What I Wish I’d Known Before Launching My Newsletter

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When I accepted the job as BuzzFeed’s first newsletter editor, I didn’t really know anything about email.

December 2012 was a very different time in the newsletter world. Many of the world’s biggest publishers were sending out newsletters based on an RSS feed of their most recent stories. TinyLetter was one of the most prominent platforms for sending emails. Of the six email platforms I most often recommend today — AWeber, Beehiiv, ConvertKit, Ghost, Mailchimp, and Substack — four did not exist at the time. TheSkimm was growing fast, but several other prominent newsletter brands, like Morning Brew and The Hustle, were still years away from launching.

I’d launched a few newsletters before I started at BuzzFeed, but nothing that had reached more than a few hundred people. How many subscribers could we eventually have at BuzzFeed? I had no idea, but I aimed for a million subscribers because, on my first day, BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, came over to my desk and asked, “When do we get to a million subscribers?” I wasn’t sure if that was a mandate or something he was curious about, but it seemed like as good a number as any to aim for.

I spent that first year worried I wouldn’t figure things out quickly enough. Everything else at BuzzFeed was growing so rapidly, and I knew that building a great newsletter strategy might take years.

But I wasn’t as clueless as I feared. I found this notebook recently, with notes jotted down from the weeks before I started that job. On one page, I’d outlined a few rules for BuzzFeed’s newsletter strategy, and not only did they pay off, but several of these rules still apply today:

• Be kind, show love, give lots
• Personality resonates
• When they let you into their inboxes, they’re making you their friend. They want to listen
• Make sure we give them great stuff
• Make a connection
• Shareability + personality + timeliness + reliability

But there’s so much more I wish I’d known on Day 1 of that job. Looking back, three lessons really stand out:

I wish I’d launched our first newsletter even faster

I spent the first few weeks at BuzzFeed meeting with key staff to understand our voice and working with designers to build out the new daily newsletter template. But it took almost two months to actually hit “send” on my first newsletter.

Two months might not seem like a long time, but those were weeks where I could’ve been getting feedback from readers about what worked and what didn’t. On Day 1, we didn’t need a great design or a perfect strategy. We just needed to get something, no matter how imperfect, into inboxes and invite readers to tell us how they felt about it.

All the good stuff happens once you start listening to readers and using those learnings to improve your newsletter. So launch as quickly as you can. The sooner the product is out in the world, the sooner you can start to learn.

I wish I’d learned to ignore the noise around me

There weren’t nearly as many newsletters in 2012 as there are today, but the ones out there were really good.

I remember meeting Mike Allen, who was then writing Politico’s Playbook newsletter, and being amazed that Politico had reporters dedicated full-time to creating amazing newsletters.

I remember getting newsletters from places like NextDraft or Quartz and being unbelievably jealous of the design and curation that went into their emails.

I remember my team talking about tactics to grow our list. Someone brought up the idea of a celebrity endorsement. “Look, it’s not like we can get Oprah to endorse our newsletter,” I told them.

Then Oprah endorsed TheSkimm.

It was hard not to feel jealous of what others were doing. It was hard not to ask myself, What do these other newsletter operators know that I don’t? What do they have that I don’t?

It took a while and many conversations with peers in the industry to realize that everyone else was dealing with internal challenges like we were. (It also helped to find out, much to my surprise, that a lot of my peers were jealous of the types of newsletters we were launching at BuzzFeed!) I wasted a lot of energy worrying about what others were doing and why others seemed to be so far ahead of us.

Learn what you can from other newsletters and figure out how to apply those lessons to your newsletter, but don’t worry about their list size, open rates, or success with monetization. Focus on what you can control: your newsletter and your strategy.

I wish I’d built audience research into our strategy sooner.

In the early days of BuzzFeed’s newsletter strategy, we didn’t rely nearly enough on audience feedback. What should we launch next? How should we promote a particular newsletter? What tests should we run? I often felt like I had to come up with all the answers myself. 

But the longer I’ve worked in this space, the more I know this isn’t true. Smart newsletter operators lean heavily on surveys to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and how to market their products. If you don’t make time to ask questions and truly listen to what readers have to say, how will you build a strategy around their needs? 

Learn from other newsletter operators

The more I thought about lessons I wish I’d known before I’d launched my newsletter, the more I became curious about what others wish they’d known. I’ve always found it helpful to talk to peers to figure out what’s working for them and what I could bring back to my own work. So Claire Zulkey and I reached out to 22 newsletter operators — some who run their own newsletter and some who work on newsletters at a larger business or non-profit — to see what advice they’d give someone who’s just starting out in newsletters. They’ve generously agreed to share that advice here on Inbox Collective.

