We invited Walt Hickey, author of Numlock News, to share with an audience of Substack writers in New York how he thinks about spinning off multiple newsletters for fun and profit. Walt started off with Numlock News – where he writes about the numbers behind the news – then added paid subscriptions, an Oscar Awards supplement, and a book club.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Takeaways

* Multiple newsletters are a lightweight way to experiment with new ideas.

* Use your main newsletter to create spin-offs, so you never have to deal with the “zero subscriber” problem again.

* Get creative with your paid subscriptions. You don’t just have to send one free and one paid post. Depending on your topic, you might consider publishing paid content during a peak season, quarterly in-depth reports, or more.

I run a newsletter called Numlock. It’s a daily morning newsletter about the numbers inside the news.

I started it after working at FiveThirtyEight for about five years, where I’d started a newsletter called Significant Digits. As a guy with a math-y background, I realized that my biggest liability as a person in journalism was that I needed to get better at writing, and doing something every day was a really effective way of practicing.

I really enjoyed writing that newsletter, and then it hit a point where the scuttlebutt was that FiveThirtyEight was going to be sold. I looked at where Sig Dig was and realized there was more value in there than we were currently unlocking. The open rate was great. People enjoyed receiving it. In building the case for why FiveThirtyEight should keep me, I actually built the case for why I should leave and start my own newsletter. I did that, and it's been great.

How he started multiple newsletters

My main newsletter is Numlock, it’s my bread and butter. It’s what I've been doing for more than two years now. I have a product that I think is good, and that my audience thinks is good. As a result, I have a good “in” with people who enjoy reading my work. If I were to describe Numlock in Uber-for-pizza terms, what I think of is, “It's Good Morning America for nerdier folks.”

This being Substack, at a certain point, it came time to monetize, so I launched a Sunday edition. For $5 a month, I talk to either a writer who wrote a really cool story that I put in the main newsletter, or I talk to an author who's got a good book out. This is a really fun way to add value.

If you think about traditional media ecosystems like late night shows, there’s a reason they have written jokes in the beginning and then an interview at the end. It’s because interviews are easy to book, and people tend to like them a lot. It’s a nice way to have something that’s less work than the newsletter itself, but gives people more insight into the stories that we find.

But I’ve also started a couple of other spin-off newsletters, one of which is the Numlock Awards Supplement.

I’m a culture writer, and I love predicting the Oscars using math. It's a good time. I started about two years ago and wanted to keep doing it. I think we learn a lot about ourselves, and how we can predict things, through this institution that is very obscure. It's a fun little puzzle.

So I started a pop-up award season newsletter. It runs from November-ish, or whenever I feel like starting it, until Oscar night and the week after. It's a nice opportunity to talk about a thing I'm really passionate about, but not have to throw it at my traditional people who just want to watch Good Morning America and never talk to me again.

That spawned another idea. I love engaging with audiences, and discussion threads are such a cool feature that Substack has built. I wanted a way to tap into that without compelling people who just enjoyed the passive nature of newsletters to participate.

So I thought, again, having interviewed a lot of authors and seeing the response that that gets, my audience is one that enjoys reading things, learning new things, cool ideas, cool books and stuff like that. I figured one way to expand that was through a book club.

The Numlock Book Club is kind of a democracy, and it's also kind of an experiment. The idea was we're going to vote on books to read, and then we're going to vote on these books. Whatever book you pick, we're going to read, then it's basically just going to be a managed reading thing.

We've gone through three so far. We're in the middle of our fourth, and it's really fun. You get a chance to cover things that you wouldn't normally cover. You get to engage with readers that you might not normally be able or willing to, based on how you normally interact with your newsletter.

Spin-offs make it easy to try new things

Here’s the real reason that you should make spin-off newsletters. Who’s having fun in media anymore? I think about this question constantly, because I'm having fun in media, but many other people are not. So I made this list of all the people I could think of that are currently having fun in media:

* Top TV talent

* Private equity capitalists extracting enormous quantities of wealth for a style of business operation not entirely unlike the episode where Tony Soprano busted up that camping store

* Walt Disney

* People who make a living directly from their audience

* People that get residuals from NBC television shows that aired in the '90s and early 2000s

* Jake Paul

I can't be any of these except for one, but it’s really fun. To give you an example of other people who’ve tried this, I’d like to highlight the example of the McElroy brothers, which is a family of brothers who have podcasts.

