Pod Insights a16z Podcast So You Want to Launch a Newsletter: Tips From Substack Writers About this episode This episode explores the process and economics behind creating an independent newsletter. In this candid conversation, host Lauren Murrow talks with four Substack writers—an artist, a technologist, a journalist, and a clinical researcher-turned-psychedelics scholar—about how to find and foster an audience, the calculus behind going paid versus unpaid, the pressure to produce, and financial benchmarks for making a living from newsletter writing.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hi and welcome to the A16Z Podcast. I'm Lauren Murrow. Today's episode, Part One in a two-part series about the creator economy, explores the process and economics behind creating an independent newsletter. In this candid conversation, I talk with four Substack writers from very different backgrounds: an artist, a technologist, a journalist, and a clinical researcher turned psychedelics scholar. The pandemic has prompted a reckoning within traditional media, and alongside it, a surge in the newsletter ecosystem. On Substack, readership and active writers both doubled from January through April. The newsletter hosting platform now has more than 100,000 paying subscribers. This episode reveals the behind-the-scenes experiences of four newsletter creators,
0:43 Speaker 00 all of whom launched roughly within the past year. Software engineer Lenny Richitsky, most recently a growth product manager at Airbnb, whose tech-focused dispatch is called "Lenny's Newsletter," more on that later. Artist and writer Edith Zimmerman, creator of the Drawing Links newsletter, which chronicles her life and musings through comic-style illustrations. Zach Hegney, an acupuncturist and researcher, whose newsletter, The Trip Report, explores the science, policy, and business behind medicinal psychedelics. And Patrice Pecq, a freelance journalist, previously on staff at BuzzFeed, whose newsletter, Coronavirus News for Black Folks, highlights the pandemic's disproportionate impact on the Black community. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear some of their favorite newsletters, which we also link to in the show notes.
1:29 Speaker 00 We discuss how to find and foster an audience, the calculus behind going paid versus unpaid, the pressure to produce, and financial benchmarks for actually making a living from newsletter writing. The first voice you'll hear after mine is Patrice, followed by Zach, then Edith and Lenny. Why did you launch a newsletter?
1:46 Speaker 01 I launched Coronavirus News for Black Folks, April 5th, I think. I became a journalist who covers stories about and for disenfranchised communities, but specifically Black communities. And when I saw that the coronavirus was going to be disproportionately impacting...
2:06 Speaker 01 People who have pre-existing medical conditions, I realized this was going to be overlooked. And so I was like, let me just aggregate this news specifically as it relates to the black community.
2:18 Speaker 02 I was aware of Substack and enamored with the process and the model. And then saw the emerging trend of psychedelic-inspired medicine kind of coming through the clinical trials for things like PTSD, depression, anxiety. And I thought it would be a really great way to monitor the news, but also like think about the evergreen issues that we'll be facing in this new domain.
2:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, part of the reason I started my newsletter was because I was doing these morning cartoons that I was turning into little stories that I was sharing on Instagram. I quit my job and started a newsletter and started sharing the newsletter instead. And there's something about the newsletter and the reemergence of certain kinds of blogdom, personal voices in a more safe space, which sounds kind of lame, but something about that feels much better than Twitter. There's something about the framing of a newsletter when it comes to presenting work on the internet that was really appealing to me.
3:23 Speaker 04 I also quit my job and I was just like, what did I learn over these years at this company if I wanted to start my own company? So I started writing notes to myself. And then that turned into kind of the cliche medium posts, but the medium post did really well. So I switched to Substack and initially I never had any intention to go paid. It was not even a thought in my mind that I would charge people for anything I was writing. And then actually COVID hit and I was out of a job for a year. The market collapsed and so I was like, shit, I gotta try to make some money again. And so I just tried this paid approach and it worked out.
3:56 Speaker 00 How do you decide whether to go the paid versus the unpaid route?
