Finding Sanity While Building a Newsletter: A Conversation With Indian Creator Tanmoy Goswami

These stories are presented thanks to beehiiv, an all-in-one newsletter suite built by the early Morning Brew team. It’s fully equipped with built-in growth and monetization tools, no code website and newsletter builder, and best-in-class analytics that actually move the needle. Some of the top newsletters in the world are built on beehiiv, and yours can be too. It’s one of the most affordable options in the market, and you can try it for free — no credit card required. Get started with beehiiv today.

After Nathália Pandeló Corrêa covered Brazil’s growing indie newsletter economy, we realized there was so much more to learn about the challenges international newsletter editors face, the unique ways they engage with their audiences, how they monetize their platforms, and the opportunities that come when you think globally.

So we wanted to launch a new series of conversations with newsletter operators based outside the United States, in a series we’re calling The International Inbox. There’s a lot to learn from hearing how others use newsletters to reach readers — wherever they are.

Our first conversation is with Tanmoy Goswami, based in southern India, who launched the mental health newsletter Sanity in 2020. Within the first 100 days of its launch, Sanity broke into Substack’s top-paid health-related newsletters — the only non-western name on their list. After he took part in an Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program at City University of New York’s Newmark Journalism School, Tanmoy decided to grow Sanity into a larger platform that provides a learning space to explore the intersection of mental health, work, culture, money, and technology. (He’s since moved his newsletter to Ghost.)

Subscribers to Sanity receive an email per week with in-depth original stories, personal essays, and reading recommendations from the world of mental health. Tanmoy’s aim with Sanity is to counter mental health myths, explore beyond the Western biomedical mental health model, and make mental health conversations accessible to an audience beyond specialists, the highly educated, and financially privileged. Some stories are lighter, like how assembling furniture from Ikea helped Tanmoy quiet the voices in his head. Some are heavier, delving into suicide and childhood trauma. It’s a newsletter that’s not always easy to read (or, on his end, to create), and he operates in a country without a long history of newsletters, which makes Tanmoy’s success all the more remarkable.

Before launching Sanity, Tanmoy worked as a business editor and reporter for the Economic Times and ​Fortune’s Indian edition​. He knows many journalists whose careers are in peril but who blanch at the idea of pivoting to becoming a “creator.” “They think that being a creator is somehow some kind of a repugnant idea,” he told me. “They think that creators are influencers, and that being an influencer or being a creator is some kind of terrible thing.” But he believes the creators he meets “are no less skilled, they have no less integrity, they have no less expertise on what they write about or produce stuff about than any journalist. And sometimes they do it with a lot more heart because they know exactly who they’re producing the work for — not some nameless, faceless audience.”

Despite the emotional effort that goes into a newsletter on mental health and Tanmoy’s desire to diversify his incoming stream, he still is an evangelist for the medium. “I’m very passionate now about telling my friends and colleagues in the industry, ‘Start a newsletter. Slowly keep growing an audience. Develop that muscle. Develop that confidence.’”

In our conversation, Tanmoy and I spoke about the challenges of producing a newsletter from India, the value of keeping communities small, the double-edged sword of audience surveys, and how to do more for yourself by doing less.

(This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.)

Tell me a little bit about your workflow.

Currently, Sanity goes out once a week, typically on Fridays at about 4 p.m. India time. I did start out with more than once a week, but very soon, I realized that I was burning through my story bank, and it was just unsustainable.

I was making up the rules on the fly. Nobody in India, to my knowledge at that point, was running a newsletter that had paying subscribers that had attained any kind of scale. By scale, I mean very modest numbers, even like a hundred paying subscribers. That was kind of unheard of when I started in the middle of the pandemic in December 2020. (Editor’s note: Rega Jha, another India-based writer, launched a small pop-up newsletter in 2020 that attracted about 1,000 paying subscribers, but they paid the equivalent of about $11 per year for access to the newsletter.)