They started with a podcast called My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Then they tried to do one episode about Dungeons and Dragons, and it went well. So they spun that off and made a podcast called The Adventure Zone, which ended up becoming a lot more popular than the original podcast. Eventually, they started adding some other weird spin-off podcasts. Some of these then turned into other opportunities to cross-promote.

The idea is, if you like The Bachelor, you can listen to Rose Buddies. If you like medical history, you can check out Sawbones, which promotes everything else they have. Everything they do internally plugs into one another.

So if I’m a person who likes the first thing, I can eventually wind my way to other things that I like. Maybe you don't want to listen to Sawbones, but you might be really down for The Adventure Zone. And this also turns into other opportunities like a book, or a graphic novel, or the fact that they had a podcast called The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls 2 and eventually it happened – they're in Trolls 2.

Spin-offs are great. They address a lot of things that are annoying about starting a newsletter from scratch, namely that you know the people who like you the most already. They're the ones who currently subscribe to your newsletter. So you can reach the people who are most likely to subscribe to your other newsletter.

Spin-offs are great. They address a lot of things that are annoying about starting a newsletter from scratch, namely that you know the people who like you the most already.

The Golden Rule I've found is that every new subscriber is slightly easier to get than the previous subscriber, because networks scale. It's very difficult to go from zero to one. Going 10 to 11 is easier. Going 99 to 100 is easier than that, and so on. So you never really need to relive the “zero-subscriber newsletter” that really takes guts to send.

As long as you come into it like that, you can say, “I don't know if this is going to last forever. This is just a fun little thing I'm going to do on the side.” But your spin-offs have an opportunity to bolster the way that you interact with your audience. You might get that hit. You might make a sidebar newsletter that ends up being bigger than your initial one. Nobody really knows what's good anymore, but experimenting a lot is a good way to try that.

Also, collaborations are great. I do my Oscar Awards one with the person I’m dating, who knows much more about the Oscars than I do.

Get creative with paid subscriptions

The internet spent a lot of time figuring out how to really optimize ads. We know a lot of ways to make money off advertising to people. We also now know that, yes, subscriptions are great. Last night I wondered: what is the average frequency with which a paid newsletter sends out paid posts?

I pulled the top 25 Substack newsletters and found that 14 of the 25 were sending about even amounts: one paid post for one free post. Some were more like me, where you do five free, one paid. And then some were the opposite direction, where you get five paid and then one free per week.

So we know what tends to do well when it comes to subscriptions, but I want to point out a few other business models that I think people should try. There are different ways to use subscriptions that are not simply, “Half my posts are behind a paywall and the other half is free.”

For instance, you can use what’s almost like demand-based pricing. If there's an election going on, in October lots of people are going to be interested in that stuff. And so maybe you have something that’s like, “We're an elections newsletter. In October, only paid subscribers get the really timely material.”

On the other hand, you could have a paid-only edition that arrives quarterly or yearly. You just have to figure out what you need to promise and then deliver on that. It doesn't need to be once a week. It doesn't need to be twice a week. It doesn't need to be once a month. As long as you figure out your social contract with your readers, you can do whatever you want. It can come in the form of, “I cover an industry and once a year, you're going to get a big report from me and that's what the money's for.”

You can promise to do 20 paid-only editions per year and only send them when there's actually news on your beat. I'm not going to monetize my Oscars newsletter, but maybe I have one that’s awards all year-round, and then I only send the paid editions when the news is hot, which is going to be in January and February. There are all sorts of ways that you can use ancillary newsletters to both experiment with content and experiment with delivery formats.

For more advice on growing your newsletter, check out “How to build community around your publication.”

Photo by Bess Adler

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

We invited Walt Hickey, author of Numlock News, to share with an audience of Substack writers in New York how he thinks about spinning off multiple newsletters for fun and profit. Walt started off with Numlock News – where he writes about the numbers behind the news – then added paid subscriptions, an Oscar Awards supplement, and a book club.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Takeaways

Multiple newsletters are a lightweight way to experiment with new ideas.