3:59 Speaker 04 I think there's basically two routes. Either you want to make a full-time income from the newsletter. And if that's how you want to approach it, then I think you charge. I think if you have another gig going, I think the newsletter is a really good way to give you new opportunities, get better jobs, learn about things. So, so the way I think about it is if you want it to be your main source of income, you should charge. Otherwise, you should not, because you lose on a lot of optionality and opportunity.
4:23 Speaker 00 Do you guys agree?
4:23 Speaker 02 Yes and no. I feel like they're both still open because I have a freemium model where, you know, one post is free to the whole list every week and then two others go out to just the paying subscribers. And so that there's continual sort of growth of the free list and then there's more in-depth sort of analysis that goes to, to paying subscribers.
4:43 Speaker 00 How has the pandemic shaped your writing? Clearly with Patrice, it was a real impetus for yours, but for the rest of you, has it shaped your process? Has it shaped your content?
4:53 Speaker 03 I started it in December of 2019 and then the pandemic started. And I was trying to hopefully turn on the paid option right when everything was happening. And I was like, either this is going to be terrible for me or possibly good because people will be at home like more interested in consuming the kind of stuff that I'm creating. But it did seem like a real terrible mistake. I'm just like gambling with my whole future and security of what am I doing? But the stories I've been telling haven't necessarily been about COVID. For the most part, they aren't. And I think that's been an escapist place for people to read the stuff I'm, I'm writing about. But it was definitely harder because most of my newsletter installments are little stories about my life and things I've done.
5:38 Speaker 03 And for a while it was pretty limiting because I wasn't doing that much stuff.
5:43 Speaker 01 I had been toying around with the idea of doing a newsletter for probably a year or so. I had actually started a newsletter focused on myself as a writer and a black woman. And then that was end of March, I sent it to my partner and one of my sisters and they were like, it looks great. But something was holding me back from sending it. I was like, I don't know if this is the time to publish it. I had just resigned from BuzzFeed the past October and I really wanted to have a place where I could cultivate my own journalism audience and not depend on other publications to accept my pitches about black stories and cultures and communities.
6:17 Speaker 00 It seems like many of you did quit jobs to pursue this. Do you consider newsletters to be kind of a side gig or a way to expand your audience? Or do many of you pursue this as a way to make a living?
6:30 Speaker 04 For me, I call it my project, Avoid Getting a Real Job. And it started off as a side gig. Yes, let me just see what happens with this thing while I explore startup ideas, or maybe look for other gigs. But then it just kind of kept growing. And so at this point, it's completely my full-time income. And it takes maybe half my time. And I don't have any plans beyond this.
6:51 Speaker 03 I am definitely doing this in an attempt to make a full-time living. And I am not there yet, but I've been trying to think in terms of two-year goals. So like where I'm at right now, I'm not sustaining myself, but the trajectory would indicate that I could be there in about two years.
7:08 Speaker 00 Would anyone share what their income typically is from a month on Substack?
7:14 Speaker 02 Uh, right now, it's more than groceries, less than rent.
7:17 Speaker 00 That's a good barometer, I think.
7:18 Speaker 04 Mine's at about a six-figure yearly income at this point.
7:21 Speaker 01 I haven't charged readers yet, which clearly I need to talk to Lenny. What's your subscription model?
7:27 Speaker 04 It's a weekly email. If you pay, you get it every week. And then if you don't pay, you get it once a month. And it's about 15 bucks a month, 150 a year. And I find most of my audience is, is tech professionals. So a lot of them expense it to their company.
7:40 Speaker 01 That's a good market.
7:42 Speaker 00 How do you, I'll think about your audience. Do you have a particular demographic or a person that you're writing for? Do you have someone in mind when you're writing your newsletter?
7:51 Speaker 03 I don't, which is hard. My newsletters are between 10 and 20 frame stories about something that happened to me recently. And it's a little awkward for me because like I still treat it like a journal, but sometimes I'm like, oh, this is coming out kind of good. I think I'm going to publish this. And then the tone shifts because I feel like I'm talking to someone instead of talking to myself. And that's hard to preserve and it's hard to think directly about. So I'll publish one story to every three that I feel came out the wrong tone or something.
