Your first 10,000 subscribers are free.
Kit, the tool that used to be ConvertKit, will run your email list at no charge until it reaches 10,000 people. No credit card, no time limit. I’ve paid Kit close to $95,000 since 2017, and it’s the best investment I’ve ever made in my business. This page is why, and how to start today for nothing.
The exercise from Chapter 7
Now do it with your own numbers. The last line is the only one that’s yours, and Kit hosts it free until it reaches 10,000.
2,000,000+
leads captured on one Kit list
9 years
on one tool, since 2017
$95,000
paid to Kit. Best investment I've made.
650,000+
creators run their newsletters on Kit
Before we go further
Let me be a salesman by appointment, not a salesman at the door.
This page carries my affiliate link. If you start a paid Kit plan through it, Kit pays me a commission. You pay exactly what you’d pay on kit.com. Not a rupee more. And the free plan is free either way.
I’d recommend Kit without the commission; I was telling my students to use it long before this page existed. And I’ve paid Kit close to $95,000 of my own money since 2017. Nine years of invoices is a more honest endorsement than anything I could write here. It’s the best money my business has ever spent.
If the commission bothers you, go to kit.com directly. Same product, same price. No hard feelings.
If it doesn’t, here’s the link: Start free on Kit
One tool, nine years, two million leads.
In the book I told you Deep Marketing gave me more than two million leads in about seven years, tens of thousands of paying customers, and a little over $2 million in gross revenue. All without making noise online.
What I didn’t tell you is what was running underneath.
Every one of those leads landed on one list. That list has lived on Kit since 2017, back when it was still called ConvertKit. The 25-day free course from Chapter 7, the one I built once and that kept bringing leads for seven years while I slept, travelled and rode motorcycles? A Kit sequence. The tags that tell me who’s a student, who’s a client, who bought which book? Kit. The one email that fills a meetup in any major Indian city? Sent from Kit.
I’ve changed my website, my course platform, and my mind about social media more times than I can count. The email tool has never changed. When the foundation works, you don’t dig it up to see what’s underneath.
Since 2017 I’ve paid Kit about $95,000 in subscription fees. The business those emails built has returned that more than twenty times over. I can’t point to another line in my accounts that has done anything close.
Where the two million came from.
In the book I told you I never advertised my paid programme, not once. I advertised something free instead: a complete 25-day digital marketing course. We built one landing page, pointed Google and Meta ads at it, and paid an average of 17 rupees per lead, while competitors paid 200 to 300 for a lead they then had to talk into buying. Here is the Google Ads half of it, all time, from March 2018 to 8 September 2026.
1.17M
leads from Google Ads, 2018 to 2026
₹17.39
average cost per lead
₹2.04 crore
spent in total, a little over $200,000
Fifty-three campaigns. 8.65 million clicks. 1.17 million conversions, and a conversion in this account means one thing: a person typed their email address into the form on the other side of the click. Average cost per lead, ₹17.39, about the price of a roadside chai. The book says 17 rupees. The account says 17 rupees and 39 paise.
The difference was never the ads. It was what the ad offered.
Now look at the chart, because it’s the part that matters for this page. The spikes are years old and the lines have run near the floor since. Paid attention is rented too: every rupee bought a click, and a click expires the moment it’s over. When the spending slows, the clicks stop the same day. What doesn’t stop is what happened on the other side of the click. Those 1.17 million people gave me their email address and joined a list I own. A good many of the 78,000 people who get my emails today first met me through an ad, years ago, for the price of a chai. The click lasted a second. The relationship has lasted years, and it still opens my emails.
That’s the arrangement. Rent the attention if you must; I did, at scale, for years, and it was worth every rupee. But the page they arrive on, the form they fill in, the sequence that greets them and the list they join have to be yours, or you paid seventeen rupees for a click and kept nothing. Every one of those 1.17 million conversions was a Kit form. The 25 lessons that followed were a Kit sequence. The ads were the megaphone at the front door. Kit was the house.
What a week on the list looks like.
This is the Broadcasts screen of my Kit account, screenshotted on 12 September 2026, one week after the Deep Marketing launch. Read it from the bottom up.