I allowed myself to embrace the chaos. The only thing that I’m very strict about is sending it out on Fridays. For about a year and a half, I was able to plan in advance. I had three stories ready in the bank at any given point. But for the last year and a half, I haven’t had that luxury. I have 20 stories in draft stages, and then I basically pick and choose depending on the state of my research and what I feel most comfortable putting out a particular week.

Last year, I experimented with these theme-based seasons with a break in between. I was confused about whether I wanted to project myself as a newsletter or a platform. The difference that I tried to build was that I would combine the rigor of research and analysis with what I call the soul of lived experience. In that sense, it is not like a journal entry necessarily all the time. There is some research, some reporting, and some analysis combined with my personal voice and the voice of the community.

It worked out really well. People knew what to expect. I was able to attract some very focused readers who were interested in things like, parenting or technology. But then again, I realized the amount of logistics and planning required to stay on course with just one theme for three months is very, very difficult to pull off. Earlier this year, I had a call with [about 25 of my most loyal] paying subscribers. I told them, “Look, I am going to move on and go back to the freestyle way of doing this.”

Every week is a new piece. There is no necessary connection between one piece and the next. And it’s once a week. I’ve become better at compressing the writing time. When I started, it would take me at least three days to put a piece to bed. Now I can do it in a day and a half if it’s a long piece that requires research, fact checks, et cetera. If it’s a personal narrative, then it can take half a day, or it can take five days, depending on how emotionally draining it is. I’ve allowed myself to wing it and embrace the chaos.

Tell me a little bit about what it’s like working from India and what issues or opportunities face the newsletter scene there.

There is no newsletter ecosystem in India. There are a few Substackers. There’s a local homegrown platform called Stck.me, which was started by the guys who started an independent media house called Scroll.

There are a few indie newsletter writers. But from what I’ve seen, a lot of them are not regular. They are not able to produce every week, and I completely understand. I am super privileged that I get to pay rent and my child’s school fees, and some surplus by writing a newsletter. But not everyone is that lucky.

If you are producing something for the local audience, my guess is it’s going to be extremely difficult to make any money out of it. Unless you are in the tech business and you have a Casey Newton-type following, which very few people in India do. But otherwise, writing a newsletter about your inner life and your journey through therapy and all of that, no, it doesn’t exist.

A lot of people do newsletters more so as to park their own thoughts and as a passion project. The main challenges are:

A.) The lack of a culture to pay for independent stuff.

B.) There is also a trust issue with this community, the newsletter community in general. If you don’t know someone from Adam, why will you allow them to be part of your inbox?

I got lucky because I carried a strong core of readers from my previous jobs. I had some credibility. But if you’re just starting out and you want to put out a newsletter, it’s going to be a grind. There’s so much buzz. SEOs can produce 100 newsletters about newsletters because there is that flywheel. But here, it’s nonexistent. There’s no culture. There’s no subculture, even, of newsletter writers.

For someone like me who has a lot of readers overseas, I can’t have differential currencies on my website. I can’t ask people to pay in dollars, rupees, and Euros, or whatever. I have bled subscriptions because of this. For instance, the amount could be in Indian rupees; it could be 5,000 rupees, which is actually $60 in U.S. dollars. But an elderly person comes to the website, they see the number 5,000, and they get spooked, and they don’t subscribe. When you have a low base, every subscriber lost is a big opportunity cost.

When I was on it, I used to write fairly annoyed emails to Substack. I was like, “It’s clear to me that this whole newsletter ecosystem is not being built for people in the global south. And you guys don’t care, honestly.”

That was half the reason I moved to Ghost because it was not making any big claims about creating this parallel economy for creators and writers. But Ghost’s fees are very high. And now that I don’t use Twitter anymore, I have lost the amplification that I used to get. I’m thinking maybe with Substack Notes, is it worth going back? I don’t know. I’ve been asking my subscribers, and they’re okay with it. But then they’re like, “You can’t keep switching platforms. Tomorrow there’ll be something else.”

