Harry Dry — Marketing Examples, Building a Business from Marketing Case Studies
The process of editing real marketing examples into short content, gathering readers through platform-specific distribution and email subscriptions, and sustaining full-time operation through corporate sponsorship.
Harry Dry is the founder of Marketing Examples, a site and newsletter that briefly analyzes real companies' marketing examples. He selected ad copy, landing pages, and customer acquisition strategies and explained them so readers could apply them to their own businesses. The initial revenue model was to publish content for free to build an audience and receive sponsorship fees from companies interested in that readership.
A Business Born from a Web Designer's Observation
The starting point for the idea was his experience working as a web designer. At the time, Dry was 23, and while browsing many websites on design reference sites, he thought it would be good if there were also a place that collected real examples for marketing. The first version of Marketing Examples, which developed this idea, was released on May 23, 2019. The early site had a few examples and an email signup box, and its features and subscription conversion methods were improved as it operated.
A post that deeply analyzed a specific product helped secure early readers. He analyzed how Nomad List targeted specific search terms, and recalled that about 50 subscribers came in when founder Pieter Levels shared the post. Adding people who came in through previous projects and his Indie Hackers activity, he secured roughly his first 100 readers.
In July 2019, he signed his first major sponsorship agreement with the email sending service EmailOctopus. He proposed it himself, judging that it was a product he used himself and that it was a good fit for his audience, and the personal connection he had built at an offline gathering also helped with the deal. EmailOctopus later disclosed that the amount of the first agreement was GBP 2,000 in total for three months. After securing sponsorship, Dry quit his job and devoted himself to Marketing Examples.
The Product Hunt launch also involved preparation. He set a goal of reaching 1,000 email subscribers and 1,000 Twitter followers, achieved it about 70 days later, and then introduced the product on August 7, 2019. As a result, over 72 hours, email subscribers grew from about 1,300 to 3,300, and it received more than 1,500 upvotes and was selected as Product of the Week. The day before launch, he focused on improving the part that converted visitors into email subscribers.
The Long Work Behind Short Content
The defining feature of Marketing Examples was an editorial approach that compressed long explanations into core principles and visuals. For the representative article '17 Copywriting Tips,' he said he condensed what he learned from a related course and about four books into 17 images. It showed how to shorten sentences, explain the benefit customers get, and lay things out in an easy-to-read form, connecting each point to actual wording.
The article on landing page headlines explained how to change the message depending on how much visitors know about the product and the problem. For customers who arrived through a referral, present the solution first; for customers who came in for the first time through a blog, make them aware of the problem first. The piece was structured to compare real business owners' pages and show even the conditions under which the principles apply.
The newsletter revealed the operator's individual presence. In a follow-up interview, Harry Dry explained that the name 'Harry's Newsletter' and a human tone were important for building a relationship with readers. The official subscription prompt also concretely stated what readers would receive, such as 'three short examples, two copywriting tips, and one favorite tweet.' It was designed so that who was sending it and what readers would get were visible before subscribing.
Designing Writing and Delivery to Readers Together
The early distribution principle was to show the content fully within the platforms readers already used. On Twitter, Reddit, and Indie Hackers, he posted the article's content directly and pointed to the newsletter at the end. On Facebook and Slack groups, he shared examples as short visuals, varying the format by platform.
This process took considerable time. Dry explained that his distribution process took eight hours in total: four hours posting and four hours replying. He also considered it important to act as a community member by sharing other people's posts and leaving detailed comments. According to records he published, about a year after writing his first post, email subscribers reached 19,000.
He also concentrated readers' sharing on specific posts. He directed people who liked an article to the same Twitter thread so recommendations and shares would not scatter across places. Existing readers' reactions exposed the content to new people, and some of them in turn subscribed to the newsletter, creating a cycle.
On the site, he placed subscription points in multiple locations. Readers could submit their email through a fixed menu, the end of an article, a popup that appeared when they were about to leave the site, and a separate subscription page. In particular, he preferred suggesting subscription at the point of leaving rather than during reading. In his own analysis published at the time, about half of all signups came through this popup.
30,000 Subscribers and $3,000 in Monthly Revenue
In the Indie Bites interview published on September 10, 2020, the newsletter had about 30,000 subscribers and roughly 50,000 Twitter followers. In the same interview, Harry Dry said his revenue at the time was USD 3,000 per month generated by Ahrefs sponsorship. Rather than selling paid products directly to readers, he was keeping the content free while earning sponsorship revenue.
In this structure, the people consuming the content and the people paying money were different. Readers subscribed to learn marketing, while sponsors paid to make their brands known to readers who were likely to use related tools. Therefore, the business scale in this case should be read with free newsletter subscriber numbers and sponsorship revenue as separate metrics.
The retrospective from EmailOctopus, the first sponsor, shows the value the advertiser gained. The company explained that its sponsorship of Marketing Examples lasted a little over six months, after which Ahrefs made a larger sponsorship offer. It also stated that even after the contract ended, new customers continued to arrive who had learned about the brand through Marketing Examples. This is a case where repeated exposure to readers in a specific niche remained as brand recall.
The difficulty Dry cited in running it full-time was the isolation of working alone. In a 2020 interview, he said the bigger difficulty was not running the site itself but the shrinking number of people he met in person. He explained that even then he was looking for a solution that suited him.
From an Examples Collection to a Specialist Resource Library
In 2022, he introduced Copywriting Examples, focused on copywriting. It offered more than 330 free examples of copy he had personally selected, organized so visitors could browse them by use case, such as headlines, feature descriptions, customer testimonials, and ads. It broadened its use from readers reading articles to a resource they could consult when actually writing copy.
Around this time, in a Product Hunt Q&A, Dry said the newsletter had 90,000 subscribers. As reasons for its growth, he cited focusing on the narrow niche of short, useful marketing examples and not adding other features such as job boards or communities. As checked on October 5, 2026, the official site's readership description says 130,000.
In Dry's case, the heart of the business lay in the combination of his ability to select and explain examples and an operating approach that repeatedly delivered them to readers. Content acquired readers, email sustained the relationship, and sponsorship agreements provided the income to focus on production. Marketing Examples is a case of turning an individual's accumulated expertise and editorial skill into a media property that continues to be read and developing that media property into his own profession.