Use your main newsletter to create spin-offs, so you never have to deal with the “zero subscriber” problem again.

Get creative with your paid subscriptions. You don’t just have to send one free and one paid post. Depending on your topic, you might consider publishing paid content during a peak season, quarterly in-depth reports, or more.

I run a newsletter called Numlock. It’s a daily morning newsletter about the numbers inside the news.

I started it after working at FiveThirtyEight for about five years, where I’d started a newsletter called Significant Digits. As a guy with a math-y background, I realized that my biggest liability as a person in journalism was that I needed to get better at writing, and doing something every day was a really effective way of practicing.

I really enjoyed writing that newsletter, and then it hit a point where the scuttlebutt was that FiveThirtyEight was going to be sold. I looked at where Sig Dig was and realized there was more value in there than we were currently unlocking. The open rate was great. People enjoyed receiving it. In building the case for why FiveThirtyEight should keep me, I actually built the case for why I should leave and start my own newsletter. I did that, and it's been great.

How he started multiple newsletters

My main newsletter is Numlock, it’s my bread and butter. It’s what I've been doing for more than two years now. I have a product that I think is good, and that my audience thinks is good. As a result, I have a good “in” with people who enjoy reading my work. If I were to describe Numlock in Uber-for-pizza terms, what I think of is, “It's Good Morning America for nerdier folks.”

This being Substack, at a certain point, it came time to monetize, so I launched a Sunday edition. For $5 a month, I talk to either a writer who wrote a really cool story that I put in the main newsletter, or I talk to an author who's got a good book out. This is a really fun way to add value.

If you think about traditional media ecosystems like late night shows, there’s a reason they have written jokes in the beginning and then an interview at the end. It’s because interviews are easy to book, and people tend to like them a lot. It’s a nice way to have something that’s less work than the newsletter itself, but gives people more insight into the stories that we find.

But I’ve also started a couple of other spin-off newsletters, one of which is the Numlock Awards Supplement.

I’m a culture writer, and I love predicting the Oscars using math. It's a good time. I started about two years ago and wanted to keep doing it. I think we learn a lot about ourselves, and how we can predict things, through this institution that is very obscure. It's a fun little puzzle.

So I started a pop-up award season newsletter. It runs from November-ish, or whenever I feel like starting it, until Oscar night and the week after. It's a nice opportunity to talk about a thing I'm really passionate about, but not have to throw it at my traditional people who just want to watch Good Morning America and never talk to me again.

That spawned another idea. I love engaging with audiences, and discussion threads are such a cool feature that Substack has built. I wanted a way to tap into that without compelling people who just enjoyed the passive nature of newsletters to participate.

So I thought, again, having interviewed a lot of authors and seeing the response that that gets, my audience is one that enjoys reading things, learning new things, cool ideas, cool books and stuff like that. I figured one way to expand that was through a book club.

The Numlock Book Club is kind of a democracy, and it's also kind of an experiment. The idea was we're going to vote on books to read, and then we're going to vote on these books. Whatever book you pick, we're going to read, then it's basically just going to be a managed reading thing.

We've gone through three so far. We're in the middle of our fourth, and it's really fun. You get a chance to cover things that you wouldn't normally cover. You get to engage with readers that you might not normally be able or willing to, based on how you normally interact with your newsletter.

Spin-offs make it easy to try new things

Here’s the real reason that you should make spin-off newsletters. Who’s having fun in media anymore? I think about this question constantly, because I'm having fun in media, but many other people are not. So I made this list of all the people I could think of that are currently having fun in media:

Top TV talent

Private equity capitalists extracting enormous quantities of wealth for a style of business operation not entirely unlike the episode where Tony Soprano busted up that camping store

Walt Disney

People who make a living directly from their audience

People that get residuals from NBC television shows that aired in the '90s and early 2000s

Jake Paul

I can't be any of these except for one, but it’s really fun. To give you an example of other people who’ve tried this, I’d like to highlight the example of the McElroy brothers, which is a family of brothers who have podcasts.

