👋 Hi Reader, Who doesn’t like a great travel deal on an Airbnb? Especially if you are a digital nomad and you are looking for something long-term. If that’s you, that makes two of us. I signed up for a newsletter way back in 2019, when a random guy in a Slack community told he is curating Airbnb deals over email. Naturally, I signed up immediately. Fast-forward 6 years later - I am now talking to that guy, who is literally bananas. Chris Cerra (pronounced ‘Cherra’!) runs Remotebase, a...
11 days ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, As you are aware, there has been a lot of hue-and-cry about Substack’s paid subscriptions routing through the Apple in-app payments for the iOS app. But the noise just got louder with creator-side payout receipts now floating in the wild. Tyler Denk, the founder of beehiiv, talked on his LinkedIn post where he showed a screenshot of an App Store payout to a creator, where the difference between the gross earnings and net payout was almost 50%. Screenshot from Tyler's LinkedIn...
18 days ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, If you have been brave enough to venture out and understand how (or if) your emails get delivered to your subscribers, you might have been hit with a wall of 3-4 letter acronyms. All of them seem like names you have heard before, or intense calculus problems, depending on which one scares you. Calculate Zach Galifianakis GIF DMARC SPF DKIM BIMI Phew, this is just 1% of the pickle. So we recently sat down with an email deliverability expert, who has made it his mission...
25 days ago • 1 min read
👋 Hi Reader, If you have been on the fence to start a newsletter and your focal point of indecision is you cannot decide on the newsletter platform, this issue is for you. The Dilemma This week was a blur. I talked to three creators this week and I will talk to two more next week. The topic: which newsletter platform to choose for the future? My counter question: How many newsletter issues have you pushed out so far? Turns out, they never got down to sending one, because they could not...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, I was going through my LinkedIn feed this week, when this post from Tyler J popped up. Post from Tyler on LinkedIn It got me thinking: What does the WSJ know about the bridge from journalism to social, that we don’t? And why now in the reverse direction from newsletter to social, when the social to newsletter funnel worked just fine? There might be two missing pieces to this puzzle (and Tyler’s take) that might make sense when put together. Trust builds faster when federated...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, If you are thinking about buying out a newsletter for acquiring their audience and are on the fence on how to implement this, let us know. We have been talking to several newsletter operators about this exact way of operation, so would like to know your most pressing concerns too. Let us know by hitting Reply. I am a Pulp Fiction fan. Like me, if that’s where you heard the Spanish expression ‘Mi casa es tu casa’ meaning ‘My house is your house’, then consider yourself in my inner...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, If the first set of emails you read this morning starts with “Hope this email finds you well....” and your reaction is this: Parks and Recreation You are not alone. Email fatigue is for real. And the bar is already set too low. Which is when I realized that a lot of newsletter creators are using video in their email to break the pattern, I thought “Maybe they know something I don’t” and started poking holes to find out if video and email mixed well, or they were oil and water....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, Thinking of starting a local newsletter for your suburb, but not sure how to go about it? Share your thoughts by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email (or send a note to marketing@letterstack.co) and we can connect you with the right people who can guide on your local newsletter journey. Wizard Of Oz GIF by Turner Classic Movies I believe no one could have summed up today’s newsletter issue better than Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz: local newsletters. I know, I know, you are going to...
2 months ago • 2 min read
👋 Hi Reader, Are you struggling with understanding who your first 1000 subscribers are? Let us know by hitting ‘Reply’ on this email, or send a note to marketing@letterstack.co. If you caught the ’Se7en’ movie reference in the subject line, you are in my inner circle :) I still remember the moment I realized I had no clue who was on my email list. Then I met Niklas Wenzel and brought him on the LetterStack podcast to explain how he built MegaHit to solve exactly that problem. He showed how CJ...
2 months ago • 2 min read