78,701
people received one broadcast
20,656
opened the 8 September email
26%
open rate, on the third email in six days
On 3 September I emailed 78,701 people about the launch event in Chennai; 16,073 opened it. On 6 September I wrote to say Chennai was wonderful and Mumbai was next; 19,167 opened. On 8 September, the third email in six days, 20,656 people opened it, one in four of everyone on the list. The open rate went up with each email, not down. Then the small row at the top: sent on Friday evening to 1,119 people carrying one specific tag, and by Saturday lunchtime 36% of them had opened it.
Twenty thousand people reading the same letter within a few days. No algorithm decided who got it. No ad budget. Nobody was shown it because they had reacted well to the last one. It went to everyone who had asked to hear from me, and a quarter of them opened it, on a list that has been hearing from me for years. That is what every person, every time looks like in practice.
Open rates are an imperfect measure; some mail apps register opens that never happened, which is why I watch the number of people rather than the percentage, and whether it is rising or falling. Twenty thousand is twenty thousand, and it is rising.
Every row on that screen is a Kit broadcast. The 1,119 is a tag. The 78,701 is nine years of one lead magnet doing its job. This is the machine from the book, caught on a Saturday afternoon.
A follower isn’t yours until you have their email.
Picture two experts. Both spend a year building an audience. The first pours everything into a social platform and ends the year with fifty thousand followers. The second builds a following too, but turns it into an email list of ten thousand people.
Who’s in the stronger position? The second, by far.
The first expert doesn’t own those followers. The platform does. An algorithm decides how many of them see any given post, and most days that’s a small slice. The rules change overnight. Reach gets throttled to push you into ads. Accounts get closed for reasons you’re never told. You’ve built a fine house, but it stands on someone else’s land, and the landlord can raise the rent or evict you whenever it suits him.
The second expert owns the channel. When she writes to those ten thousand people, her message lands in their inbox. Not “maybe, if the algorithm approves”. Every time. If a platform she also uses disappears tomorrow, her list comes with her.
That’s renting versus owning. Across a career, it’s building on sand versus rock.
I’ve watched this happen to good people. A big following feeds the business, they’re certain it always will, and then the platform quietly changes what it shows. The reach is gone in a week. They never owned the connection. They rented it, and one day the lease ended.
Here’s my own YouTube channel. Look at both numbers.
This is my YouTube Studio dashboard, screenshotted on 12 September 2026. The big number is real: 1,29,009 subscribers on a verified channel. By the standards of the two experts above, I’m the first one.
1,29,009
subscribers
10,700
views in the last 28 days
₹55
estimated ad revenue, last 28 days
Now read the smaller numbers. In the last 28 days the entire channel had 10,700 views. The latest video, the best of my last ten, had 6,500 views in 36 days; if every view were a different subscriber, that’s five in a hundred, and the other ninety-five never saw it. Estimated ad revenue for the month: fifty-five rupees. The channel gained 78 subscribers. One email to my list puts a few hundred people in a room in whichever city I name.
None of those 1,29,009 people did anything wrong. They subscribed because they wanted to hear from me. YouTube simply decides how many of them do. It shows a new video to a small slice, watches how the slice reacts, and if the reaction isn’t what the algorithm wants this week, the rest never hear about it. I’m not complaining. That’s the deal you sign when you build on rented land: the house is yours, the land isn’t, and the landlord decides who gets to visit.
Compare that with the list. When I send an email, it goes to every person on it. Not to a slice the algorithm picked, not after a test on a small sample. Every person, every time. You saw the numbers above: the same week I took that YouTube screenshot, one email went to 78,491 people and 20,656 of them opened it within four days. More than three times the people my best video reached in 36 days, from a list six-tenths the size. Same me. Same ideas. Different land.
That’s the whole argument of this page in two numbers, and I’d rather show you mine than quote someone else’s.
Followers and subscribers are the platform’s users. They become yours only when you have their contact details. Until then, you’re borrowing them.
Kit is where you stop borrowing. And until you have ten thousand of them, it costs nothing.
Deep selling, at the scale of advertising.
For most of history you had to choose. Sit down with one person and build real trust, or broadcast to thousands and build none. Deep with a few, or wide with many. Never both.