Here’s what they had to say:

Geoff Sharpe
CEO and co-founder, Lookout Media

What I would say is to keep things simple rather than trying to do everything. Keep it really focused on one thing: Writing the best newsletter and building the best newsletter product. The big mistake I think we made was trying to do too much. Really narrow in on the one thing you do really well and just do it the best for that audience. 

Jen Flanagan
Executive Director, Roca News

The value prop of what a newsletter adds to someone’s day really matters. I don’t think I understood that right away, and it took me a really long time to get there. You’re competing with other newsletters in someone’s inbox and with someone’s time. And so the ability to truly add value and understand what your product should be — that matters. 

I was so focused on deliverability, I was so focused on the open rate, and it takes away from that fundamental question of, “Why is someone who’s getting hundreds of emails a day opening this product?” And the second we were able to nail that, everything else just rolled into place. 

Sarah Ebner
Head of Newsletters and Executive Editor, Financial Times

I have two pieces of advice that I would share with anyone thinking of launching a newsletter. One is that it’s an ongoing process. People get really excited about something shiny and new, making sure it looks right and that there are good comms around its launch. But that’s only the beginning. You have to put in the work regularly, however busy you are, to make your newsletter a success. You can’t stop because you’re bored or have too many other things to do. 

The other advice would be to always remember that while your newsletter might be great, people won’t know that unless they open it. Subject lines are key — not an afterthought!

Kevin Alexander
Writer, On Repeat

When starting a newsletter, there’s no shortage of advice waiting for you:

• Write in your own voice! 
• Be consistent! 
• Make sure to include a call to action (CTA). 

That’s great advice, and I recommend all of it. 

What gets missed — and what I wish I would’ve known — is that newsletters can be a tool to build a community around. Our digital lives are lousy with carnival barkers and lacking in dialogue. Fostering two-way dialogue with readers improves the user experience on both sides of the screen.

In my newsletter, I shared music I love with people I hoped would love it back, but I wasn’t asking what they were into. I wasn’t asking for a simple reason: fear. I was worried that I would be hosting a party no one would show up to. 

I could not have been more wrong. 

Every Monday, I ask my readers, “What are you listening to?” and they answer. Better still, those discussions are now omnidirectional. It’s a delight to see. On the business side, it’s my most shared work, drives the most subscriptions, etc. Win-win. 

Bottom line: as you build out your newsletter, make space for community involvement, and make sure that’s a Day 1 item. My own business is better for it. Yours will be, too. 

Meagan McGinnes
Assistant Managing Editor, Newsletters, WBUR

One thing I wish I’d known before launching some of our newsletters at WBUR? There is no one answer to growing your subscriber audience. It takes many little wins and lots of experimenting over time to make a real difference. That’s testing sign-ups across our site, paid social ads, partnerships, publishing more material — it’s all of it together. 

The one single change that made the most difference for us, however, was hiring. When we added two members to the newsletter team and an extra product manager, we saw our growth accelerate — and that’s why we’re roughly on track to meet our goal of 80% unique subscriber growth within three years. If you’re trying to push for a new hire right now, don’t forget to include accelerated growth in your pitch to the bosses. For companies and media orgs that never have a shortage of ideas and feel like their own bottlenecks, more hands (and brains) make for more content, more ideas, and more bandwidth to try out cool things! We didn’t hire our second newsletter editor until I had been at WBUR for three years already, and I wish I had made the case for a team even sooner. 

Joanna Ericta
Co-Founder and CEO, The Assist

When I first started The Assist, I wish I had known that…

• A list of 5K super-engaged readers beats 50K less engaged ones. Cleaning your list diligently of bad subs now will help your engagement and deliverability rates later.
• Tracking your subs by acquisition channel is crucial, especially if you’re thinking about doing paid media in the future. (We did it by passing UTMs — those little bits of code at the end of a URL to identify the original source of the link — to our email service provider.)
• You don’t have to include pricing in your media kit (noting we do custom packages based on ad goals and budget has worked better for us, for example).
• You can say no to sponsors. Making money is great, and it’s so exciting when you close your first deals — but if you know your audience won’t resonate or if the brand is difficult to work with from the jump, sometimes saying no is the better move.
• Newsletter operators are out there, and communities for people like us exist! Had I networked with and sought them out sooner, I would’ve saved a lot of time and headaches while building up a newsletter.

Jason Feifer
Writer, One Thing Better

I’ve spent my career in national magazines and was trained to think about broad audiences. But newsletters don’t work like that. If a newsletter isn’t relentlessly focused on a hyper-specific audience, people will tune out fast.