8:24 Speaker 02 So what's interesting in this landscape that I'm covering is that it's the convergence of a lot of different standalone fields in their own right. So like neuroscience, psychiatry, and mental health, the healthcare system, clinical trials, FDA approval, and then obviously psychedelics. And I feel like the audience are people. Who are smarter than I am about all of these different things, depending on the, on the topic for the day. And what that does is it forces me to reconcile with my imposter syndrome. There's a lot of readers who are literally experts on, on a particular domain, whether it's medicinal chemistry or drug development or something like that. So it needs to like pass the sniff test for them,
9:05 Speaker 02 but also be informative for readers who are not necessarily experts in, in that particular domain.
9:12 Speaker 00 Some of you are creating original content. Some of you are aggregating from various sources. I know creative process sounds a little precious, but are there particular tools you find helpful in writing your newsletter, whether that's online or off? What's that process like?
9:26 Speaker 01 It's evolving. So I've done aggregations, yes. I did an original article about the history and culture of conspiracy theories in the black community. At the same time, I did an interview series called Essential in Black because essential workers are disproportionately women and disproportionately black and brown people. So I was like, if no one else is gonna do it, I'm gonna do it. So I took money out of my own pocket. I paid some women illustrators to illustrate the essential workers who I profiled. It's been, it's been a mix and I've just been experimenting. So I'm trying to work to my own perfectionism as I do my newsletter.
10:01 Speaker 00 When many of you are charging for your newsletters, does that create a pressure to produce? Do you feel like you have to keep up a particular cadence? Do you feel like you should be doing more? What feels like the right amount to have some kind of payoff for your reader?
10:18 Speaker 04 I always feel like there's this boulder chasing me for every week, the next week. As soon as I put something out, I'm like, okay, what's coming next week? And so there's, there's no better way to motivate myself to keep going and writing. And what's funny with Substack, people are buying these yearly plans. And so in theory, I don't, I don't think you can ever stop.
10:37 Speaker 04 Unless you're planning a year ahead.
10:39 Speaker 00 The boulder's getting bigger, Lenny.
10:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, but I think it's a good thing because it's motivation and otherwise I don't know if I'd keep going.
10:45 Speaker 02 Every time somebody signs up for an annual subscription, you're on the hook for a year from that day. One of the things I think a lot about is how the psychedelic emerging ecosystem could go downhill. Because we've seen it in the past historically. And so I think about how could the paid newsletter ecosystem go downhill? And it could be like people get subscribers and then they make these ambitious plans and we don't fulfill them. But it is a real motivator.
11:09 Speaker 00 How about you, Edith?
11:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, when I switched to paid, I wasn't really anticipating it would make much of a difference. But it's definitely a big deal. Even if you're just asking people to pay like a penny for it, the whole experience changes. And it becomes like, okay, this is something that if I fail to produce, I'm actually failing people rather than just like following my own impulses. I do it three times a week and I've been really struggling with what to send to people who pay for it and what to send out for free. Other people have lots of different kinds of advice about what I should do. Some people are like, give it all away for free. Don't give any of it away for free. Put it all behind the paywall. Like you should sell prints rather than offering a subscription. You should go to Patreon.
11:53 Speaker 03 I just thought that it would be much more intuitive, but it's just lurching constantly all the time. I'm trying to follow the NPR setup, basically, which is like, if you're enjoying this, please consider supporting it. I really struggle with the language. I didn't think it would trip me up as much as it would. I've never had to directly ask people for money before.
12:14 Speaker 00 Do you all hear from your subscribers? Are they like, we love that one or we hated that one? For those of you who have worked in media, how does it compare to a traditional media following? Does it feel more intimate? Does it feel more niche?
12:27 Speaker 01 I don't get comments, really. I get a lot of feedback on Twitter, mostly. People who are supporting the newsletter by saying, you guys need to read this and here's why, sharing posts. But I don't get as much interaction as I've gotten when I've worked at previous places. But you know, the BuzzFeed audience is outspoken, so.