They started with a podcast called My Brother, My Brother, and Me. Then they tried to do one episode about Dungeons and Dragons, and it went well. So they spun that off and made a podcast called The Adventure Zone, which ended up becoming a lot more popular than the original podcast. Eventually, they started adding some other weird spin-off podcasts. Some of these then turned into other opportunities to cross-promote.

The idea is, if you like The Bachelor, you can listen to Rose Buddies. If you like medical history, you can check out Sawbones, which promotes everything else they have. Everything they do internally plugs into one another.

So if I’m a person who likes the first thing, I can eventually wind my way to other things that I like. Maybe you don't want to listen to Sawbones, but you might be really down for The Adventure Zone. And this also turns into other opportunities like a book, or a graphic novel, or the fact that they had a podcast called The McElroy Brothers Will Be in Trolls 2 and eventually it happened – they're in Trolls 2.

Spin-offs are great. They address a lot of things that are annoying about starting a newsletter from scratch, namely that you know the people who like you the most already. They're the ones who currently subscribe to your newsletter. So you can reach the people who are most likely to subscribe to your other newsletter.

Spin-offs are great. They address a lot of things that are annoying about starting a newsletter from scratch, namely that you know the people who like you the most already.

The Golden Rule I've found is that every new subscriber is slightly easier to get than the previous subscriber, because networks scale. It's very difficult to go from zero to one. Going 10 to 11 is easier. Going 99 to 100 is easier than that, and so on. So you never really need to relive the “zero-subscriber newsletter” that really takes guts to send.

As long as you come into it like that, you can say, “I don't know if this is going to last forever. This is just a fun little thing I'm going to do on the side.” But your spin-offs have an opportunity to bolster the way that you interact with your audience. You might get that hit. You might make a sidebar newsletter that ends up being bigger than your initial one. Nobody really knows what's good anymore, but experimenting a lot is a good way to try that.

Also, collaborations are great. I do my Oscar Awards one with the person I’m dating, who knows much more about the Oscars than I do.

Get creative with paid subscriptions

The internet spent a lot of time figuring out how to really optimize ads. We know a lot of ways to make money off advertising to people. We also now know that, yes, subscriptions are great. Last night I wondered: what is the average frequency with which a paid newsletter sends out paid posts?

I pulled the top 25 Substack newsletters and found that 14 of the 25 were sending about even amounts: one paid post for one free post. Some were more like me, where you do five free, one paid. And then some were the opposite direction, where you get five paid and then one free per week.

So we know what tends to do well when it comes to subscriptions, but I want to point out a few other business models that I think people should try. There are different ways to use subscriptions that are not simply, “Half my posts are behind a paywall and the other half is free.”

For instance, you can use what’s almost like demand-based pricing. If there's an election going on, in October lots of people are going to be interested in that stuff. And so maybe you have something that’s like, “We're an elections newsletter. In October, only paid subscribers get the really timely material.”

On the other hand, you could have a paid-only edition that arrives quarterly or yearly. You just have to figure out what you need to promise and then deliver on that. It doesn't need to be once a week. It doesn't need to be twice a week. It doesn't need to be once a month. As long as you figure out your social contract with your readers, you can do whatever you want. It can come in the form of, “I cover an industry and once a year, you're going to get a big report from me and that's what the money's for.”

You can promise to do 20 paid-only editions per year and only send them when there's actually news on your beat. I'm not going to monetize my Oscars newsletter, but maybe I have one that’s awards all year-round, and then I only send the paid editions when the news is hot, which is going to be in January and February. There are all sorts of ways that you can use ancillary newsletters to both experiment with content and experiment with delivery formats.

For more advice on growing your newsletter, check out “How to build community around your publication.”

Photo by Bess Adler

Get on the email list at on.substack.com

Of all the writers who use Substack, no one is as good at promoting their newsletter as Judd Legum, publisher of Popular Information. Judd was previously the editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress and has also been a political campaign researcher and lawyer. I convinced him to join me on a special pop-up episode of the Substack Podcast to share his advice on how to run a one-man newsletter business, build an audience, and turn Twitter to your advantage.