I wish I’d known that to start! Instead, I first launched a newsletter called The Feifer Five — just five things each week from, uhh, a guy named Feifer. Then I rebranded it as Build For Tomorrow, a newsletter broadly about “change.” Neither worked. Eventually, I focused. I called it One Thing Better, aimed it at people who want to be happier and more successful at work, and I created a recurring format of offering “one thing” that readers could do each week. That finally worked. Now I know: If you want to be relevant in inboxes, then find an audience that feels underserved — and be incredibly, unwaveringly predictable in serving them.

Claire Zulkey
Creator and Editor, Evil Witches

I have had a fine experience with Substack thus far, but early on, I was less sure of what I was doing and more susceptible to the engineers’ suggestions for optimal output. Sometimes, I wonder whether I really do need to send out two issues per week (one free, one paid) and what would happen if I scaled back. 

Not every new feature is for me. The first time I tried Substack’s suggestion of paywalling an issue halfway through to drive subscriptions, a reader wrote to me immediately to say, “Ugh, I hate when newsletters do this!” to my chagrin. I do still use that feature sometimes, but sparingly. 

Additionally, this past year, Substack changed its dashboard so that you see your newsletter’s stats each time you sign in, whether you want to or not. I actually don’t want to! I prefer a “Dance like nobody’s watching” approach to my content creation and don’t want to think about what was a flop vs. what drove a lot of subscribers. I have just learned to train my eyes away from those metrics whenever I log in. 

As I’ve gotten more experienced, more comfortable, and aware of my place in the newsletter landscape, I’ve come to realize that I won’t necessarily be “left behind” if I don’t sample every option, play around with every new layout suggestion, suddenly start podcasting just because the platform has a feature to do that. With Substack in particular, I know that they are out there as a social media platform in addition to a newsletter tool, so they want me to be on it as much as possible (with my readers following). This doesn’t necessarily align with my interests and needs, and I don’t think too many of my readers are clamoring for new features and options as well since their lives and schedules reflect my own. Ultimately, it’s still about the content and community, not the bells, whistles, or stickiness.

Andrew Steigerwald
Editor-in-chief, 1440

There’s a nearly infinite number of things I wish we knew when we started, ranging from very in the weeds to 30,000-foot advice. There really is no No. 1, and it’s hard to even boil down to a handful, given the number of variables involved.

That said, here are the top three things I wish I knew:

• Audience growth is a knife fight. Every single day. Having a fantastic product that people love is table stakes for success. Even with a world-class product, you’re not competing against other people in your industry — you’re competing against your potential reader’s daily habits. Behavior change and breaking into daily habits is incredibly difficult — but once you’re in, you’re in.
• Up front, identify what you want to be: A super-successful independent creator (think: Casey Newton, Heather Cox Richardson, Matthew Yglesias) or a full-blown company (Morning Brew, TheSkimm, The Dispatch). This will determine virtually all downstream decisions.
• As long as your primary product is newsletter-based, you’ll be at the mercy of the large inboxes. Deliverability will always be a black box; you can’t control it. IP health is your lifeblood. Protect it accordingly.

Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
Co-creators, Drinks With Broads

Our big top-level takeaway: Don’t be afraid to charge a fee for at least some of your newsletters! By and large, readers recognize that writing, knowledge, information, and entertainment have value and are willing to pay for it — especially now when sources of independent journalism and writing are becoming so few and far between as the media landscape contracts. Figuring out the balance between your free offerings and what you put behind the paywall takes a bit of trial and error, as does how much you want to charge, so think about it carefully — but do not hesitate to include a paid level. You deserve to be paid for your work, and people understand that!

Virginia Sole-Smith
Creator, Burnt Toast

It probably took at least six months, if not more, to get to my conversion rate goal. I thought I was doing something wrong for a while in that first year. I actually have talked to more people now, and I’m like, “Oh, it takes a while to build.” Different newsletters just build differently. It’s easy to look at the most successful ones as the model, but it might not be the right model for you because your readers and your goals might be very different.

Wesley Verhoeve
Photographer and Writer, Process

Two things I wish I’d known before I launched:

• Follow your passion, not trends. In the world of newsletters, authenticity counts. When crafting your content, prioritize subjects that ignite your own passion, not just what you assume your readers want from you. Your enthusiasm will resonate with authenticity, creating a genuine connection with your audience. Readers can tell the difference between something born from genuine interest and something that was produced solely to please others. By staying true to your passions, you not only cultivate a more engaging newsletter but also attract a community that shares your genuine enthusiasm. Remember, authenticity builds trust, and trust is the cornerstone of a successful and lasting newsletter.