12:50 Speaker 00 How about the rest of you? What kind of engagement are you seeing with your subscribers?
12:53 Speaker 03 It's one of my favorite parts of doing this newsletter is that people write back to me over email and it's just such pure pleasure. I'll share a story about my life and then someone will come back with a story about their life. And I just feel like I have all these ongoing conversations with people and it's so meaningful to me. And I find that people mostly say supportive things and if they have something critical to say, they mostly keep it to themselves.
13:15 Speaker 00 That's a shift from traditional media, I would say.
13:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, I guess there's something about like if you've opted into this, like you can just opt out if you don't like it.
13:22 Speaker 04 With my newsletter, it's positioned as an advice column for work, essentially. And so people are sending me questions all the time and then responding to questions I'm answering. And the thing that I realized recently is that there's this really interesting community that's created. The people that subscribe to the newsletter are really interesting and smart and doing really cool things. And so what I ended up doing is building a Slack group for paid subscribers, where if you're paid, you get into the Slack group. And that's turned into something really unexpectedly amazing, where people are asking questions, helping each other with things. There's jobs that have been found through it. I'm starting to think about taking content from that community and adding it to the newsletter to give other folks a chance to kind of surface things they've experienced.
14:05 Speaker 04 And so that's something I definitely recommend you guys do if you have a big enough subscriber base.
14:10 Speaker 00 How do you think about growing your subscribers? Do you think about branding? How do you promote your newsletter?
14:16 Speaker 04 For me, it's essentially word of mouth. People are sharing it with their coworkers and with their friends. I also use Twitter a lot. I find this really cool flywheel between Twitter and the newsletter, where I write a post and then I tweet the nuggets of the post in Twitter. I give it away as much as I can and people retweet that thing and then they follow me in the newsletter. So there's kind of back and forth that happens.
14:37 Speaker 00 It's maybe a bit easier for you to say, Lenny, because you have a massive Twitter following.
14:42 Speaker 04 But it wasn't that massive initially. It started small. And I built both platforms at the same time where I started writing and then I tweeted the same idea and it kept growing in both directions.
14:53 Speaker 00 How do you think about it, Zach? Because as you say, you're kind of coming into it new. How do you promote your newsletter?
15:00 Speaker 02 The way I think about it, it's B to B. So it's about the business and the policy of this emerging industry. But it's also like B to what I'm thinking of as like a fanatical C. This stuff has a lot of personal meaning for people. It's very much chaos at this point in this space. If we can combine a curational aspect with news and then linking them together and contextualizing it, then it gets shared. And so I started with posting it to LinkedIn, which I've never used my LinkedIn profile at all.
15:28 Speaker 00 Did that work?
15:29 Speaker 02 It did, yeah. I was shocked because there's a lot of early energy. People are looking for jobs. People are looking for investment. People are really hungry for information in this particular domain. And so even though it's a small topic in the scheme of things, when people find it, it seemed to have been readily shared. So then I just cut off all sharing on social whatsoever, just to see if it would continue to grow. And it continued to grow. I use that as like a bellwether that I'm on to something in the early days.
15:57 Speaker 00 How about you, Patrice?
15:58 Speaker 01 It's interesting. And maybe the first or second week that I launched back in April, I saw that publications that target Black audiences, like Blavity, The Root, Black Enterprise, all covered the newsletter and I hadn't even reached out to them. It was just this one tweet that sort of got the ball rolling. Nikole Hannah-Jones over at New York Times, maybe mid-April, started tweeting about how the coronavirus pandemic was going to disproportionately impact Black communities. And in the Twitter thread, I was like, hey, actually, I started a newsletter about this in case anyone wants to check it out and put the link. The people who are following the thread and also responding are going to see that in the Twitter thread.
16:39 Speaker 01 So Adriana Lacy, who works at LA Times and who also has her own Substack newsletter called The Intersection, which is like musings about journalism at the intersection of tech and innovation, she saw my tweet and was like, hey, can I interview you for my newsletter? She's also a Black woman, so let it be known. That black women and journalists gave me the attention that really got the ball rolling with this newsletter. Nieman Lab reposted it, got me a whole bunch of other subscribers.
