It’s a meaningful way to end an email–an aside to a lover; a greeting to a family member; an apology to someone you care for deeply. It’s also how Anand Sanwal frequently closes his daily business data newsletter.

He’s the founder and CEO of CB Insights, a private market intelligence firm. The company offers many analysis products, including reports and research-oriented apps and plug ins. But perhaps what it’s most well-known for now are the daily emails that have taken the tech industry by storm. If you look at the past few email subject lines, you can get why: “pizza-as-a-service (Paas),” “a unicorn gores an investor,” “truth: startups are like kindergarten.”

They are admittedly eye-catching given the voice and quasi-irreverence. That same voice is what led Sanwal to end with some iteration of “I love you.” It got people’s attention, including VCs who have tweeted about the service and hundreds of thousands of subscribers (mine too–full disclosure: I wrote a few posts for the CB Insights blog while I was a freelance writer). The press has also become hip to the company–the New York Times has featured the company’s data more than a few times.

A lot of it had to do with the tone something like “I love you” creates. “It was to see if people were reading or paying attention,” Sanwal told me. Most emails that deal with business data are dry and lifeless–they attempt to be objective in form, which leads to dead prose and glazed eyes. He decided to insert tidbits into the newsletters one wouldn’t expect; “Easter eggs” as he calls them. “The goal is to be conversational and approachable.”

Now, six years after the company first launched, the newsletter is going strong. In the first six months of 2016 it hit 171,000 subscribers. That’s up from 51,000 in 2014. According to Sanwal, the average “email open” rate currently hovers around 30%. For reference, the average “newsletter open” rate for most industries is about 20%-25%.

Since its start, CB Insights has aimed to be a data analysis company that focused on the private markets. It’s an onerous subject, and one that’s not necessarily new–information services companies offer myriad products that aim to do just this. But what Sanwal wanted to do after he left his cushy VP job at American Express in 2007 was to make a data firm that looked at private business trends. He saw people like Nate Silver and even businesses like OK Cupid doing interesting data-crunching in ways that hadn’t really been applied to this industry. He felt those kinds of trend-data approaches could help differentiate an analysis-based company.