Why I’m Shutting Down Not a Newsletter

After five years, 56 issues, and many, many fast facts about Google Doc animals, this issue of Not a Newsletter — the monthly, semi-comprehensive, Google Doc-based guide to sending better emails — will be the last.

But while the Google Doc itself is going away, the newsletter that thousands of you get every month isn’t disappearing with it. I’m shifting to a new era: A weekly newsletter highlighting the original work we publish every week on Inbox Collective, with actionable tips, strategies, and ideas to help you get more from your newsletter.

We’re working to build Inbox Collective into the go-to resource for anyone who works with newsletters, and updating this newsletter is the next step on that journey.

If you’re already on the Not a Newsletter email list, you don’t need to do anything — you’ll start getting the new weekly email immediately. If you’re not on the email list, sign up right now, and I’ll ensure you don’t miss a single issue.

How did I decide to shut down Not a Newsletter and shift to a weekly email? As Alex Hazlett wrote earlier this year, there are a few exit plans a newsletter operator can take. Here’s how I figured out the right exit plan for Not a Newsletter:

Not a Newsletter’s origin story

To understand why I’m shutting down the Google Doc, we have to go back to 2018. Back then, I worked as the New Yorker’s director of newsletters. Every month, I’d get an email like this: “I just got hired to run the newsletter strategy at my news organization. I’d love to get coffee, pick your brain, and learn how you approach this job.”

I had this coffee meeting countless times over the years, but in 2018, things seemed to shift — lots of other newsrooms were making bigger investments in newsletters, and the volume of coffee requests started to pile up. It meant I was having very similar 1-to-1 conversations about newsletters, sometimes two or three times a month.

At many of those coffee meetings, I was often asked: Where should someone who works in media go to read more about newsletters? I didn’t have a good answer for them — so I decided to build it myself. The result was Not a Newsletter, titled that because, well, it wasn’t a newsletter — it was a Google Doc.

Since I launched the Google Doc in January 2019, it’s grown far beyond the media world I’d initially targeted. And Not a Newsletter has become my consulting business’s single biggest driver of new clients. I know this: I wouldn’t be doing my job today if not for the Google Doc.

But last year, something shifted in my content strategy that made me rethink whether I should keep publishing Not a Newsletter every month.

The conflict: Not a Newsletter, Inbox Collective, or both?

A few years into publishing Not a Newsletter, I noticed it was getting harder to find great stories worth sharing with readers. So, if others weren’t going to publish the stories I wanted to share, I would publish them myself. I brought on a small team — Alex Hazlett, Claire Zulkey, and Zoie Lambert deserve special shout-outs for their work — and in the summer of 2022, we started publishing new content every week on Inbox Collective.

We’ve published deep dives (52 Ways to Grow Your Email List), industry analysis (The Five Types of Indie Newsletter Business Models), case studies (How The Financial Times Got More Than 78,000 Replies to a Survey), and lessons from experts (How Tinder Made Me a Better Copywriter). These stories reach an audience far bigger than that of Not a Newsletter, and it made me ask a hard question: If I was building a newsletter strategy from scratch, starting today, would I still want to build it around Not a Newsletter? Or would I focus on the original content we publish weekly on this website?

After thinking through my options, a few things became clear:

• My work/life balance needed to shift — When I launched Not a Newsletter, I had no kids and worked full-time at the New Yorker. These days, I’m a new dad, and I run Inbox Collective as my full-time job. That’s made me rethink where I want to invest my time. Not a Newsletter takes at least 20 hours a month to put together. What if I could redirect some of those hours toward parenting, some towards consulting work, and some towards writing articles, guides, and tutorials for Inbox Collective?
• My goals have shifted — In the early days of Not a Newsletter, I aimed to help readers find things worth reading. But that’s not where I’m at right now. I’ve got a new goal with the website: to share everything I know about creating great emails, building loyal audiences, and monetizing newsletters. I truly mean everything — the plan is to publish all of the resources I’ve only made available to clients and instead make them available to every reader, for free. Over the coming months and years, I want to build a one-of-a-kind resource you can learn from. I asked myself: Where would the Google Doc fit in with my new goal?
• Not a Newsletter has competition now — When I first started writing the Google Doc, there weren’t many places to find curated links about the email space. Now, there are dozens — many quite comprehensive, and almost all come out at least weekly. Was there a need to put all this time into the Google Doc if you could get similar content elsewhere and more often?
• The Google Doc format had been stretched about as far as it could — There are real limitations to publishing in a Google Doc. For one, ironically, the Google Doc isn’t publicly searchable in Google. It’s also awful to read on your phone and tough to share. Plus, advertisers wanted access to real data — and Google Docs provided literally none: nothing about opens, clicks, visits, or time spent within the doc. I launched the Google Doc in 2019 to get something out into the world quickly, but I never intended it to be a long-term publishing solution. So I asked myself: Could I continue to deliver the best possible experience for readers and advertisers via this format?
• Five years is a long time to do one thing — I never intended the Google Doc to be the platform I published on forever — it was just supposed to be a way to launch something quickly. My gut was telling me that it was time to try something new. 

All of this pointed me toward a simple conclusion: After five years, it’s time to end the Google Doc. It’s what’s best for me, for you, and for my partners. Most importantly, it allows me to focus on the work that can help more people in the email space.

Figuring out the next step for my newsletter

Starting next week, subscribers will get a weekly email from me on Wednesday mornings (New York time). It’ll highlight that week’s big story, plus an additional tip to try that week. I’ll try to keep things useful and actionable every week. I hope you love the new newsletter — and if you’re not yet on the list, please sign up here!

(If you’ve been getting email alerts when I publish new pieces, I’ll be sunsetting those newsletters, too. You’ll just get the weekly email from here on out.)

As for the Anonymous Animal of the Month that you’ve seen at the end of each Google Doc, I’m not sure what the future of that is, but I can promise you’ll still see those animals pop up around Inbox Collective.

Are there any shameless plugs you want to include at the moment?

In fact, yes! The new newsletter format should bring even more value to partners’ ad buys with Inbox Collective. I do something unique with my sponsorships: My quarterly sponsor gets to promote their brand on every story we publish that quarter, and that sponsorship stays on the article forever. (So Litmus’s promotion of, say, that 52 Ways to Grow Your Email List post means that their ad grows in value for every month the post gets traffic.) But on top of that, sponsors will now get featured promotion in two of the weekly newsletters every month (six total over the course of a quarter), on top of the on-site promotion and a featured case study during their quarter. It’s unlike any other ad package I’ve seen in the newsletter space.

If you’re an advertiser interested in partnering with Inbox Collective, let’s chat. Email me at dan@inboxcollective.com, and we’ll schedule time to talk. 

This is also a good time to mention that I pay freelancers to contribute to Inbox Collective! I pay $450 for shorter stories and $750 for longer, more reported pieces. If you’ve got a story you’d like to pitch, email me at dan@inboxcollective.com — I’d love to hear it!

One final thank you

I feel incredibly lucky to run Inbox Collective — it’s truly a dream job. And it wouldn’t be possible without you, the readers, and without Not a Newsletter. I’m grateful to all of you who’ve read and shared the Google Doc over the years and delighted that it’s helped so many people worldwide.

Thanks for reading — and thanks for continuing on this journey with me.