Below, I’ve summarized some of the key takeaways. Enjoy!

—Hamish

Play to your strengths

“When I’ve been able to leverage my skill as a researcher and then turn it around and put it out in the newsletter and help inform people in a deeper way about something they care about – whether that’s been the corporate donations to Cindy Hyde-Smith or Steve King, or whether that’s been really diving in deep to the election fraud issues in North Carolina, or some of the more recent stuff I’ve done about Facebook ads or the corporate contributions to some of these politicians pushing abortion bans in the United States – that’s what the audience really responds to. And so knowing that, I try to look at what’s going on the news and see where is there a topic that I can research further and pull out stuff that’s really new. That’s information that people didn’t have and I think that’s what people value and are willing to pay for.”

People pay to feel empowered

“From what I’ve heard from my paid subscribers, it’s just that they really want to support this kind of journalism, and they feel good about it when I do that kind of work. They feel empowered and they feel more informed and so that’s what’s motivated them. And that’s something I didn’t anticipate either. I thought it was really just the paywall that motivates people and the fact that you were withholding content, but I think for most people that’s not it.”

Sell value instead of volume

“Most people do not want more email. So if the only thing you have to offer them is, ‘Hey, subscribe to this newsletter and you’ll get some more email,’ that’s not that compelling. But if you can create a different value proposition where you can say, ‘Look, I’m creating the kind of writing that you can’t find anywhere else and I need you to be a part of this and to support this work if you value it,’ then I think that people get into that. And they want to get it four times a week, but it’s not necessarily the idea of getting it four times a week that is going to be the motivating factor.”

Why he spent the first three months publishing everything for free

“I thought that if I could get people in the door and show them what I could do with their support, that maybe people would go for it. And I think that’s largely what happened, because that’s still been my best little, you know, two-week period, was right when I turned on the paid subscriptions and the people who had been receiving it during that free period were given an opportunity to switch over.”

The importance of free content

“If you think of it from a business perspective, because this is a little business that you start – it’s a newsletter but it’s also a business – the free content is by far the most important content for your business. Because one, it’s something that anyone can read and it can help grow your free list. And two, it’s what gets sent to your total mailing list and gives you an opportunity to convert people.”

If you don’t self-promote, you won’t get a promotion

“I think probably the easiest mistake is just to think that, ‘Oh, I’m just going to write and put it out there and we’ll just see what happens.’ I can tell you, nothing will happen. You’ve got to really work on it... If you’re trying to earn a living doing it, you’ve got to work on it. And in addition to your job of writing the newsletter, you have another job, which is you’re the marketing officer for your company.”

How to use Twitter to drive growth

“I don’t know the exact percentage of subscribers who first came on Twitter but I think it probably approaches 50% of my paid subscribers. And the way I use it is to give people essentially a thesis statement of what the newsletter is about that day. And I’ll do that in a thread of tweets. It might be 5 to 15 tweets where I lay out my main points or the things that I’ve learned. And then I try to use that to build up to a period where one of those tweets – not the first tweet and not the last tweet but somewhere in there – there is an organic place where I can ask people to sign up for the newsletter and that that’s the best way to get the information”.

Use Twitter to grow even if you don’t have a huge following

“If you don’t have a huge following to begin with, you can still be successful. And one of the ways to do that is to reach out directly to people and tell them about what you’ve written if you do it in a thoughtful way. So you’ve got to think about what your topic is, what you’ve discovered, what you’ve written about and think about who does have a large audience on Twitter and might be interested in that, and send them a nice polite note about that thing. And that’s still something I do on a targeted basis, even though I do have a pretty good following, because there’s people with even bigger followings and there’s also people with smaller followings but they have really engaged followings that you want to get your information in front of.”

Threads are better than single tweets

“One, it’s just more space in people’s feeds. Social media is a brawl for people’s attention. And it’s basically like sending eight or nine people into the ring versus one person into the ring to see what they can do, so that’s an advantage. I think you have a better chance of capturing what’s interesting about your newsletter in a thread than you do in a single tweet. And I think that, just as a matter of Twitter strategy, I know that creating a popular thread is something that is likely to get you new Twitter followers, whereas just an individual popular tweet is not. And I think that’s because a thread indicates that you are a thoughtful person.” (See example below.)