Email broke that rule. A single well-written email can feel like a personal letter and still reach ten thousand people.
And trust works on email the way it works in life. Talk to someone for three hours at a conference and you might like them. Meet them for ten minutes a week for ten weeks and you’ll trust them far more. We trust what we’ve known for a while. Fifteen minutes of attention spread across eight weeks builds more trust than the same fifteen minutes in one sitting.
That’s why, in the Deep Marketing loop, the public content earns the attention, but the content after the opt-in earns the trust. The lead magnet. The welcome sequence. The weekly email that brings one useful idea and asks for nothing. Small deposits into an account that, over enough months, becomes a person who believes you’re on their side.
An owned channel doesn’t just grow bigger. It grows warmer.
Your email sequence is the engine that does this for you, while you sleep.
Which is exactly why the tool matters. Not more than the owning. But a sequence has to be built somewhere. Tags have to live somewhere. The automation that notices someone bought your book, and stops pitching them the book, has to run somewhere.
For me, since 2017, that somewhere has been Kit.
14-day free trial of the paid plans. No credit card.
Why the book didn’t name a tool. And why this page does.
Chapter 7, An Email List: The Channel You Own, is where this page begins.
In Chapter 7 I told you to open an email account this week, “Substack, Ghost, or whatever’s current when you’re reading this”, because the tool matters far less than the owning. I stand by that. A book should outlive the software of the year it was written in.
But every week someone asks me the same question. Deepak, what do you actually use?
So here’s the page the book didn’t have room for.
Kit was built by a man who had the same realisation I did, a year before I did, on the other side of the planet. In 2012, Nathan Barry was a designer in Boise, Idaho, selling books about web design. He’d sold more than $150,000 worth of them through a blog and an email list, and when he looked at where the sales were coming from, the answer surprised him. Email was driving the vast majority. Not social. Not search. Email. At a time when everyone said social media was the future of audience building, he reached a different conclusion, and in 2013 he built the tool he wished existed: email software for people who make things and sell their expertise, not for marketing departments.
He called it ConvertKit. In 2024 it became simply Kit. He bootstrapped it without a rupee of venture capital, and it now serves more than 650,000 creators, from James Clear and Tim Ferriss to Ali Abdaal, Sahil Bloom and Matthew McConaughey. It runs on a philosophy Nathan calls hub and spoke: your email list is the hub, and every social platform is a spoke that feeds it. If you’ve read the book, that sentence should sound familiar. I say rented land and owned land. He says spokes and hub. We mean the same thing.
Nathan runs his company the way I’ve asked you to run your practice. Teach everything you know. Default to generosity. Work in public. When they changed the name, they filmed the entire process and published it as a series. And in 2024 they made the product free for anyone with fewer than ten thousand subscribers, which is the most generous thing I’ve seen an email company do. That’s Deep Marketing, practised by a software company.
I didn’t choose Kit because of Nathan’s story. I chose it in 2017 because it was built around tags instead of lists: it treated a subscriber as one person with a history, not as a row in a spreadsheet. I’m telling you Nathan’s story because it explains why the tool has stayed true to that for thirteen years, while most of its rivals chased the enterprise money.
The Deep Marketing loop, and where Kit does the work.
You know the loop. CATT + OST = R. Content earns Attention. Attention, given time, becomes Trust. Trust makes the Transaction possible. Then Onboarding, Service and Transformation turn a client into a fan, and the Reputation that follows makes the next stranger trust you sooner. Here is where Kit sits in each step of mine.
- Content
- Attention
- Trust
- Transaction
- Onboarding
- Service
- Transformation
- Reputation
- back to Content
- Attention becomes capture. Landing pages and opt-in forms, unlimited even on the free plan. The page for your lead magnet, the one that answers the question clients ask you most, can be live this afternoon without a website. Kit delivers the download automatically. And its Recommendations network lets other creators recommend your newsletter to their new subscribers; Kit says it now drives about 40% of all subscriber growth on the platform.
- Trust is built in sequences. This is the engine room. A welcome sequence that runs for days or weeks. A visual automation that watches what someone clicks and sends them down a different path. Tags for every entry point, interest and purchase, so you’re never pitching the book to the person who already bought it. Polls inside your emails, so the channel listens as well as speaks. My 25-day course was one sequence, built once.