• Big hits only contribute so much in terms of the growth of your list compared to a steady, consistent pattern of output.  While a viral newsletter edition can generate a temporary surge in subscribers, the real growth lies in a consistent output of work. Establishing a steady pattern of quality content shows reliability, keeping your audience engaged over the long term. Reliable content builds trust and anticipation, converting one-time readers into dedicated subscribers. Consistency, like a steady heartbeat, sustains the lifeblood of your newsletter, contributing more significantly to list growth than sporadic, attention-grabbing spikes. Aim for a balance between quality and frequency, cultivating a dependable rhythm that makes it possible for your newsletter to become an integral part of your readers’ routine. Steady wins the race.

Uri Bram
CEO and Publisher, The Browser

The thing I wish I’d known when I started is that most platforms and publications are inflating their numbers. One platform told publishers they could aim for a 10% conversion rate from the free to paid list, which, of course, they could aim for, but almost none achieve it right away. Meanwhile, most outsiders who estimate the incomes of newsletter publishers seem to be about as reliable as the websites that estimate every celebrity’s net worth as being $100 million. If you’re comparing yourself to other newsletters, take a breath and realize that their numbers are almost certainly fake.

Eleanor Konik
Author, Obsidian Iceberg

I wish I had known that the writing itself, either in terms of content creation or pace, wasn’t going to be the hard part — and that even the professionals struggle with the backend aspects of running a newsletter. I could have saved myself a lot of stress if I’d realized that stuff like properly handling caching, Stripe APIs, payment processing and pauses, database de-duping, redirects, etc., can be genuinely awful, even when you know what you’re doing. I wasted a lot of time and money thinking that learning more about programming — or hiring professionals — would be able to solve enough of my problems to be worth the effort. I should have just used the most straightforward methods for hosting possible, gotten something with low technical overhead set up, and left it alone while I focused on writing. 

L’Oreal Thompson Payton
Creator, LT in the City

I wish I had switched from Mailchimp to Substack earlier. I launched my newsletter, LT in the City Weekly, in January 2017. I chose Mailchimp because that was the de facto email marketing tool at the time; however, as years went on, I realized what I wanted to do wasn’t marketing, per se, but rather a newsletter version of my blog. I’d started blogging in 2010, but informally sunset it once my newsletter took off. 

However, about a decade later, I longed for more of the longform/community aspect of blogging, and Substack fit the bill. I’d seen other writer friends move to Substack, but I definitely dragged my feet because the thought of having to learn something new/start over again intimidated me. But I was happy to learn I could easily import all of my old posts, and I’m really enjoying the comment section, chat feature and new Notes section. It feels like the best of blogging and newsletter!

Stephanie Talmadge
Director of Newsletter Strategy, Boardroom

I worked as a social media manager before I got into the newsletter world, and growing an email list is just so different from growing a social account. With email, typically, you don’t have these flashpoint moments of virality where something hits, and then the next day, your subscribers have doubled. This is the blessing and the curse of building an audience that you own rather than one that’s owned (and manipulated) by Google or Meta. The growth is more likely to be slow and steady, but a small list of subscribers who are actually engaged with your product can be so much more valuable than a social handle with a large, passive following, where ultimately who sees your content is in your control. In short, don’t be frustrated if your growth is slow — consistency is key, and your list doesn’t need to be huge to be monetizable. It just needs to be healthy.

Max Bidna
Founder, Growth Daily

Launching my ad-driven newsletter business hasn’t given me too many surprises or speed bumps other than the community. Though smaller than anticipated, the newsletter community, both on Twitter and in private Slack and WhatsApp groups, has proven to be an invaluable resource. The camaraderie among other newsletter creators — even my direct competitors — has been truly shocking compared to my experiences in other industries. The insights shared often go beyond the expected business boundaries, with competitors generously sharing insights on effective landing page tricks, monetization ideas, and subscriber acquisition ad strategies.

Rather than a cutthroat atmosphere like in the ad agency niche I was in before this, there seems to be a genuine willingness to see others flourish, with some direct competitor newsletters even making intros to potential sponsors! That’s something that would be considered crazy in other spaces. It really makes me feel like there is an understanding that a rising tide lifts all boats in this community. I’m grateful to be a part of it!