This is what happens when you are an indie creator in this part of the world. You don’t have colleagues that you can just knock heads with. I have to wait to get to a festival somewhere in Thailand to meet people from South Asia or Southeast Asia and then discuss these pains with them. [Editor’s note: A big shout-out to the team behind Splice Beta, which takes place every year in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is a rare event aimed at media operators in Asia.)

Is Sanity your sole source of income?

I write a few columns and essays occasionally. I don’t take on too much because it just overwhelms me. I say everything that I have to say for Sanity, and then I’m like, “Please don’t ask me about my inner life anymore. I’ll throw up if that term comes up one more time.”

Pretty much every opportunity that I’ve gotten in these three years has come because of Sanity. If I were to simply break it up between the subscriptions, contributions to Sanity proper, and then the other gigs, I would say a third to 40% comes from Sanity. I freelance very little because I can’t take the stress of pitching one article and waiting to get paid. What I do is I now work with one client a quarter, and usually, I do stuff around workplace mental health.

Last year, I did a series of 16 videos with an insurance company breaking down busting myths around workplace mental health. There are so many of these apps that come to me now and say, “Can you apply a lived experience lens and help us sanitize this product?” So I do that. Then, I teach at seven or eight different universities. I teach one-off modules. I teach courses. My goals are very low from this. Rent, school fees, groceries — if that happens every month, I’m very happy.

How many paid subscribers do you have?

I actually have defocused subscriptions because I don’t have a paywall, so it’s all available for free. I realized if I’m tracking how many people are paying to read this, I will end up frustrated very soon because I’m not giving people any reason to pay apart from out of the goodness of their hearts. Now, what I try and track is both paying subscribers and people who make one-time contributions.

This is where it gets a little tricky because a lot of them are repeat contributors. If I were to count each separate contribution, then it would inflate the number and it would make it seem close to 500 or 600 a year, including subscriptions and one-time contributions. I would say I probably have around 350 paying subscribers.

I have a habit of purging subscribers regularly because I use Ghost, and I decided not to let the number go beyond 3,000. This is not a politics or a tech newsletter. A lot of people can’t even bear to read this stuff every week. I have readers who won’t read anything for six months; then, they will slowly plod their way through edition after edition. If I’m getting about 10% [of the total list] paying, I’m very happy with it. I have consistently had about 15 to 18% paying, putting together regular contributions.

Every year around December, there is a slump because renewals come up. In India, we’ve had this big tech regulatory overhaul that has resulted in a lot of chaos. I realized that subscribers, in the conventional sense, are not the way to go for me. I have to appeal to people to make more one-time contributions. That has been my focus for the past year and a half, and it’s been working out okay.

When you did your call with your loyal readers, had you done that before? Do you do that regularly?

Dan [Oshinsky from Inbox Collective] would be proud of me because he’s always saying, “Respond to every email.” Even when I was a journalist in a dead tree newsroom, I was always responding to every reader within 15 minutes. But then you would get one email every six months or so.

I wanted to keep it intentionally small, not just because this stuff is heavy or because growing will become expensive for me, but because when you’re writing about a near-death experience or when you’re writing about childhood abuse or themes like that, you want to feel safe when you write that stuff.

In the beginning, it used to be terrifying, to be honest. I used to have half-yearly calls and 100 or 150 people would show up. Typically, what I would do is present an annual report or a half-yearly report with the financial numbers from Sanity, the editorial highlights, all of that, and then some feedback gathering, but then also just sing. They’re people in the community who bring their guitars and start singing.

Once that started happening, I realized, “Okay, I can breathe. This is not an annual general body meeting.” But I realized that in order for me to add more meat to these calls so that people have a reason to feel that they’re getting something out of it, apart from the pleasure of my company, I decided that I need to do something extra.

I’m very blessed to have some incredible people in the community who are experts in their fields. They’re neuroscientists, people who run suicide helplines, people who are entrepreneurs in the mental health field. In 2022, I started reaching out to them very gingerly and saying, “Do you mind coming and delivering mini-keynotes?” And they started doing that. That has been a massive hit. I’ve been doing that for the last year.

