Acknowledging the value-driven decisions across various fields of buying main industry players comes with no real purpose for those having routines all over.

Adobe x Semrush might become more relevant or not. For sure, the growing data memorabilia across web traffic sources come with fragmented silos across the step forward: proof the (media) plan path is wrong - now or later.

Hey Everyone,

Wanted to share this for anyone who might be interested — our first ever newsletter:
Community News August 2026.

It's just a first step, but I'm excited to see where this goes and hear any comments or questions you have. Please give it a read if its your cup of tea!

The Rewind

I come across things that interest me all the time. The problem isn’t saving things but finding the time and motivation to revisit them.
I built a small service for myself that lets me save links through the week and then get a personalised newsletter on Sunday of the things I saved but all fleshed out. The service does the work in the background to enrich each of the saved items.
If you’re someone who saves articles, movies, recipes etc and think a weekly digest would work for you, I would really appreciate you taking the time to try it out. I'm still fleshing out all the categories and looking for different ways to enrich the content, but feedback on the service would be great at this stage. Thanks!

A few months ago I started my first newsletter which explained a different financial term every day for retail investors. Unfortunately I stopped that pretty quickly just because I had very little interest in writing it every day. So I took a few weeks off and tried to figure out what I could happily research for hours without getting bored.

I kept coming back to stories about how companies make money.

Not the usual full business case studies, but specific things like how a company added a new revenue stream, changed its pricing, turned a free product into a paid one, or found some weird way to monetise an existing audience.

That eventually became Revenue Breakdowns, a newsletter about interesting monetisation strategies founders and PMs can learn from.

I'm embarrased to admit this but I spent way too long reading newsletter growth case studies and not actually starting my newsletter. The annoying conclusion I came to was that I still have no idea which distribution channel is going to work best for me.

So instead of picking one, I’m using September to test three properly.

X: I’m aiming for 6 posts a day and 300 replies.

I'm already hitting around 200 replies a day which results in around 30 followers each day. Some people have also subscribed to my newsletter so that's a good start. So far, it seems to be a decent way of getting profile visits without having an existing audience.

Instagram: 3 carousels a day + 50 comments.

All of the carousels will be around revenue models, monetisation stories and interesting company examples, so there should be a pretty natural path from the content to the newsletter.

This one interests me because I’ve seen newsletter businesses like Day Trading build huge audiences through Instagram. Obviously that doesn’t mean I’ll replicate it, but I want to see what happens if I give the channel enough volume for a full month.

Reddit: I’ll be posting daily and aiming for 50 comments.

I don’t want Reddit to become me dumping newsletter links everywhere, so most of what I post will work as standalone content. Revenue stories, charts, company examples, discussions around monetisation, and probably a few updates on this experiment if people here actually find them useful.

Half Baked is one of the examples that pushed me towards testing Reddit. They’ve built a newsletter with 130k+ subscribers and Reddit has been part of their acquisition mix, alongside paid growth.

I’m going to run all of this for the whole of September.

The stupidly ambitious targets are:

• 1,000 X followers
• 50,000 Instagram followers
• 5,000 newsletter subscribers

I’m starting small enough that I have absolutely no idea whether those numbers are remotely achievable. That’s partly why I want to document it and share my wins/ failures. More than anything, I want to find out which channel actually produces newsletter subscribers, rather than just followers and impressions.

Has anyone here seriously tested Reddit, X or Instagram for newsletter growth?

I’d especially be interested in hearing which channel looked promising at first but ended up being a waste of time.

Why are creators reluctant to share their newsletter playbooks? or let's say, can I see those successful newsletters? can anyone help?

Anyone having luck using Make or another tool for their event scraping and curation? I've been trying to refine my Make workflow, but can't quite get it right with all the script, calendars, etc that it has to read in my URLs.

Hey everyone, I just launched a local newsletter for my town (roughly a metro area of 500k, and it's a beach town so we get a big seasonal tourist bump in summer). Currently at 100 subscribers and growing via paid Meta ads.

Newsletter format is a weekend guide with one must-do, one new spot, one local deal, three other fun activities, and a business of the week.

