Come For the Newsletter, Stay For the Discord: Why Some Newsletters Have Private Communities for Their Subscribers.

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Writing a newsletter can be a solitary operation. Even if you have a large, dedicated following, the act of producing a newsletter often involves a lot of solo activity and then waiting for a response. In the meantime, readers aren’t always aware of what type of company they keep — they don’t know where other readers live, what newsletter issues they most respond to, or what else they’re interested in. 

Some newsletter operators offer access to separate interactive online communities as a way for readers to communicate with each other and with the editor — without waiting for a new issue to arrive to prompt a discussion around a particular topic. If a reader’s inbox is their digital living room, then a private online community is more like the bar where your readers have all agreed to meet up. 

This sort of community might be a place for newsletter readers to ask work-related questions or connect with others in their industry, like in the group for paying members of A Media Operator’s newsletter. It could be a way to find others who want to discuss the tech news of the day, like in the members-only community for Platformer. It could be a way to educate your readers as well, like how Casey Johnston uses a community to provide videos on correct weightlifting form for readers of her newsletter, She’s a Beast.

Some newsletter platforms, like Ghost or Substack, allow a writer to add a comments section at the bottom of the web-published version of their newsletter. Other operators offer readers the chance to join a more active digital community hosted on platforms like Discord or Slack that behave like traditional social media platforms, with readers starting many of the conversations, which grow spontaneously and organically at all hours of the day.

Often, operators make access to those digital communities a feature available only to paid subscribers or members. For writers with a paid newsletter offering, a digital community might offer readers an additional incentive to pay to subscribe. For readers with a free newsletter or podcast, a community built around a specific niche might be something that your audience is willing to pay for separately, particularly if it helps them learn something new or advance their careers.

And there can be real benefits to building a digital community around your newsletter:

• It can be a space for valuable conversations — Lyz Lenz, Iowa-based creator of the newsletter Men Yell at Me, lets any of her 3,700 paid subscribers join her Flyover Politics Discord. “There are conversations I have on Discord I would never have in the comments section [of my public posts] because it might be too personal,” she said.
• It allows you to deepen the relationship with your superfans — A community will likely appeal to your most ride-or-die readers — and for an independent writer, it’s good to know who your superfans are. Let’s say you’re trying to sell a book. As Lenz told me, you can point to your digital community and tell a publisher, “This is my audience. These are the people who are with me no matter what, who are guaranteed to read and engage with my writing.”
• It might allow you to add another “owned & operated” platform — In the past, writers might have been content to engage with their audience via platforms like LinkedIn. But with so many changes happening on social media platforms, it could be safer to shift those conversations to a platform where you have full control.
• There can be significant revenue in launching a community — Take the example of Jay Clouse, the founder of Creator Science, which includes a newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel, along with a paid consulting community aimed at creators called The Lab that he caps at 200 people at any given time. (There’s a waitlist to join.). Access to the members-only community isn’t cheap — it starts at $1,999 per year.

But launching separate subscriber communities isn’t the right path for all newsletter operators. They take time to set up, monitor, engage in, and moderate — all in addition to your other work. Moderation can be a particularly demanding task, especially depending on the community’s size and the topics discussed. Anne Helen Petersen began a Discord to accompany her Culture Study newsletter but shut it down after a few years because it became too large to manage. “I didn’t like playing this role anymore,” she told me. “I’m a writer, and I still really like teaching and starting discussions, but I am not a skilled moderator. It’s really hard.”

Plus, there’s the time involved with setting up an online community. You can launch a Discord server for free if you’re a member, and it costs nothing to set up a Facebook group or a simple Slack channel, but odds are you’ll need to spend some time learning the ropes of a platform relevant to your newsletter — but still separate from your email platform. This doesn’t include the time you may commit to running an online community or troubleshooting issues for your subscribers. 

Before you consider launching your own community, it’s worth asking: What makes a subscriber community worth the time and revenue for those who do run them? And what are the dos and don’ts of building a community? I spoke with a handful of newsletter operators who host subscriber communities about lessons they’ve learned and what makes these groups work for them. Here’s the advice they’d offer anyone thinking about launching a community.

Find a co-moderator for your community

One way to offset the time and the emotional work of running a community is to enlist a partner (or two). Rusty Foster of Today in Tabs got technical help with his Discord — a platform that first gained popularity among the video game community — from one of his former interns, Bijan Steven. “He’s a gamer and I’m not,” said Foster of Steven. “There are a lot of weird features of the platform. He helped me set it up and suggested some strategies that tend to work.”