The calls with the paying subscribers, I’ve done that maybe thrice in the past three years. I’ve always done that when I have hit a wall with something. I resort to them only when I am like, “I’m going to shut this down unless you can change my mind, so come and talk to me.”

When they show up for these calls, I feel like we know each other a lot. I want boundaries to be respected, of course, because mental health is a topic where it’s very easy to lose sight of boundaries. They offer very focused advice. They offer coaching; they offer their time. They don’t ask me to do anything extra for them. Many of them will be like, “Don’t do anything. Even if you don’t produce another edition, we’re going to keep supporting you.” It’s one of the perks of this work.

When you originally put out more content per week, and then you scaled back, did you announce that to your readership?

They were like, “We never asked you to do this. We never asked you to produce more.” I, in fact, even started these audio stories — really roughly produced podcasts, but some excellent, extraordinary conversations. I introduced that as an add-on for paying subscribers.

Obviously, this was a ton of extra work. And barring a period of four or five months a couple of years ago, I haven’t had anybody helping me. I thought, “This is going to be cool. People are going to be happy.” Those podcasts had among the lowest open rates of anything I’ve ever produced. Not that open rates mean anything anymore, but when they used to, I would get 55, or 60%. When the numbers grew, they would come down to 45, 47, 48%. Then, for those podcasts, they’d be like 22%.

I was like, “Guys, I’m working so hard to put out this amazing thing for you.” Then they turned around, and they were like, “Hang on, we never asked you to produce anything extra.” Their number one advice to me over the years has been don’t create extra work for yourself. Do less.

Do you run surveys?

Very few. I have one survey form embedded in the welcome email that readers get after signing up, and there’s always a steady trickle of responses. One thing that I’m always very mindful of is if I ask people for feedback, I have to act on it. That’s another reason why I consciously don’t ask for too much because then I have to do something with all that information.

I have maybe one or two surveys that go out on autopilot, but I’ve never really felt the need to. This community is super communicative. Right after I put out an edition, I know that by midnight my time, there will be at least half a dozen emails in my inbox.

I used to be a devotee of community engagement and things like that. For a one-person show, forget about it. You can’t do all that fancy stuff.

My favorite types of emails that I get — I woke up with one of them this morning from a person who wanted to discontinue their subscription because they said they have reduced income now. I get at least 20 of those emails every quarter. They don’t even realize that the thing is free, that they don’t need to keep paying [Ed: Tanmoy offers a paid model where for ₹5,000, or roughly $60 per year, paid subscribers receive access to member-only posts and roundtables and a say in the newsletter’s editorial agenda.] When I write back to them and say, “Hey, no sweat, but keep reading,” they’re always surprised.

This community has very low expectations. These are people who have been taken for granted by various systems and structures. They are not responding with commanding and meaty stuff to a survey. There’s a power play there because it presumes that the person that you’re asking those questions has the mind space or the training to think about stuff that means something to you.

I don’t collect click rates. I don’t track anything, actually. I tell them all the time that I’ve stopped tracking data. But yes, always keep me accountable. If I write something that is harmful in any way, that is ignorant, write back to me. That’s all that matters, really, to me.

Tell me about your reader demographics.

I have subscribers in about 54 countries across all six continents. About the top 10 or 12 are from India and then a bunch of Western European countries and the US. There is a steadily growing phalanx in Portugal and Singapore.

As a pompous former journalist, I used to think that the pieces that should do the best are the ones where I’ve done kick-ass reporting like, “This is good. I’m feeling happy about this.” Then, nothing, like the chirping of crickets. Then, I’d write something incredibly personal. When I look at it three years later, I’m like, “This is really cringe.” Those pieces will always elicit the most amount of responses.

I’ve realized that what people expect from me is not really reporting on mental health. That’s also been liberating. One of my readers did a profile of me, and they were like, “Do you consider yourself a journalist?” I’m like, “Hell no. Why would I want to go back to that identity with all its problems? I’m very happy being called a creator.”