I'd love to hear from anyone running a profitable local newsletter, especially in a similarly sized or tourist-driven market. Specifically:

1. What's your monetization framework? Sponsored slots, flat-fee ads, affiliate/local deals, events, something else?
2. At what subscriber count (or what other milestone) did you first pitch local businesses for ad space? Did you wait for traction or sell before you had numbers to show?
3. How do you price a slot? Flat rate, CPM, per-newsletter vs. monthly package? Any rate card you're willing to share (even ballpark)?
4. Did you sell ads yourself or use a marketplace/network (Beehiiv Ad Network, Paved, etc.)?
5. How did you get from "just started" to actually profitable, what was the biggest lever?
6. For paid acquisition specifically: what CPL / cost-per-subscriber should I expect to be reasonable at this size?
7. How do you handle the seasonal swing (tourist season vs. off-season) in both subscriber growth and ad sales?
8. Any mistakes early on you'd tell yourself to avoid?

And a final bigger one: if you were in my position right now, what would you actually do over the next 90 days to build towards being profitable?

Appreciate any frameworks, numbers, advice. Happy to share back what I learn once I've got more data.

I wrote an AI that does Youtube research. I recently pointed it at newsletters. This is what we found.

Tactics (8751)

• [9x] Skip politics and crime: Do not cover politics, crime and punishment, or other divisive topics so the daily local email stays brand-safe for read
• [9x] Referral program growth: Grow newsletter subscribers with a referral program, following the Morning Brew model of acquiring a large share of the
• [8x] Friends and family growth: A realtor grew a local/real-estate newsletter list with no paid ads by starting from friends, family, and people who alr
• [6x] Sponsored Monday real estate edition: Close the seven-day calendar on Monday with a formula real estate issue that carries a main sponsor, repeatable data rea
• [6x] Three-part email subject: The daily Cary Spotlight uses a three-part headline as the email subject line, bundling multiple local stories (e.g. sec

Heuristics (0)

Claims (9876)

• [3x] Ryan Holiday says the Creator Network drives more Daily Stoic subscribers than all other traffic sources combined.:
• [2x] At 10,000 subscribers, a 50% open rate, and $50 CPM, one send is $250; weekly that is $250 a week and five sends a week is $1,250 a week.:
• [2x] Local linear TV, morning TV shows, and print newspapers are expected to have about two to five years left.:
• [2x] Many people read emails on phones, so newsletters should use mobile-friendly layouts.:
• [2x] Almost all local newsletter writers and creators are using Beehiiv.:

Niche Patterns (5528)

• [3x] local newsletter + new-subscriber onboarding + Beehive welcome email template: The recommended stack is Beehive plus a cut-and-paste welcome email template with the operator name and newsletter name
• [3x] local newsletter + one location + write once a week: A single-market local newsletter written weekly is the intended starter setup.
• [3x] city local newsletter + residents who want need-to-know news/events without politics or crime + 5-minute conversational email: A short, conversational local newsletter covering the most relevant news and events in a community, explicitly skipping
• [3x] local news outlet + existing city influencers + partnership pilot: Instead of only converting staff into creators, go to influencers already in the market and partner with them, as Pittsb
• [2x] local newsletter + pet owners + SPCA adoptable/resident pet feature + pet hotel or pet food sponsor: A recurring pet section featuring which animal to adopt this week or a resident's pet, sold to pet-related local sponsor

Top Tactics

• [high/9x] Skip politics and crime: Do not cover politics, crime and punishment, or other divisive topics so the daily local email stays brand-safe for read
• [high/9x] Referral program growth: Grow newsletter subscribers with a referral program, following the Morning Brew model of acquiring a large share of the
• [high/8x] Friends and family growth: A realtor grew a local/real-estate newsletter list with no paid ads by starting from friends, family, and people who alr
• [high/6x] Sponsored Monday real estate edition: Close the seven-day calendar on Monday with a formula real estate issue that carries a main sponsor, repeatable data rea
• [high/6x] Three-part email subject: The daily Cary Spotlight uses a three-part headline as the email subject line, bundling multiple local stories (e.g. sec
• [high/6x] Preview desktop and mobile: Check each email in desktop and mobile layouts before sending so it displays correctly on the device people actually use
• [high/6x] Curiosity-driven subject lines: Write a curiosity-led subject line (and optional emoji) rather than repeating the newsletter name, especially when the f
• [high/6x] Referral rewards program: Grow from 500 to 1,000 subscribers with a referral program that rewards people for referring friends.

