In late 2022, as ChatGPT went mainstream, Zain Kahn found he had the same questions about AI as everyone else.
By his own account he was a marketer, “not from an AI background,” and for years his job had been finding customers for products somebody else had built.
So he started a newsletter to answer those questions for himself, squeezed into less than five hours a week while he worked his day job.
Within six months, that side project was on pace to earn more than a million dollars a year, and the day job was gone.
Today more than a million people open Superhuman Ai every morning for free, more than any other AI newsletter in the world.
Even so, the marketer who came to AI with nothing but questions now holds the one thing every AI company on earth is chasing.
And it all started with the man he shared a house with.
A Housemate’s Eight-Figure Exit and a Two-Week Test
A few years before Superhuman, Zain Kahn had been a growth marketer living near the University of Toronto campus.
The work took him from KPMG, Nestlé and the United Nations into startups, where he ran paid ads to attract sign-ups, and shaped the products so existing users would bring in more users.
By the time he was done, the apps he’d worked on had more than 8 million users between them.
His housemate happened to be in a very different line of work.
He was building an AI company, and at home he used to tell Zain all about it.
Zain listened, but it was complex and he couldn’t see how AI would ever reach ordinary people.
Then one day his housemate sold the company for eight figures, and AI suddenly had his attention.
He would later say that sale “first got me into AI.”
Zain kept doing what he was good at, which was finding people for a product.
By 2022, he was finding them for himself.
While still working a day job at an ed-tech startup, he started posting about marketing and growth on X and LinkedIn.
He wrote long Twitter threads, then rebuilt the best ones as LinkedIn carousels, posts that readers swipe through one slide at a time.
Within about a year, both accounts had hundreds of thousands of followers.
On the side, he also ran a small email newsletter that built up to about 5,000 subscribers.
Then in December 2022, he launched a marketing course to everyone who followed him, and the sales came from a place he didn’t expect.
“I saw more conversions from my 5K newsletter subscribers than I did from my 500K online followers.”
Around the same time, ChatGPT arrived, and the subject his housemate used to talk about at home was suddenly everywhere.
So Zain tested the idea of an AI newsletter the way a marketer would.
He posted a couple of AI threads, watched both take off, and set himself a rule: if 2,500 people signed up in two weeks, he would launch.
Five thousand signed up.
Superhuman’s first issue went out in early 2023, and a month later he opened it to sponsors to see what would happen.
Within three months, it had 100,000 readers.
Two months of ad slots at about $250 each sold out in 48 hours.
He doubled the price to $500, and the next batch sold out too.
At that rate, the ads could bring in up to $2,500 a week, and Zain worked out that if he sold about 80% of his placements, the newsletter could be a six-figure business.
In April 2023, with every batch of ads selling out, Zain left the ed-tech job.
Sponsors were clearly willing to pay to reach his readers.
So he launched a paid subscription to find out if readers would pay for Superhuman themselves.
The answer they gave is the reason Superhuman is still free to read today.
The Paywall That Bombed And the Ad Slot Worth $650,000
“The subscription product bombed,” Zain said later (about charging readers).
He dropped the paid tier, and decided to “scale this out as much as I can before I start to divert focus.”
Since then, the newsletter has stayed free.
That free newsletter is the front end of the business, and the back end is sold to sponsors.
The work of finding those readers now belongs to Khizer Abbas, Superhuman’s head of paid acquisition, who buys readers the way Zain once bought users for other companies.
Zain’s ads run on Meta and inside other newsletters, and in 2025 one ad network alone brought in 5,000 to 10,000 new subscribers a month.
Most of his ads sell the newsletter itself, with a line like “AI won’t take over the world. People who know how to use AI will.”
Others lead with a free gift, such as a library of more than 1,000 ChatGPT prompts.
From there, the newsletter arrives seven days a week with the day’s AI news, new tools and prompts readers can copy.
It’s written for one reader in particular: the person using AI at work.
By its first birthday, Superhuman had 600,000 of those readers, and between 42% and 46% of them opened each issue.
Those readers work at the companies that buy software, and 63% of them hold decision-making roles (according to Superhuman’s listing on the ad marketplace BuySellAds).
CJ Gustafson, from an earlier piece, built his finance newsletter on the same kind of reader, and nine of every ten dollars he earns come from sponsors.
Many sponsors find Superhuman on their own, through a note at the end of every issue that lists past sponsors and links to a booking page.
Bigger buyers fill out a form for the media kit and book a 15-minute call, and most start with a small test ad.
Superhuman’s sales team, led by Nev Santana from the B2B advertising world, goes out and finds the rest, and every one of them buys from the same ladder.
The bottom rung is the Featured Tool, a short mention near the end of the issue that Superhuman pitches as a cheap way for a sponsor to test whether its readers want the product.
Above it in terms of price sits a “Spotlight ad” mid-issue and a “Primary ad” at the top.
The highest rung is the “Sponsored Tutorial”, open only to selected brands, where Superhuman teaches readers to use the sponsor’s product step by step.