Tweet something valuable

“Anyone can tweet a link to their website, but you have to come up with a value proposition for why people should do it. I think the shortest way to explain the value proposition that works best for me is that you should do it to receive and support accountability journalism. But no matter who you are, you have to be able to succinctly describe the value proposition. If you don’t have that, it really is not going to matter how much you promote your website, because you haven’t given people a reason to do it.”

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Of all the writers who use Substack, no one is as good at promoting their newsletter as Judd Legum, publisher of Popular Information. Judd was previously the editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress and has also been a political campaign researcher and lawyer. I convinced him to join me on a special pop-up episode of the Substack Podcast to share his advice on how to run a one-man newsletter business, build an audience, and turn Twitter to your advantage.

Below, I’ve summarized some of the key takeaways. Enjoy!

—Hamish

Play to your strengths

“When I’ve been able to leverage my skill as a researcher and then turn it around and put it out in the newsletter and help inform people in a deeper way about something they care about – whether that’s been the corporate donations to Cindy Hyde-Smith or Steve King, or whether that’s been really diving in deep to the election fraud issues in North Carolina, or some of the more recent stuff I’ve done about Facebook ads or the corporate contributions to some of these politicians pushing abortion bans in the United States – that’s what the audience really responds to. And so knowing that, I try to look at what’s going on the news and see where is there a topic that I can research further and pull out stuff that’s really new. That’s information that people didn’t have and I think that’s what people value and are willing to pay for.”

People pay to feel empowered

“From what I’ve heard from my paid subscribers, it’s just that they really want to support this kind of journalism, and they feel good about it when I do that kind of work. They feel empowered and they feel more informed and so that’s what’s motivated them. And that’s something I didn’t anticipate either. I thought it was really just the paywall that motivates people and the fact that you were withholding content, but I think for most people that’s not it.”

Sell value instead of volume

“Most people do not want more email. So if the only thing you have to offer them is, ‘Hey, subscribe to this newsletter and you’ll get some more email,’ that’s not that compelling. But if you can create a different value proposition where you can say, ‘Look, I’m creating the kind of writing that you can’t find anywhere else and I need you to be a part of this and to support this work if you value it,’ then I think that people get into that. And they want to get it four times a week, but it’s not necessarily the idea of getting it four times a week that is going to be the motivating factor.”

Why he spent the first three months publishing everything for free

“I thought that if I could get people in the door and show them what I could do with their support, that maybe people would go for it. And I think that’s largely what happened, because that’s still been my best little, you know, two-week period, was right when I turned on the paid subscriptions and the people who had been receiving it during that free period were given an opportunity to switch over.”

The importance of free content

“If you think of it from a business perspective, because this is a little business that you start – it’s a newsletter but it’s also a business – the free content is by far the most important content for your business. Because one, it’s something that anyone can read and it can help grow your free list. And two, it’s what gets sent to your total mailing list and gives you an opportunity to convert people.”

If you don’t self-promote, you won’t get a promotion

“I think probably the easiest mistake is just to think that, ‘Oh, I’m just going to write and put it out there and we’ll just see what happens.’ I can tell you, nothing will happen. You’ve got to really work on it... If you’re trying to earn a living doing it, you’ve got to work on it. And in addition to your job of writing the newsletter, you have another job, which is you’re the marketing officer for your company.”

How to use Twitter to drive growth

“I don’t know the exact percentage of subscribers who first came on Twitter but I think it probably approaches 50% of my paid subscribers. And the way I use it is to give people essentially a thesis statement of what the newsletter is about that day. And I’ll do that in a thread of tweets. It might be 5 to 15 tweets where I lay out my main points or the things that I’ve learned. And then I try to use that to build up to a period where one of those tweets – not the first tweet and not the last tweet but somewhere in there – there is an organic place where I can ask people to sign up for the newsletter and that that’s the best way to get the information”.