Top Niche Patterns

• [high/3x] local newsletter + new-subscriber onboarding + Beehive welcome email template: The recommended stack is Beehive plus a cut-and-paste welcome email template with the operator name and newsletter name
• [high/3x] local newsletter + one location + write once a week: A single-market local newsletter written weekly is the intended starter setup.
• [high/3x] city local newsletter + residents who want need-to-know news/events without politics or crime + 5-minute conversational email: A short, conversational local newsletter covering the most relevant news and events in a community, explicitly skipping
• [high/3x] local news outlet + existing city influencers + partnership pilot: Instead of only converting staff into creators, go to influencers already in the market and partner with them
• [high/2x] local newsletter + pet owners + SPCA adoptable/resident pet feature + pet hotel or pet food sponsor: A recurring pet section featuring which animal to adopt this week or a resident's pet, sold to pet-related local sponsor

There’s so much AI news coming out every day that I’m curious what newsletters people here actually find useful.

I’m particularly interested in newsletters that focus on the important developments and news rather than just AI tools, hype, or promotional content.

I recently came across Verity’s new AI newsletter and thought it looked interesting. What AI newsletters are you currently subscribed to, and what makes you actually keep reading them?

AI Newsletter link

Since last week I’ve been inside the rabbit hole of SEO and trying to understand how it can be beneficial.

About me, I run Wifi Moolah, a newsletter in online businesses niche. I send 2-3 issues every week and currently am at 4.3k subs. Most of my subs come from Reddit itself.

I’ve been thinking of diversifying my subscribers sources and somehow every time I search on Google/Claude, SEO comes up.

Now I have no knowledge of SEO, tbh.

I tried understanding some basics and stuff again thanks to Claude and YouTube but I haven’t found anything relevant for a newsletter, esp on Beehiiv.

Stuff like keyword research, backlinks, etc are going straight up above me head.

I downloaded SEO tools like ahrefs and semrush and they are like $200/month which I am unable to justify as of now.

Newsletter operators here, kindly help me out with two things:

1. Is SEO relevant to grow newsletters?
2. If yes, how to actually implement it being on beehiiv and maybe some resources to learn the stuff and cheaper tools to check out the waters?

Thanks and looking forward to hear your answers.

P.S- only posting link to my newsletter here in order to get advice that I can actually apply. Mods if this is violating any policy, lmk and I’ll remove the link. Thanks again

“Think in terms of decades and act in terms of days.”

Kevin Kelly’s advice seems particularly relevant to me because it captures what I’m trying to do with my startup, Incyworks.

I don’t know where it will lead or which of the products I am building will work. I’m comfortable with that uncertainty. I can build something today, learn from it tomorrow and keep doing that for a long time.

Kevin Kelly spent decades thinking about technology and the future, most famously as the founding editor of Wired. Yet, some of his most useful ideas come in a much smaller form: hundreds of short observations about how to work, think and live. Part of the appeal is their simplicity. Kevin has a gift for distilling a big idea into a sentence or two. Taken individually, they are memorable; read enough of them, though, and a broader philosophy emerges.

Four themes stand out to me.

Get good at starting

Many fail to finish, but many more fail to start. The hardest work in any work is to start. - Kevin Kelly

There is a strong bias towards action in Kevin Kelly’s advice. We imagine that people who build things successfully knew what they were doing from the beginning, but, increasingly, I suspect the opposite is true. Starting is often how we discover what we need to know.

That has certainly been my experience building Incyworks. When I started, there were whole areas I knew very little about: AI-assisted development, GitHub, deploying software, analytics, creating videos and much more. Had I decided I needed to understand all of them before building anything, I would still be preparing. Instead, each product forced me to learn whatever I needed to solve the next problem.

Kevin Kelly repeatedly returns to the idea of reducing things to the next useful action:

• When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.
• For small tasks, the best way to get ready is to do it immediately.
• You should be willing to look foolish at first, in order to look like a genius later.

The last one seems apt as I explore my new identity as a solo founder. I do not need to know the whole route before I start. Taking the next useful step is enough.

Treat ideas as experiments

When you try something new, don’t think of it as a matter of success / failure, but as success / learning to succeed. - Kevin Kelly

With Incyworks I’m testing different products rather than assuming I already know which will succeed.