In general, people respond best to things that they are either surprised by or pieces that they see themselves mirrored in. That latter point speaks to the general crisis in news avoidance and why people don’t want to read the news because they don’t see themselves in the news very much. It’s intuitive that people coming to a mental health newsletter would be interested in having their experiences mirrored, validated, and questioned also at the same time.

Even reporting on a piece is just a lot of labor. This is why sometimes I’ll freelance, and that’s where I will tickle my reporting bone. But I’m very happy to write essays. I’m contemplating that, at some point, the tagline on the website will change to just “Essays on mental health.”

But there are sub-communities. There is a tech founder/VC/policy community that is very interested in my work on data privacy and mental health apps. There is a sub-community which is very interested in the problems with psychiatric diagnosis. The beauty is that I know almost every member of those small communities.

I think it’s interesting that you don’t prefer to call yourself a journalist despite your extensive experience as… a journalist.

I started preparing myself early on to diversify. I started my career as a teacher, and I was like, “I need to get back to teaching somehow.” Because I’ve started thinking of myself as a creator, it has allowed me to do some things that, if I were to just look at myself narrowly as a reporter, I wouldn’t be able to.

I finally launched this thing called School of Sanity, this online learning space. The plan is that every month, I’ll be hosting a closed group session on the intersections of mental health, work, money, culture, and tech: 10, 15 people, paid sessions. Slowly, I would want at least 30, 35% of my revenue to come from there so that I can write the newsletter, which is what I’m still the most passionate about, without the pressure and without freaking out every time a subscriber unsubscribes. Journalism does not prepare you for this. It’s taken me three years to unlearn some of those narrow, muted ways of thinking.

There is now a core group of people all over the world who understand what that brand is about and who are allowing me to experiment with it and do different things. This is the year when I let the newsletter also breathe a bit, don’t put the pressure on it to put food on the table, and just continue to survive. I have this thing on my laptop. It says, “Aim for joy, settle for survival.“

What are your guidelines for doing this kind of work but also protecting your own mental health?

The piece that I submitted today is all about this, where I basically flogged myself for being a complete hypocrite because I tell people to do this, and I don’t. I suck at it, to create boundaries and get off the treadmill and all of that.

One thing that I have done with reasonable rigor is take a one-month break after every two months of doing this. I’m not completely offline in the sense that I line up these things I call these Sanity classics. I repurpose a lot of my old stories, refresh them a bit, and I keep putting those out. But I try not to write anything new and original for a month after every two months or so.

The other thing that I’m wrestling with right now, really, is I used to feel very responsible for this wounded community that has gravitated towards me. In therapy, I had this insight that somehow I was sacrificing my own patienthood because I had this rescue mindset, perhaps, that I have to make all of these people feel safe and see the light and feel validated. I have now stopped feeling that way.

It gets overwhelming when a mother writes to you and says, “My daughter was about to kill herself, and that she had locked herself in her room for a year. Because I read your work, it has helped me connect with her again.” What do you do with that, right?

Earlier, I had this policy of immediately responding to emails. It’s a small thing, but now I’ve stopped doing that. I don’t immediately respond to anything. It allows me to marinate because I don’t want to be an emotional mess every time I get an email like this. I now put at least two days between an email hitting my inbox and my responding to it.

Increasingly, I’m trying to give myself permission to really write about flowers and stuff. The beauty of mental health writing is that it doesn’t have to be about depression, schizophrenia, or whatever. It can actually be about flowers. I have very seriously started writing to a few of my close readers and ask them, “Would you still read me if I were to write something about Bollywood music?” I’m going to do that this year. I’m going to create space to write about really random stuff.

Thanks to our sponsor

The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our winter sponsor, beehiiv, an all-in-one newsletter suite with built-in growth and monetization tools, no code website and newsletter builder, and best-in-class analytics that actually move the needle. Start your journey with beehiiv today, absolutely free — no credit card needed.