- The transaction happens in the same place. Sell a digital product, a workshop seat, a paid newsletter or a recurring membership from a Kit page, with the checkout built in: 3.5% + 30¢ per sale and no monthly fee for the shop itself. Your first low-priced step, the workshop or the book, sits inside the same tool that built the trust.
- Onboarding and service run on automations. A purchase triggers the onboarding emails. Tags decide who gets what. Conditional content shows different paragraphs to different people in the same email. More than a hundred apps in the Kit App Store connect it to your course platform, calendar and CRM.
- Reputation feeds the loop again. A newsletter referral system on the Pro plan. The same Recommendations network, now working in your favour. And, the newest piece, Kit MCP: connect Claude or ChatGPT directly to your list and ask your own audience data questions in plain English.
What it costs, honestly.
Kit isn’t the cheapest tool once you’re paying. You’ve read Chapter 1: cheap doesn’t scale, and cheap backfires. But it’s priced so you pay nothing until the list is real. The free plan runs until you have 10,000 subscribers, and ten thousand is a bigger list than most experts build in their first two years.
Free
$0, for up to 10,000 subscribers
- Unlimited landing pages and forms
- Unlimited email broadcasts
- Tagging and segmentation
- Sell digital products and subscriptions
What it lacks: sequences and automations, the engine. Fine for your first year.
Creator
From $33 a month, billed yearly ($39 month to month), for up to 1,000 subscribers
Everything in Free, plus:
- Unlimited email sequences and visual automations
- Kit MCP
- Subject-line A/B tests and polls
- SMS, RSS campaigns, and 100+ apps and integrations
- Kit branding removed
- 24/7 email and chat support
- Free migration of your subscribers, tags and segments (over 10,000 subscribers, they rebuild your forms and automations too)
The plan my engine runs on.
Pro
From $66 a month, billed yearly ($79 month to month), for up to 1,000 subscribers
Everything in Creator, plus:
- Engagement analytics and subscriber scoring
- Subscriber Signals and deliverability reporting
- Unlimited team users and collaborative editing
- A/B test the content, not just the subject line
- Facebook custom audiences
- Newsletter referral system
- Edit links in emails you’ve already sent
For when there’s a team, or a big list.
Prices rise with subscriber count and are billed in US dollars. Yearly billing saves 17%. Both paid plans come with a 14-day trial and no credit card. Prices checked on kit.com in September 2026; see the pricing page for your exact tier.
Who this is for. And who should look elsewhere.
For
Coaches, consultants, freelancers, agency owners, doctors, lawyers, designers, architects, authors. Anyone with a craft who wants a business built around it, and the patience to build a list before selling to it.
Not for
A large online store with hundreds of products and inventory to sync. A sales team that wants a full CRM with pipelines and call logs. And anyone hoping for a hack. Deep Marketing is for the patient. Kit is a very good spade. It still won’t make the sapling fruit tomorrow.
Your move.
- Open your Kit account today. It’s free up to 10,000 subscribers. Set it up. Send nothing yet.
- Write down the one question new clients ask you most often. Answered properly, that’s your first lead magnet. Build a one-page landing page for it in Kit. It takes an afternoon.
- Write five emails. Not twenty-five. One useful idea each, sent a day apart, asking for nothing. That’s your first sequence, and the first deposit in an account that compounds.
Do all three this week. Remember, you can’t plant a sapling and pluck the fruit tomorrow. So plant it now.
Build on land you own.
You’ve read this far, which means you have the patience Deep Marketing needs. Most of your competitors don’t. They’re busy posting thirty-second videos for an audience that can’t hold a thought for eight seconds. You’re about to build something that compounds. One list. One tool. Free until it’s ten thousand people strong. Ten years from now you’ll be glad you started this week.
Free up to 10,000 subscribers. No credit card. Free migration if you’re moving a list.
P.S. If you take one thing from this page, take the exercise at the top. Write down every place your audience lives, and next to each, one word: rented. Then write the number of people you can reach without asking an algorithm’s permission. If that number is zero, good. Now you know your starting line. Kit is where the second number starts growing, and it won’t cost you anything until it reaches ten thousand.