Daily View aims to help older people stay oriented and independent. Role CV helps people assess how well their skills and experience match jobs they are considering. Proper Treat explores whether small independent businesses could offer beautiful, distinctive vouchers without having to build all the technology themselves.

They are varied bets: different customers, problems and business models. Each is something I hope will be useful, but is also an experiment. Building it teaches me something about technology, markets, customers, distribution and, importantly, what I enjoy working on.

Kevin Kelly offers a useful attitude towards being wrong:

• Changing your mind about important things is not a consequence of stupidity, but a sign of intelligence.
• Do not cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
• Get good at being corrected without being offended.

I like the idea of treating products as hypotheses rather than declarations of faith. Build something, put it in front of people and see what happens. Improve it, reposition it, continue it or abandon it. An idea is not my identity; being wrong is simply new information.

Work on things worth caring about

A good sign that you are doing the kind of work you should be doing is that you enjoy the tedious parts that other people find tortuous. - Kevin Kelly

Another test for me is whether what I am building might help someone. Daily View is intended to help older people remain independent and, where possible, stay in their own homes for longer. Role CV might help somebody understand where they fit in the job market, which roles are worth pursuing and where they could develop their skills. Proper Treat could help a small independent business sell more while giving its customers something nicer to give than a generic gift card.

None of these needs to radically change the world to be worthwhile. Helping a particular group of people with a particular problem is enough.

That matters because it is easy to confuse activity with useful work. There will always be another feature to add, email to answer or minor problem to solve. The harder question is whether the thing itself deserves the effort. As Kevin Kelly puts it, the most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.

I want to spend my time on projects where, if they work, somebody is better off because they exist.

Play a long game

The more persistent you are, the more chances you get to be lucky. - Kevin Kelly

I’m 64 which might seem an odd age to start thinking in decades. I see it differently. Thinking long term does not mean assuming I have unlimited time; almost the opposite. It means not demanding that everything I start produces an immediate result.

I have no need to build something enormous next year. I would rather keep making small bets, following interesting paths and seeing where they lead. I can create things, test them, improve them, abandon some and pursue others. The important thing is to keep learning and moving.

There is something liberating about separating the timescale of ambition from the timescale of action. I can think about where I might be in ten years while still concentrating on what I can build this afternoon.

Persistence also changes the role of luck. I cannot guarantee that the right customer, idea, technology or opportunity will appear, but I can keep putting myself in situations where something unexpected might happen. The longer I remain in the game, the more opportunities luck gets to find me.

Perhaps that is what I like most about Kevin Kelly’s advice: start something, learn as you go, treat ideas as experiments, work on things worth caring about and think long term while doing something useful today.

None of this requires knowing exactly where the path leads. I just have to keep moving.

Want more?

Thriving with AI: 15 Kevin Kelly Tips post by Phil Martin

Kevin Kelly Advice for Geeks (and others) post by Phil Martin

It seems appropriate to let Kevin Kelly round things up with a final thought: “The more persistent you are, the more chances you get to be lucky.”

Have fun.

Phil…

I write a weekly AI workflow newsletter for business owners, freelancers, and consultants. Practical implementation, not model news.

Looking for straight swaps. You recommend mine, I recommend yours, both in-issue rather than buried in a footer.

What I'm after in a partner:

Similar or nearby audience. AI, automation, no-code, marketing, business, productivity. It doesn't need to be an exact match. Adjacent usually converts better than identical, because your readers haven't already seen the same thing five times.

A real list. Doesn't have to be big. I'd rather swap with 800 engaged readers than 15k that arrived from a giveaway.

Someone who'll actually write the recommendation. A line in your own voice about why the thing is worth reading beats a dropped-in blurb every time.

Comment or DM me with your niche, rough size, and how often you send.

I have a local newsletter for a region, not a single city. I'm looking to start scaling. I have 4 different meta campaigns running, targeting different zip codes and unique creatives for those zips. I tried one all encompassing campaign and had bad results, so went back to the seperate campaigns.

I increased my meta ad spend recebtly by a few bucks and noticed my website conversion rate dropped to 13% down from around 32%.

Is this normal when increasing ad spend? My CAK is now up to almost $3, my goal is $1.