A community partner doesn’t have to be connected to your original newsletter. Lenz decided she wanted to collaborate with a partner on a Discord server as a growth strategy. Initially, she tried contacting editors of newsletters with similar focuses as hers, covering midwestern culture and politics, although she didn’t get any takers at first. Six months after she set up her Discord on her own, Garrett Bucks, operator of The White Pages, joined her. “It’s been incredible,” Lenz said of the partnership. “It’s good to have someone I can do a gut check with: ‘This conversation is weird to me. Should I intervene, or am I just tired?’”

Lenz also relies on Bucks to step in when she’s out of town or to provide additional moderating muscle when she needs it. “I’ve had a couple of times where I’ve had to say, ‘Hey, you can’t talk to people like that.’ Each time they were men, and they did not respect me. I had to have Garrett tell them. At that point, ‘Screw you’ — they got kicked out.”

Consider putting caps on the size of your community

It may be ideal to see the size of your newsletter list trend up and up, but the same isn’t required for a successful community. Clouse, founder of Creator Science, caps his community, The Lab, at 200 people at any given time. We spoke in July; he said he’d reached his cap as of February with an 80-person waitlist. (Typically, one or two members cycle out of their annual membership per month.)

The cap benefits both Clouse and his audience. “As I continue to build my own creator business, there are limits on my personal capacity,” he said. “The way I’ve designed the membership and the personal support I provide, there needs to be a limit or else I wouldn’t have the time to be a creator.”

He said that the people who pay to be a part of The Lab expect helpful and timely support. “For me to do my job well, I have to be pretty tied in constantly,” he said. He can’t respond to every message in real-time, but he does see almost every DM or post as it comes in and spends about 15 hours on two to four Lab sessions per week, where he answers questions and provides feedback to members. He said it took several months to come to this balance. “I had to figure out the economics of it: how many members, at what price point?” he said. “I could hire someone to help out, but if I were spending less time [in the community], that’s a betrayal of the promise I’ve made.” Ultimately, he said, the tightness of the group strengthens it. “This is a group that often before I can even jump and provide my own perspective, someone’s beaten me to it.”

Lenz’s Discord has around 800 members — about a fifth of her paying subscribers have joined. She said she sees the benefit of online communities that don’t grow for the sake of growth. “When I first launched the Discord, I wanted it to be this huge thing that spawns a community and really builds out platforms and does this exciting stuff,” she said. “Now, I’m fine.” After she watched some other Discord communities become too sprawling, she realized, “There is perhaps a happy size for these kinds of things.” And a smaller community means that members can actually get to know one another. Lenz said that her Discord members have organized a team for a three-day relay race called Relay Iowa and were working on an in-person meetup.

Set rules for the community — and be willing to enforce them

Foster said that there isn’t a lot of disagreement in the Today in Tabs Discord, but when there is, he said, it’s usually because “someone is doing a bit and someone else is not enjoying the bit.” Foster laid down some general user guidelines, borrowing from Casey Newton’s template for his Discord accompanying his newsletter, Platformer. “I thought they were well written and well considered,” said Foster. “When you first join, you have to look at the rules and agree to them explicitly.” As Foster put it, the 14 or so rules mostly say, “Don’t be a jerk. There are ways not to be a jerk.” For the Today in Tabs Discord, Foster keeps a Google Doc that provides background on the community’s culture and how to navigate the server, including an emoji dictionary. “It explains a bunch of jokes you’ll run into,” he said.

Even still, he said the free-flowing nature of Discord means he’s not always aware of, ironically, discord among his members. “You can dip into it and step out. The drawback is that it can be harder to moderate,” he said. “Arguments can flare up and disappear, and I might not know about it if nobody tells me.”

Not knowing might seem ideal for those of us who are conflict-averse, but Clouse warns that moderators should not let rule-breaking behavior slide because “if you don’t take action that sends a signal that’s unacceptable use of the space, that can degrade it quickly.”

Lenz wished she had been more explicit in terms of community rules when she began her Discord. “Going in, I was like, ‘I’m going to be very gentle and assume the best of everybody.’” But, she said, “There are at least two people I wish I had kicked out earlier.”

The rules make the community better both for moderators like Lenz and for members. “You write policies so you can stick by them,” she said. Without them, she had to contend with longtime troublemakers, some of whom she’d met in real life (complicating things on an interpersonal level) and some of whom had long histories of getting kicked out of other online groups. “I can’t believe I put up with it for so long,” she said.

Lenz cautioned against the notion that toxic discussions are better than none at all. “What I’ve learned is that if you pull that weed, then something grows in its place,” she said. “It creates spaces for all the people who were being silenced by that person’s negativity to come and engage. It creates more wonderful conversations than we could ever imagine.”

