Trend: (Paid) Newsletters are secretly just communities in the making
I tweeted this the other day:
Lenny's Newsletter
I subscribe to Lenny's newsletter. I enjoy it. He now has a Slack with people connecting, sharing info and having fun online meetups.
It's now a community with people calling one another 'Lennyites'.
Trends.co
I wrote recently how Trends.co use to pitch themselves as a newsletter.
They now focus in on the community aspect as a selling point. They started with writing (great content), but connection with their audience is important too.
They use Facebook as the platform of choice.
Trends.vc
Not to be confused with Trends.co.
Trends.vc is run by indie hacker @dru_riley. Started as a free newsletter. Is now partially free with paid access too.
Dru has started experimenting with community too. Appropriately called Trends Tribe. I managed to attend one of his meetups (using icebreaker.video) with appropriate music to match Dru's style.
It had me smiling all the way through.
So, before calling your thing a newsletter, think about how you can remove that word from your vocabulary. Really what you're building is likely to be much more than that. Possibly a community, but maybe something else.
They remind me a lot of just regular old blogs. Only difference is the posts cut through all the noise by going straight to your inbox.
I think of the Software Ideas paid newsletter the business model, not the business itself.
It's just the ideal way to get content to interested readers right now. Writers are happy because they are getting recurring revenue, while readers get it directly in their inbox.
Maybe there's a point in the future where 'newsletter fatigue' becomes real, and there's a better method for delivering content to readers. When that happens, I know most people will be switching over without too much of a problem.
So I think you're spot-on Rosie, the newsletter part isn't really the important part of the business. It just happens to be the delivery method.
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Really interesting point. Do you think the same principle applies to podcasts?
It could be. It's a long term game. Starting from Ep1 along the way when you are at Ep 25 people comment, text you saying they loved episodes. It's helpful for them. You'll keep going because people love it. So there comes a time in your journey let's say after Ep 50 and you think of doing a paid community where your listeners can talk to you. That's it. So a percentage of your listeners would love to be part of your community.
Podcasts are just a means to get people to listen to your content.
This is so true! The real value add of Blogging Guide has been the creation of a community of writers and exclusive resources, rather than the traditional structure of a subscription newsletter.
I just started it because of this post - https://fajarsiddiq.substack.com/
how do i custom a domain with it? some of my blog content will be public as imported from medium.
https://ghost.org/vs/substack/ i find this is interesting on using ghost.
What's your thoughts @rosiesherry?
This is so insightful.
Thanks for the mention Rosie! 🙏
That's awesome!
However my newsletter for BuildFaster isn't going so well. I think it would be better to just do some email marketing on a place like EmailOctopus or something and give out deals to people on the list.
What do you think about this?
I'm giving my thoughts on questions like these in the comments over here if you have any specific questions! Happy to chat about BuildFaster
Thanks! I’ll come over later today and ask some questions :)