17:06 Speaker 00 That actually feeds into another question I have for all of you is, does the newsletter community feel interconnected? In the way that there's an influencer community on many other social platforms that kind of feed off one another? Does the same thing exist in newsletters or does it feel more siloed?
17:21 Speaker 03 It does feel connected to me. I think when I used to read blogs, the blogs would be visibly connected to me and mine as a reader. But now that I'm a newsletter creator, I feel connected to other newsletter creators. And similarly, that's been my experience of growing the newsletter. I get my hugest bumps in subscriber rates after someone recommends it in their newsletter. It feels like a bunch of wheels that are layered on top of one another, Venn diagrams or something. And the spokes are often odd. The topics aren't necessarily the same, but like I feel connected to someone who writes about money in a newsletter more than I feel connected to a cartoonist in another form necessarily. And it's been fun to talk about the business end of it and stuff like this podcast is like, we're gnawing on the same bone, but from different angles.
18:05 Speaker 03 And I find that to be a really nice point of connection with people.
18:09 Speaker 00 Having all had your newsletters for roughly a year or so now, some less, some slightly more. What do you wish you'd known in the beginning that you know now?
18:20 Speaker 04 I called mine Lenny's newsletter because I had no better name when I was signing up for Substack. And then it's like really hard to change later. The other is going paid. It's a bigger deal than you think. Where now you're committed to writing for a long time and very few people see it, at least initially, only the people paying for it. It went from thousands of people reading everything I wrote to a few hundred and over time that builds again, but it feels really weird.
18:42 Speaker 00 How attuned are you all to how many subscribers you have? Very attuned.
18:47 Speaker 04 Let's not talk about how often we check our dash
18:49 Speaker 01 I'm attuned also, and sometimes it's like, okay, like, how many followers do you have? For me, I'm interested in how many people are receiving the things I'm writing and creating because my intention was to empower people with information and to make a difference. At the end of the day, I think it's cool to focus on like a smaller following of more loyal people rather than like a massive follow people who are tepid about what you're doing. It's more impactful and influential that way.
19:20 Speaker 00 In that your newsletter is more mission driven, do you think you will monetize? Like you went the Patreon route, right? Can you talk about why you decided to go that route rather than others?
19:31 Speaker 01 I wrote an op-ed for New York Times about how myself and other Black journalists are exhausted because we're experiencing all these pandemics within pandemics, and they didn't just emerge overnight. That, of course, got me a huge boost in subscribers and people just reaching out, how can I support you? This one woman was like, I just want to send you $300. How can I do that? But I didn't want to have that boulder like Lenny was talking about because I've had that boulder my whole career, working in digital media. So with my Patreon, I was like, okay, well, this is a way people can support me individually and I won't feel like, oh, if I skip a week on the newsletter, it will still be okay, it won't be these people paying and I'm not producing anything. I do want to pivot to a subscription model because I
20:14 Speaker 01 want to provide opportunities for other Black journalists to write the stories that they see are missing about Black people within the pandemic.
20:22 Speaker 00 A lot of traditional journalists are being laid off, you know, now in the midst of a pandemic. Lenny, you mentioned tech academia is shrinking. I think a lot of newsletter writers are coming from a lot of different industries at the moment. Do you think this is part of the evolution of media? Do you think that this kind of niche, community targeted media is the direction we're going? Or do you think that it's tangential to? Traditional journalism.
20:49 Speaker 01 I think it's the route that we're going. Traditional media is changing. But also, look at the way that our society has become like so fractured and so siloed in terms of perspectives. It's like a snake eating its tail. I don't think it's going anywhere, especially because we have these tools where anyone can become a platform.
21:08 Speaker 00 My question for all of you then is, what is the drop in newsletter compared to either traditional media or compared to social media?