She also warned against assuming that opening up a community space is just like getting paid to chat with your friends. “I have to remind myself constantly, ‘Discord is work.’ It takes an emotional load,” she said. “You’re guiding conversations, you’re making sure people are being kind to one another, not starting fights. You’re constantly engaging and hearing people’s thoughts and monitoring comments.” She keeps a sign on her desk to remind her not to fight with paid subscribers who mean well and are supportive, even if they occasionally get under her skin. She told me she tries to remind herself to take a break from the community when she needs it. 

When they work, communities can help you write your newsletter

There are few things more satisfying as a newsletter operator than when your community begins to support the newsletter cycle with ideas, feedback, and written contributions. That often comes in the form of readers writing back directly to your newsletter, but member-driven communities can make this feedback loop even tighter. Lenz relies on her community to help her brainstorm ideas for her Dingus of the Week feature and link roundups. “That’s a community-building thing,” she said. “People love it and are competitive about whose suggestions make it into the newsletter.” This type of feedback from her readers directly benefits the newsletter. “It helps me understand my audience and what they like, so when I go to write my newsletters, I’m having the kinds of dialogues that make them excited and interested.”

Foster said that many of the most active members of the Today in Tabs Discord are the most devoted readers of the newsletter who give him news and tips they’ve learned from other communities. “In a lot of ways, people pay to be on the Discord, and I sell their own links back to them,” he said. “I hope I add value to them.” He describes his community as “a several-hundred-strong research department” that’s good at finding interesting stuff. When it comes to riffing on current events, he takes note of the takes and jokes other commenters tend to duplicate so he can provide a fresh perspective for the Tabs audience.

If it’s not fun, don’t keep running a community

If the idea of the time and work that goes into running a separate platform for your readers stresses you out, it’s probably a sign it’s not for you. “If it feels like a strategy for growing your newsletter, I’d be really wary of that,” Foster said. Part of the reason he started his Discord is that he felt “lonely, honestly, writing a newsletter every day” and knew that X, formerly known as Twitter, was going through a major content shift. 

He said that his community on Discord is more of a retention strategy than a monetization strategy for the newsletter. “If people like the Discord and they get involved in it, they tend to keep being subscribers, and they stay engaged with the community,” he said.

Lenz said that when it comes to the way her Discord is run, “It has to be fun for me, too. Otherwise why do I do this? I could just quit and have a corporate communications job.” She said she often has to remind herself that in addition to running a business, the platform has to be a place she wants to go. That’s when her partner, Garrett, comes in handy. “The weeks where it feels like all too much work are the weeks where I say, ‘Hey Garrett, I need to tap out.’” 

She said that while she tends to dedicate Mondays and Thursdays as her “community days,” when she can dig in and engage with readers, there’s no magic amount of time to spend on the platform to keep a community going. “It’s vibes,” she said. “If you’re boring yourself, you’re boring your audience.” 

Ready to start your own community? Here are a few tips to try

• Start small — If you haven’t yet, open up a comments section for your newsletter and see how your readers respond to a weekly chat or discussion post. There is no magic number of subscribers or comments that indicate whether your community might benefit from a separate platform, but there are some indicators that it could be something worth trying. Do your readers talk to each other in addition to responding to what you write? Do they often start their own side conversations? Do you have the time and interest to regularly check in on the conversation to make sure it’s moving along and friendly? If it feels like a strain to keep these conversations going, either in terms of your time or your energy, a comments section may be more than enough for you — or may be something you want to shut down entirely.  
• Spend time in other communities you like — Which ones make you want to return to them, and why? Which have policies that speak to you? Do you prefer to keep up with ones that move more like a lazy river or raging rapids? Survey your friends and readers as well about what communities they enjoy or have drifted from. You may learn aspects of community moderation that you’d never considered before. 
• Research your platforms — You may hear people casually referencing their Discord or Twitch stream, but a social platform isn’t that good if you, the operator, struggle to learn its features or use it. Do your research, including tapping your own audience’s knowledge. Your readers may already be test-driving platforms for you — just ask them what they’re already using and liking.
• Be honest about your mental and workload — If you have a new baby at home, or you’re caretaking for a loved one, or your day job demands unpredictable hours, you need to be clear-eyed about your ability to monitor an online community that people have paid money to access. Similarly, if online fights make you break out into a cold sweat, or you hate the idea of telling someone online to stop what they’re doing, moderating may not be for you. 
• Your readers may be intimidated by new tech — Without overloading your reader (and yourself) with directions on how to use Slack, Discord, or what have you, consider providing members with a brief guide to what they’re getting into. By setting clear expectations and rules, you have the best chance to build a respectful and engaged community from Day 1. 

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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.