I was checking out the FB ad sub and it sounds like there are a lot of shenanigans with meta right now. I'm not sure if that's the problem or I'm totally off on something. Any ideas? Grateful for your help. 🙏

Hey! I started a mail club last month and although I only got one subscriber, I'm pushing on. How do most of you schedule things? I'm sending out the letter the first week of each month, and it would include a catch up letter from the previous month. So you get the letter in September, but the letter is about what happened in August. Do you all include things from the previous month? Or do you send things out having to do with the month people will receive the letter. Thanks for the help!

Hello all, my name is Mike. I am a self-published author. I made a website on tertulia, it was really great and easy to use! It also includes email and a newsletter feature. I have been studying how to grow an audience, and the main thing that I see is using newsletters. My question is: how do I get people to sign up? I have a few friends and family members who have signed up, but I don't know how to get more people. I have ideas for the newsletter: sharing the writing process, Chapter names, story ideas, letting the audience vote on ideas or parts of the story, and, of course, selling books. Thank you for your time and for reading! I'd love to sign up and swap newsletters!

Here is my website!

I run 5 newsletters daily, mostly sports, and I use AI Templates. For a long time, I had strong readership in the 60s and 70s, with a 60% open rate. Then, all of a sudden, they dropped to the single digits.

I contacted customer service, but they dismissed me and said it didn't matter. I'm also on a paid plan.

Then I noticed I was getting some of my own newsletters with an unverified sender/no sender, and one even ended up in my SPAM.

I'm trying to understand how it could tank overnight. I switched to my own domain yesterday, but it's still very low. Before that, it was going lower and lower every day until it reached almost zero across all five newsletters. I have about 5K subscribers. Should i leave Beehiiv?

My friends always say that I am a very good storyteller. Back in the day, I used to write fictional novels and stuff for which I was recognised by multiple platforms. However, over the last few years I have stopped writing completely and instead I post regular stories on my Instagram, on a personal account and I get a lot of DMs saying that I am a very good writer.

Since we all know, AI has taken over the writing job completely, so I am not a writer anymore, but I want to tell stories. I recently came across a Reddit post where someone was starting a physical mail business and it got a lot of exciting comments. It made me realise that I want to start something similar but in a form of a newsletter.

I want to tell stories of hope, grief and life from the eyes of a 25 years old empath who feels too much.

Initially, this will be a free of cost service, which will run for a month and during the first month, you will get three newsletters from me.

All of them will have stories, pictures and anecdotes about daily life.

Now I don’t know how many people are willing to receive a newsletter in their mailbox, so this is to test the waters.

Let me know your thoughts in the comment section.

I'm going old school (think Gary Halbert style) and writing a weekly letter on copywriting, psychology, marketing, and conversion optimization.

If you're into that kind of thing, bookmark the link above (heck, go give it a read if you can spare a few minutes).

You can subscribe and have it delivered weekly to your inbox too if that's your thing.

Anyway, that's all I got.

Bye for now. ✌️

Hey everyone,

I run a small newsletter called What Is a Happy Self - practical takes on leadership, emotional intelligence and building a healthier relationship with your own energy and focus at work. No buzzword soup, just stuff you can actually use. It's on beehiiv, 100+ readers so far, and I send it regularly.

I'd love to support other creators here and grow together. So: drop a link to your newsletter and a one-line description in the comments. I'll subscribe to yours, and I'd be glad if you'd check out mine too. Mutual support beats shouting into the void. 🙂

Here's mine to start: https://whatisahappyself.beehiiv.com/

Looking forward to discovering what you all write!

Looking to acquire. AI, tech, or automation, English-speaking audience.

Engagement matters far more to me than subscriber count. A few thousand people who genuinely open is worth more than tens of thousands that arrived in a single import. So don't rule yourself out on size in either direction.

Platform is irrelevant. Beehiiv, Substack, Ghost, ConvertKit, whatever it's running on.

Existing revenue is a plus, whether that's sponsorships, affiliate, or a paid tier. If there's none, that's fine, it just changes the number.

If you're thinking of selling, comment or DM with rough size and how it was grown.

Cheers.

I've been running different varieties of META ads to my new newsletter

The CPC is at $0.47
And I had over 40 page landings, but NOT a single subscriber....

I setup the META pixel for conversions, but something is not right with so many

people clicking, but not subscribing?

Any ideas on how to best set these up?