Looking to follow me in the new year?. 🔵 New stories at 🟢 Email news, tips, and ideas at 🟡 Newsletters + alerts at

Thrilled about the last few weeks of stories on @inboxcollective:. Chris La Tray on the power of a paid newsletter —> Evvie Crowley’s new series, FWD Progress —> New @YannaTorry column —> Lots more coming!.

I still can't believe this: I'm almost to the end of year four of writing a monthly Google Doc. (And even more unbelievable: Almost 10,000 of you read it every single month.). Read on in the latest issue. .

Oh, just a funny story about the time I tried to make some email authentication updates at the end of a long day and accidentally ended up in the spam folder for 24 hours 🤦‍♂️.

It's Nov. 1, which means @NewsMatch kicks off today. I've got a few tips here to help you build your best fundraising campaign yet.

As Alex explains so well here: We're making a push to tell stories about newsletters from all over. This month, we've published stories from writers in India, the UK, & Chile. And this is the first we've published in two languages (English and Spanish). Lots more to come!.

RT @ivanwese: Una alegría y honor que El Semanal sea digno de ser destacado x los capos de @danoshinsky y @ahazlett.

Excited to be a (small) part of this course!.

RT @_AshleyHoffman: What do you readers want? Ask. Them. @danoshinsky

RT @sarahjebner: If you're interested in newsletters, you may enjoy a piece I've written with my colleague from reader research, Mike Hoole….

But it’s wild to wake up today and see, right there on the @Semafor homepage, a massive email sign-up box for their 8 newsletters. How things have changed in a decade. I know Ben’s still asking the same questions about growth — here’s betting it won’t take them nearly as long.

It took 25 months to answer Ben’s question and get to a million subscribers. (Turns out that when you have no strategy or budget, you rely on a lot of trial and error.) The second million came less than a year after that.

So, uh, a million? I told Ben, as carefully as I could, that it might take a bit.

I had no budget, no strategy, no team, no idea what readers might actually want in a newsletter (or newsletters???), and to date, I’d never built a newsletter that had even reached 1,000 subscribers.

“We’re happy you’re here,” he told me. “When do we get to a million newsletter subscribers?”.

Anyway, Ben came over to my desk that first morning there. Ben was always direct — he was one of the only actual adults in the room. (I was only 25, but that was basically ancient by BuzzFeed standards). Ben always got straight to the point.

I had no budget, no strategy, no team, and no idea what readers might actually want in a newsletter. I had no idea if we should launch a single newsletter or a bunch of newsletters. I had no idea if joining BuzzFeed was a career-defining or career-ending mistake.

Email was a lifeboat, just in case Facebook ever decided to change its algorithm.

Email was very much a weird experiment. The company’s focus — again, it was 2012! — was Facebook. That’s where our traffic and audience was. And the company had hired unbelievably smart people for social to help grow that channel.

As for me, my entire experience with email was sending a newsletter called Tools for Reporters (, which I’d grown to about 500 people. Seemed massive at the time. BuzzFeed knew this, and hired me anyway.