Heather Curcio
Email Marketing Manager, AARP

• Make sure you and any vendors you’re testing use the same metrics for final results to align — opens don’t equal actual engagement. 😉
• Plan for reporting as you build the email/content/documentation. Folks who mostly deal with websites tend to have almost a different language than email folks and focus on different reporting or tracking needs with no idea how things work in email platforms, making expectations around URL tracking formats… interesting.
• Don’t forget to have some way to opt-in to your newsletter on your website once you send out the initial invitation/acquisition push (oops!).
• Don’t forget about checking in to see if everyone on your list is still breathing. It’s a bear when annual list hygiene/de-activation wipes out your list at the end of the year without warning.

Stuart Schuffman
Editor-in-Cheap, Broke-Ass Stuart

Make sure you give people a reason to open your newsletter other than what you’re selling. No matter what your product is, people don’t want only to receive marketing emails. So have other things of value in them.

For example, let’s say you sell… I don’t know, used jacuzzis. Have each newsletter include interesting articles from the world of used jacuzzis as well as whatever strange jacuzzi product you’re trying to sell. (Chlorine, maybe? I bet your used jacuzzi needs some more chlorine.)

That way, people will have a reason to open the newsletter and be excited to read about used jacuzzi news. And once they open your newsletter, they are far more likely to buy something in it. 

Hank Stephenson
Co-founder, Arizona Agenda

I’m gonna do this a little differently. Here’s what I’m glad nobody told me before launching a newsletter: They’re expensive as hell. 

When we launched the Arizona Agenda in 2021, our revenue goals were pretty low: basically just two humble reporters’ salaries. 

But unless you want to operate without insurance and to do literally everything yourself – from tax filings to customer support to logo design — there are going to be a fair number of costs associated with running the business side of your newsletter. 

For example, one of the best investments the Agenda ever made was hiring a virtual assistant to grow the newsletter’s reach and keep the audience we have. It has earned and saved us tens of thousands of dollars, but it’s not free. 

These days, running the Agenda costs nearly twice as much as we originally thought it would. 

Had I known that, I would have never had the courage to start. 

Because here’s the other thing nobody told me: Newsletters are lucrative as hell. 

The Agenda is already earning more than double what we originally hoped.

Boye Fajinmi
Co-founder and president, The Future Party

Really, there are so many things I wish we had known when we first started our newsletter. When we first started, there weren’t that many fancy tools that are widely available now (referral program, boosts, ad marketplaces, etc). We had to do everything custom and slower. This gave us deep knowledge, but we found ourselves building, investing, and solving for tools that would later be created. I wish we’d known that the newsletter ecosystem was growing so fast, those things would come out, and we would have rethought our investments. Now, there are so many things we “could” build or do ourselves, but we have an understanding they are being built or probably will be built. 

I wish we had known early on that not all growth channels are the same. Cheaper customer acquisition cost (CAC) doesn’t at all mean more valuable CAC. In addition, I wish we had known that clicks would be the most important thing our brand partners care about. There was no Apple Mail Privacy Protection when we started and open rates and impressions would take you a long way in the eyes of brand partners, so CAC was calculated off of open rates, not click-through rate. Due to the shifting economy, at minimum, you have to drive traffic to brand partners to create a sustainable business. I wish we’d known and could have adapted quicker to how we grow, in order to more impact our bottom line.

I wish we’d known to survey our audience a lot quicker than we did. We often received great feedback, but becoming scientific with our thoughts, questions, and potential features really helped solidify our direction, validate and give us a pulse on what was really important and valuable. Constantly creating a feedback loop has gone a long way.

Nichole Dobo
Senior Editor for Audience Engagement, The Hechinger Report

One of the best things about newsletters is we get to solve problems that do not have a playbook. When I started my first newsletter in 2014, and later led the creation of a larger portfolio of newsletters in my newsroom, there was a lot of space for creativity. I am proud of what we accomplished with a tiny team. What I wish I had thought of in the beginning is how to communicate to the entire newsroom that we are never finished. There is often a flurry of activity and energy around building something new, but it is a mistake to say, “Okay, good enough.” On a small team, it’s a challenge to find the bandwidth to keep marching up that hill. One solution is to hold periodic meetings where you ruthlessly cut tasks and features that are no longer serving your organization or readers. Experimentation can’t stop.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed a lesson to this piece! And now it’s your turn: What’s something you wish you’d known before launching your newsletter? Share it with me here — I might include your lesson in a future post on Inbox Collective.

Thanks to our sponsor

The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our fall sponsor, Who Sponsors Stuff, which gives you and your team the tools to quickly find and reach out to relevant sponsors for your newsletter. They track 350+ newsletters, have direct contact information for 6,000+ sponsors, and keep you on the cutting edge of who’s spending money in the email advertising space. Find out how their Sales Pro product can supercharge your ad sales operation today.