7 Lessons We've Learned From Sending 100 Weekly Newsletters

When we first started our newsletter, we had no f*cking clue what we were doing or where it would lead us. The one thing we did know was that having accountability to send something out every week could only benefit our creativity and our business. And 100 weeks later, we can say: We were right!

Here are seven lessons we’ve learned along the way:

🥾 Start before the path is clear

We constant say how happy we are that we started both our newsletter and our podcast before we fully knew what we were doing with either. We could have spent months (years!) spinning our wheels trying to figure out exactly where to go with it, but but if you wait until you know exactly what you want to do, you never will. Start now, do it shittily.

🗑️ Don’t be precious with your ideas

Late night hosts like Conan O’Brien and Stephen Colbert have said that with a daily late night talk show, you don’t have time to dwell on a bad show. They will happen, and there’s another one you have to plan for as soon as it’s done. Sometimes we send newsletters that we LOVE, sometimes we send ones we don’t love quite as much. We never send something we’re not proud of, but if it doesn’t come together as excellently as a previous one, we don’t dwell on it. Keep it moving, don’t be precious, everything is just data and experimentation.

🌱 Adapt as you grow

What works when you first begin may not be the thing that you continue to feel inspired by. When we first began our newsletter, our company had a whole different name. When we knew it was time to change the company, we simply adapted the newsletter. Since then, we’ve also completely rebranded it, niched down the audience, and updated the format. Newsletters are an incredibly adaptable medium, so instead of feeling constrained by it, let it evolve with you.

💃 Write with a specific person in mind

Talk to one person. Many people feel very restrained by a niche, but clearly defining the one type of person you’re talking to actually makes it a lot easier on you, the creator. When you’re trying to talk to everyone, you’ll find yourself worrying whether your stuff will land with every different sub-group, which can send you into overwhelm. When you’re talking to one person, the positioning of your stories, arguments, and ideas is much more clear.

🪴 Build a content garden

Give yourself a place to store ideas, add to them, and let them grow into something you feel inspired to share. When you’re writing a weekly newsletter, your brain will start scanning the world for great ideas and recommendations that your audience might like. We use a system we built in Notion to store our ideas and push them forward, but you can just as easily start with the notes app and graduate to something more robust when you need to.

🌀 Let your ideas keep going

When we first started writing our newsletter, everything felt so ephemeral. We would put hours of work into a single email that would fall off our radar once it was sent. We made the switch to put our bigger ideas into blogs (that live in our Beehiiv archive), and now it’s much easier to both share them months later, and repurpose them into other mediums, like podcasts and YouTube videos.

👋 People will unsubscribe

Let them. It’s going to happen no matter how hard you try to avoid it, so take each instance as an opportunity to practice being okay with it. Our newsletter has between 5-10 unsubscribes every time we hit send. It’s not personal, it’s just preference. You want people to unsubscribe because it means your audience is weeding themselves out. The people who stay are the ones who want to be there. Ultimately, you have to care more about your creative expression and development more than you care about the hypothetical opinions of hypothetical unsubscribers.

Want to go deep on starting a newsletter?

📚 Read our Why Creative People Should Start a Newsletter blog

🎧 Listen to our How to Stop Daydreaming and Actually Bring Your Creative Ideas to Life podcast episode

Ready to start your newsletter on Beehiiv?

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