21:16 Speaker 02 The archetype of a writer has been something that I've looked up to, but I never had the gumption, the courage, the orientation to like go that route. So for me, it's just like, just start a Substack and then there's no gatekeeper. I reached out to a handful of publications when I first got started and never heard back from anybody, so I just started it myself. So from the creator's perspective, that, to me, feels significant. The internet allows a non-journalist to have a chance of creating something. I haven't figured out the art of Twitter. And so I want to reserve my energies for the writing in the newsletter, which I actually feel very comfortable with. I feel like that's a medium that has this unique feature of being open because it's over email.
21:59 Speaker 02 It's not on a quote unquote platform like Facebook or what have you.
22:03 Speaker 00 What's your perspective, Edith?
22:05 Speaker 03 A lot of this I did because it seemed to align with the kind of stuff I wanted to create, which didn't totally exist. It's like I wanted to have it be comics, but also writing with ways to link into other stuff. And that wasn't something I could pitch to a traditional media outlet. One problem that I think about and would be curious other people's thoughts on is like, is there a natural ceiling for this? I started following all these newsletters and I loved them. And then I became bored of them. And then now I get way too many. And it really starts to add up very quickly. And I feel like a sense of being one of those people. There's like an audacity of like, me, my voice alone is good. Please listen to it.
22:49 Speaker 03 Don't listen to me on a team with other people. Listen to me alone. And there's a lot of talk about like, A fostering community, and I think a lot of newsletters have done a good job with that. That was like a big part of my favorite past job when I was running another website that was a community-driven site. And so I've moved on to this thing that's not really community-driven. It's just me creating and other people reading. And I worry that the average person has an appetite for that, that that will soon be exceeded by the amount of newsletters that are being created.
23:17 Speaker 00 Right. The question is, do you worry about newsletter oversaturation?
23:20 Speaker 03 And specifically, the newsletters that are asking people to pay for them, like my own.
23:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, the way I think about it is, you can basically make a living off a newsletter if you have a thousand to three thousand paid subscribers. There's a lot of people in the world that care about a lot of different things. The way I think about it is, what are like, what are the topics that people are interested in, especially if it's professional or something that they value enough to pay for in some way. And if you can be one of the better content producers in that vertical, I think you can make a living. And I think a lot of people can make a living doing that. I think there's so much opportunity. I personally subscribe to sixty-five newsletters.
23:58 Speaker 00 How many of them do you read?
23:59 Speaker 04 I read most of them. I unsubscribe for the ones I don't.
24:01 Speaker 00 As newsletter writers and readers, what are the main components behind a successful newsletter, in your opinion? The newsletters that you love and read and actively engage with, what makes those successful?
24:16 Speaker 04 I think there's, there's essentially five ways to provide value. I think about this a lot. What are the different types of newsletters? And I think it's either entertain the reader, make them smarter about some topic, keep them informed on what's happening, make them money, or make them feel like they're part of something bigger. If you can do one of those things really well consistently, I think you'll have a really successful newsletter.
24:39 Speaker 02 Do you optimize for one versus the other? Or in your example, do you feel like you're kind of mixing and matching?
24:46 Speaker 04 I've been looking at newsletters just to see if they generally fall in one of these buckets. And I think generally it's just one.
24:51 Speaker 01 As someone who's always interested in Hearing from marginalized and underrepresented voices, I would advocate to put your unique vantage point on top of those different buckets, whichever one you fall into, lean into what makes you different. And a lot of times, that's going to involve some transparency and being vulnerable with your subscribers. But I think that really resonates with people.
25:20 Speaker 00 One thing I'm interested in is, it seems to me that media is shrinking somewhat, but also becoming increasingly personality driven. How much of your newsletters do you feel like is driven by your perspective, your personality versus information driven? And what's the benefit of each?
