jonathan’s weekly newsletter, Five Reps Friday, embodies this philosophy. It’s designed to be “low-lift”—something he can consistently execute without burning out. Each week, he shares ideas from his reading and writing, tests concepts that might end up in future books, and maintains a genuine relationship with his community.
“Kit just makes it really, really easy for me to have an ongoing relationship with my community,” Jonathan says. “I can share some of the ideas, I can get real feedback from them.”
The payoff isn’t immediate revenue. It’s something more valuable: a distribution network built on trust.
The simple system behind his email-driven book deal and creative work
When Jonathan releases a book, he’s not starting from zero. He’s not dependent on Amazon’s algorithm or hoping for a viral social media post. He has direct access to tens of thousands of people who’ve been following his thinking, who understand his values, and who trust him enough to buy his work.
“The size of my email list did help me get a great book deal, which of course helped me sign with Harper Collins,” Jonathan explains. “That made me an important author to them, which meant that I got good editors and support from their marketing team.”
In terms of moving copies of the book, I think that the email list is very important for that, but I think your reputation as an author and your relationships with other authors is more important. So I think that the email list helps you get to the point where you can write a good book and be surrounded by a good team, and then it will help sell the initial copies of the book for sure, but there are a lot of other pieces.
But beyond the book deal mechanics, there’s something deeper happening. Jonathan has built what other creators dream about: genuine mind share with his audience.
Creating a sustained relationship
“I think about ownership as ‘mind share’. I think about ownership as reputation,” he says. “I think email is a great way to gain mind share. But I don’t actually buy into the mantra of ‘you own your email list’ because, yes, even though you do, you don’t own the inboxes that it gets delivered to.”
This perspective shifts everything. It’s not about owning people. It’s about earning their attention through consistently valuable work.
This means showing up, week after week, with ideas worth reading.
“I think email is way better than social media followings,” Jonathan shares. “I think it’s way more important to own. But I do think that reputation and mind share are #1, and nothing else comes close.”
This is exactly the kind of thinking that separates professional creators from people just chasing metrics. Jonathan understands that his real asset isn’t the list size: it’s the quality of relationships he’s built through that list.
The command center for the work that matters
What Kit does for Jonathan is remove the friction between him and his community. He doesn’t spend hours getting bogged down in technical details. He doesn’t need a marketing team to manage complex campaigns.
It’s just simple to use. I’m able to create a weekly, low-lift email, keep in touch with my audience/community, hint at what’s coming, get feedback on ideas that are going to go in future books, and not have it take up much of my time or energy and get bogged down in the technical stuff.
That simplicity matters because Jonathan’s time is better spent elsewhere: on the deep work that only he can do.
How his mentorship team uses email automations to drive sales
While Jonathan uses Kit to nurture his personal newsletter community, his mentorship business uses it differently, leveraging automation to keep their sales process organized and personal at scale.
His team manages 200-500 DM conversations daily across social media, primarily Instagram. With that volume, they need systems that help them stay organized without losing the human touch.
“We have a huge book of leads. There’s a huge amount of people in the funnel constantly that we’re having conversations with,” Jonathan says. “This combination of Zapier and Pipe Drive and Kit has helped us keep in touch with them ongoing.”
Their most effective automation? A Zapier integration that links Kit with their CRM (Pipe Drive) to track where people are in the sales cycle and remind the team to follow up with leads who didn’t convert right away.
The content upgrade flywheel
Jonathan’s team has built a flywheel that turns organic content into qualified leads:
- Create a content upgrade or article
- Tease it with an Instagram story
- Use ManyChat to capture interest when someone DMs or comments
- Send them to a squeeze page to enter their email (captured in Kit)
- Start a consultative sales conversation in the DMs
- Follow up with a nurture sequence in Kit
- For high-performing content, run it as a paid ad
“This flywheel of organic content or paid content DM for a thing, consultative sales conversation right there in the DMs, but then also capturing that lead in Kit to be able to follow up within a nurture sequence and ongoing emails for our mentorship has been incredible,” Jonathan says.
The key? Kit captures every lead so they can follow up thoughtfully, not just once, but over time as people move through their decision-making process.
The realities of building an email list
“It’s going to be a grind,” Jonathan says of building up an email presence. No shortcuts. No hacks. No promises of overnight growth.
“Focus on strategies to get 10 subscribers before 100. And do this until you’re at 10,000+ subscribers.”
This is the opposite of what most email marketing advice sounds like. There’s no mention of viral loops or growth hacks. Instead, Jonathan describes the unglamorous work that actually builds a foundation for author or creator marketing systems.
This means creating a great piece of content and manually sending it to people. This means manually sending a message to everybody who follows you on social media inviting them to join your newsletter.
Ten subscribers at a time. Manually. Repeatedly. Until you hit 10,000.
It sounds tedious because it is. But Jonathan knows something that beginners often miss: those first 1,000 subscribers are the hardest—and yet the most important. They’re the foundation everything else is built on.
The question isn’t how to get subscribers. The question is how to get the right subscribers. People who will actually engage, who will care about your work, who will be there when you launch something.
Jonathan’s answer? Show who you really are.
“Deeper, more thoughtful storytelling,” he explains. “Show who you really are. Don’t just give advice, talk about how the advice reinforces your values.”
Lead with authentic storytelling
This is where most creators get it wrong. They think people subscribe for tactics and tips. But people actually subscribe because they connect with the person behind the advice.
Jonathan isn’t trying to appeal to everyone. He’s trying to attract people who share his values. And the way you do that isn’t through clever copywriting, but rather authentic storytelling.
Notice the order: experiences first, stories second, values third, tactics last.
Most creators do this backwards. They lead with tactics, sprinkle in some stories, and hope it resonates. Jonathan starts with lived experience, uses stories to make sense of that experience, connects it to deeper values, and only then—after all that foundation—offers the tactical advice.
This approach takes longer. It requires more vulnerability. It means accepting that some people won’t resonate with your work.
But for the people who do? The connection runs deeper than any email sequence could create.
And that’s the whole point. Jonathan isn’t building an audience. He’s building a community. He’s not collecting email addresses. He’s earning mind share and reputation.
That’s the grind he’s talking about. Not the grind of posting 3x a day on social media or optimizing every funnel. The grind of showing up consistently, being genuinely yourself, and trusting that the right people will find you.
It’s slower. It’s harder. And according to Jonathan’s 66,000 subscribers and HarperCollins book deal, it works.
What authors and creators can learn from Jonathan Goodman
For Jonathan, using Kit isn’t about maximizing open rates or conversion percentages. It’s about having a reliable, simple tool that lets him focus on what matters: writing, exploring ideas, and maintaining genuine relationships with people who care about his work.
Social media is transient. Algorithms change. Platforms disappear. But his email list gives him something more valuable than ownership—it gives him mind share. It’s his command center. His distribution network. His way of earning reputation and maintaining the relationships that make his work meaningful, week after week.
Key takeaways:
- Write consistently: not for algorithms, but for clarity.
- Build an email list long before launching a book.
- Attract the right audience by sharing your values.
- Simplify tech to free up your creativity.
- Use email as a thinking partner, not just a sales channel.
With Kit handling the technical details in the background, Jonathan can get back to what he does best: being an author, obsessed with authorship, exploring the ideas that help him become more of the human he wants to be.
Want to build an email list like Jonathan’s? Start your 14-day free trial of Kit, the simplest email platform made for creators and authors.