Each issue carries four sponsors at most.
Sponsors send a few bullet points, and the editorial team writes every ad in the newsletter’s own voice.
Every booking and payment runs through Passionfroot, a sponsorship tool Zain leans on for a reason.
At one point, sponsors paid so late that the founders covered salaries from their own savings and, in Zain’s words, “came very close to going out of business.”
Back in March 2024, the bottom rung of sponsorships cost $2,499 per issue.
Sold five days a week for a full year, that one slot is worth about $650,000.
The sponsors keep coming back, too, and Google itself has renewed four times.
Passionfroot calls Superhuman a seven-figure ads business, and Superhuman keeps the exact total private.
Superhuman also runs The Code, a newsletter for more than 300,000 engineers, and a weekly marketing edition for 115,000 marketers, which gives each new set of sponsors an audience of its own.
On top of the newsletters, Zain co-hosts a podcast, Superhuman AI: Decoding the Future, with investor Hassan Bhatti, and its two episodes a week carry sponsors of their own.
What all of those sponsors are really paying for goes back to the job Zain did for years before he wrote a single issue.
Why Google Keeps Paying a Marketer With No AI Background
Some of the biggest companies that advertise in Superhuman now come looking for it, before anyone on its sales team has reached out.
Zain’s brother, Awais Kahn, who runs operations, says enterprise buyers started arriving on their own once the list grew large enough.
They come because Superhuman does a job every software company has always paid for: putting its product in front of the people who will use it.
For years, Zain did that job on a salary, inside other people’s companies.
Now AI companies pay Superhuman to do it, and this time Zain owns the people.
Wispr Flow, a voice-typing app, credits its Superhuman campaigns with about $3.9 million in tracked sales over a year, according to Superhuman’s own case study.
Results like that explain why the newsletter stays free.
Each new reader makes every ad slot worth more, so a paywall that shrinks the list would cost Zain more than it could ever earn.
From the first months, he ran the business on that loop, taking no pay himself and putting every dollar back into finding more readers.
Sahil Bloom, from an earlier piece, ran the same loop, using sponsor money to buy new subscribers at about $1.50 each.
One of Superhuman’s biggest rivals shows what the other road looks like.
The Rundown, an AI newsletter Rowan Cheung built in the same boom, sells to its sponsors and to its readers.
Its course library, Rundown University, costs readers $29 a month.
Superhuman’s bottom-rung ad slot, sold every weekday for a year, earns as much as about 1,900 of those memberships.
At Superhuman, the readers pay nothing, and the sponsors pay for everything.
That leaves Zain holding the one thing every AI builder, from Google to Wispr Flow, has to pay for.
In March 2026, he became one of those builders himself.
Lemon is an AI voice agent for the Mac, in the same category as Wispr Flow.
So the marketer who once couldn’t see AI reaching ordinary people is now building it, with an audience of his own already in place.
Four Lessons From a Million Free Readers
Zain’s story is about AI, but the moves behind it work in almost any field.
1. Lead with your skill, and learn the subject as you go.
Zain’s strengths were business and audience building for companies.
He knew how to do that through paid ads, and that’s what he used to build Superhuman.
He had no background in AI, and he turned that into the pitch, writing for “everyday folks like me” who had the same questions he did.
In a brand-new field, the person who knows how to reach an audience can build faster than the person who knows the most about the subject.
If your strength is selling, marketing or building audiences, you can start in a field before you’re an expert in it.
Write as the learner, for people one step behind you, and use the skill you already have to find them.
2. Be willing to test and see where the value lies.
Zain had two groups who might pay him: his readers, and the companies trying to reach them.
He tested both.
Sponsors bought every ad slot he opened, while the paid subscription he offered readers went nowhere.
So he put everything behind the side that was already paying.
Most audiences have more than one possible buyer, such as the people who read, the companies that sell to them, and the employers who pay for their training.
Put a small offer in front of each group for a few weeks, then build on whichever one pays.
3. Paid ads can put fuel on the fire if you know what you’re doing.
A lot of people wouldn’t put money down to build a newsletter.
They think organic exposure and lead magnets are enough, and that is one way to do it.
Zain went down the route of daily publishing, which effectively makes him a media company.
The more readers he can get, the more he can ask from sponsors.
If ads are new to you, start with a small test budget and watch what each new subscriber costs over a few weeks, because that price moves up and down.
4. Build the audience before you build the product.
Superhuman’s readers are professionals trying to get more done with AI at work.
Lemon, the voice agent Zain launched this year, is built for that same kind of person.
By the time Lemon existed, he had spent three years gathering the people it was made for.
When you choose who to write for, pick the people you’d most want as customers later, even before you know what you’ll sell them.
Years ago, Zain sat in a house near Toronto, listening to his housemate describe a technology he couldn’t picture ordinary people using.
Today, AI companies pay to stand in front of his readers every morning.
He got there without becoming an AI expert first, using the one skill he had spent his career on.
For anyone who has spent years growing someone else’s business, the skill to grow their own may already be there.