25:41 Speaker 02 I will say that my experience with that has been challenging. I think Naval Ravikant credited with this quote of escape competition through authenticity. Nobody can compete with you on being you. And so the early days of my newsletter were way funnier than they are now. And that was a challenge to, one, it's really tough to keep it up, to do that. But also, as the audience grows, there is a feeling of pressure. I'm sort of struggling with that. I think I'm coming back a little bit to that, a little bit with offering it more of my character, personality cursing to readers. But that was like really challenging. It's like, oh, people are paying attention to this and now I'm shrinking in my authenticity.
26:26 Speaker 00 How do the rest of you think about that? How personality driven your newsletter is?
26:30 Speaker 01 I don't have a formula for mine. It really just depends on the tone. And like Edith said, subscribers don't have to be there if they don't want to, which is great, freedom for everyone involved. So I don't think there is a right or wrong way to insert yourself.
26:47 Speaker 03 Mine is definitely very personality driven and it makes me feel close to other people in the ways that it plays out, but it's hard, it's intense and it feels very personal in a way. Like it's hard to do the work and do it well. It's harder to step away from it because it feels like the camera is very, very close to my face, which is exactly where I placed it, but I, I wouldn't say it was necessarily the most sustainable business model.
27:12 Speaker 00 Lenny, what do you think about that?
27:13 Speaker 04 So my, my newsletter is definitely information driven. I try to balance the like, oh, it's Lenny's newsletter with, okay, it's actually just like a bunch of information that you can use. But I find similar to what Zach said, that it's really important to be authentic and honest about what you're saying and not just say things that sound good and things that other people have said. So whenever I write, I try to, one, always include my perspective and my, my experience, but still focus it around information. And then two, make sure I feel like this is real and honest and not just fluffy things that quickly come off as you're writing. Often when I, when something's too easy to write, I'm like, I don't know if that's actually true. Let me really think about this.
27:52 Speaker 00 How do you think about competition? Your topics are all fairly niche. Is that by design? And how do you think about others in your space?
28:01 Speaker 04 I, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. The thing you find though is most people just can't keep it up. And so even if there is somebody that's like, oh wow, this guy is going to be even better than me. Oftentimes they have like other things to do. They have jobs they gotta work on. And so a lot of it is just consistency.
28:17 Speaker 00 Outlasting the competition?
28:18 Speaker 04 That's, that's part of it. It's outlasting. And then the other thing is people just don't have time to write newsletters well. And so if you actually have time and you don't have like a day job that's sucking up all your brain energy and hours, you're, you have a big advantage over a lot of other people that are thinking about it or trying to do it. Because in my experience, there's a really direct correlation between the hours I put in to a newsletter and how well it does.
28:40 Speaker 00 It's tricky. You're going to recommend a lot of people quit their jobs.
28:44 Speaker 04 There's a lot of benefits to having a job. Health insurance, for example.
28:49 Speaker 00 Zach, are you a full-time newsletter or do you have a day job?
28:54 Speaker 02 I'm an acupuncturist and we recently moved from Brooklyn to Portland, Maine about a year ago. So I was in the process of getting a new practice up and running in March of this past year. And then I had to shut it down, but I very much intend to be doing this full time as soon as I can. And I think I could probably get to that point in the next year and a half to two years.
29:17 Speaker 00 Patrice, how do you strike that balance in that this is not your full-time gig? How do you strike the balance between making a living and this newsletter, which started out as I think kind of a passion project?
29:30 Speaker 01 I freelance, but that's more writing. And from someone who's like burnt out from writing, it's a lot. So yeah, I'm figuring it all out as I go.
29:43 Speaker 00 How would you define success when it comes to your newsletter? So what's the point you're aiming for when you'll be like, I've made it. It's a successful newsletter. Or if you've reached that point, how long did it take?
29:55 Speaker 04 I'll say for, for me, there's kind of like the financial goal. And then there's kind of like the emotional goal. I'd say financially, it's when I can get past the salary that I had at my last job would feel like, holy shit, this is crazy and real. And I could stick with this for a while.
30:10 Speaker 00 Have you done that?
30:10 Speaker 04 I haven't done it yet. And then emotionally, I think it's just consistently feeling like people are getting value from it by emails I get and replies and tweets and things like that. As long as it continues, I feel like I'm on the right track.
30:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, I really like that answer. That speaks to my experience too, which is it was emotionally fulfilling pretty much right off the bat. And financially, my goal is to get 1,000 paying subscribers in one year and 2,000 by the end of the second year. And I'm like halfway to the first, so just shy of 500 paying subscribers. But I, I like the previous salary thing. That's a nice benchmark.
30:48 Speaker 02 A thousand true fans. It's like a mantra for, for me, trying to get to that point. I think that's like a real proof of concept.
30:57 Speaker 00 How close are you to reaching that benchmark?
31:00 Speaker 02 Not close, not close, but I think I can do it in 12 or 18 months. But then there's also like this idea of optionality. I sort of set out with the intent to create an opportunity for myself in this emerging space. And the at bats that I have on that front that are creating something analogous, but that would allow me to keep writing, but also provide some sort of steady income. And that seems to be getting closer and they're getting more substantive. And so those are the two sort of frameworks that I'm using.
31:28 Speaker 00 Patrice, do you have a perspective on that?
31:30 Speaker 01 Ideally, you know, it's so successful that there's no longer a need because there's no disproportionate impact. And hopefully my newsletter contributes to that in some way. Hopefully it allows someone to avoid getting infected or to better care for people in their community once they're diagnosed with it.
31:51 Speaker 00 In our last couple of minutes, I'd like to do a lightning round. What are some of your favorite newsletters?
31:57 Speaker 01 I really like Darian Simone Harvin's Beauty I R L. It's a deep dive into beauty, the same way people do deep dives into politics and other hard news. Carefree Black Girl by Zebba Blay. Maybe Baby, it's this writer, she was at Man Repeller. And she left and she started her own newsletter. It's just musings on what's happening in her life. The common thread is millennial women being transparent about the way culture and society is impacting their life and perspective.
32:28 Speaker 00 Zach?
32:29 Speaker 02 Stratechery, Ben Thompson is one. Bill Bishop, who's like the OG Substack writer, writes a China newsletter. That's been motivational for me. There's another guy, Jacob Donnelly, who writes a newsletter called A Media Operator. It's about operating a media company, but he's a one person operation himself. So it focuses a lot on the solo creator. Anthony Pompliano's got a good one. Andrew Sullivan just switched over to Substack, so that's a full circle there.
32:58 Speaker 00 Edith?
32:59 Speaker 03 I really like The Browser, which is a selection of. Stories from around the internet every day and they're like always from really weird corners. There's a British writer, Ian Leslie, he has a personal newsletter. He recently switched to Substack. It's called The Ruffian. It's selections of his own work, but then also stories he finds online. And I really like his tone. I like Craig Maude's newsletter. He's in Japan. He's a photographer and sort of like personal musings. There's an antique jewelry newsletter that I love. My, my friend Monica McLaughlin runs it. It's called Dearest. It's also on Substack. And then a daily newsletter I really like that I've contributed to in the past is called Why Is This Interesting? And it's just different stuff every morning.
33:40 Speaker 00 Lenny?
33:40 Speaker 04 2PM by Webb Smith talks about like D to C and e-commerce. Really good newsletter. Lee Jin has an awesome newsletter about the passion economy. And now she has like a video series every week where they interview someone in the passion economy. Alex Danko has an awesome newsletter about tech and trends and things like that. Turner Novak, who's a VC, he has a great newsletter where he goes deep on various companies like TikTok and Pinduoduo. Nikhil, he has this great newsletter called The Next Big Thing. There are Alex Kancheritz left BuzzFeed and started a newsletter called Big Technology. He writes about tech. Paulina has an awesome newsletter called The Profile, where she profiles successful people. There's also the Everything
34:21 Speaker 04 Bundle, which has a lot of great content. And she has one called Not Boring. That's not boring and great that I recommend.
34:29 Speaker 00 Great title. Well, thank you all so much for joining us on the A16Z Podcast. Thanks.
34:34 Speaker 04 Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
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