Use Twitter to grow even if you don’t have a huge following

“If you don’t have a huge following to begin with, you can still be successful. And one of the ways to do that is to reach out directly to people and tell them about what you’ve written if you do it in a thoughtful way. So you’ve got to think about what your topic is, what you’ve discovered, what you’ve written about and think about who does have a large audience on Twitter and might be interested in that, and send them a nice polite note about that thing. And that’s still something I do on a targeted basis, even though I do have a pretty good following, because there’s people with even bigger followings and there’s also people with smaller followings but they have really engaged followings that you want to get your information in front of.”

Threads are better than single tweets

“One, it’s just more space in people’s feeds. Social media is a brawl for people’s attention. And it’s basically like sending eight or nine people into the ring versus one person into the ring to see what they can do, so that’s an advantage. I think you have a better chance of capturing what’s interesting about your newsletter in a thread than you do in a single tweet. And I think that, just as a matter of Twitter strategy, I know that creating a popular thread is something that is likely to get you new Twitter followers, whereas just an individual popular tweet is not. And I think that’s because a thread indicates that you are a thoughtful person.” (See example below.)

Tweet something valuable

“Anyone can tweet a link to their website, but you have to come up with a value proposition for why people should do it. I think the shortest way to explain the value proposition that works best for me is that you should do it to receive and support accountability journalism. But no matter who you are, you have to be able to succinctly describe the value proposition. If you don’t have that, it really is not going to matter how much you promote your website, because you haven’t given people a reason to do it.”

Get on the email list at on.substack.com

Canadian journalist and media critic Jesse Brown is well known in his home country for big media scoops and uncompromising commentary. These days, he’s creating a name for himself as a media entrepreneur, too. With his latest venture, Canadaland, the former columnist has created a podcast network funded by its audience through Patreon.

In this interview, we discuss Brown’s colorful career, his surprise side success from cofounding a startup that many years later was acquired by Snapchat, and why he thinks every journalism student should start a newsletter and charge for their work.

Brown is a sharp media thinker and digital media expert. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and think you will too.

—Hamish

Click here to listen in your favorite podcast app

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Canadian journalist and media critic Jesse Brown is well known in his home country for big media scoops and uncompromising commentary. These days, he’s creating a name for himself as a media entrepreneur, too. With his latest venture, Canadaland, the former columnist has created a podcast network funded by its audience through Patreon.

In this interview, we discuss Brown’s colorful career, his surprise side success from cofounding a startup that many years later was acquired by Snapchat, and why he thinks every journalism student should start a newsletter and charge for their work.

Brown is a sharp media thinker and digital media expert. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and think you will too.

—Hamish

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Today, we’re moving into paid podcasts with the launch of a tool for audio publishing. The first Substack publisher to use the tool is Anthony Pompliano, who is launching a daily podcast for Off the Chain that will be available to his paying subscribers.

We’ve always believed that one of the great benefits of Substack is that you can subscribe to a person. That power is intensified when you can actually hear that person’s voice.

Subscription podcasting through Substack works in the same way as publishing newsletters. Once the feature is enabled, you can create an audio post that is just like a normal post and can go out to everyone or only to subscribers. After receiving the post by email or accessing it on the web, subscribers can listen to the audio through the Substack web player. (Try it by listening to our special announcement episode right here in this post.)

It used to be that the web-player experience for audio wasn’t great. In iOS, for instance, audio that was playing from a browser wouldn’t keep playing once you switched apps or turned off the screen. These days, however, the web-player experience for audio is good, with persistent playback and controls that are accessible from the lock screen. With the Substack player, you can speed up the audio, too, so if you like to listen at 2x you’ll be well looked after. We may soon add the ability to add a private feed of episodes to podcast players, but we like the web solution for now. (Give us your feedback, etc.)

We also like email being the distribution channel. When you are constantly bombarded by tweets, push notifications, and updates, receiving an email that gives you a direct link to a podcast episode just feels... sane. Plus, email is a decentralized system that avoids depending on platforms that may or may not be interested in helping you build a subscription business through a direct relationship with your audience.

Anthony has been doing amazing work with Off the Chain, so we’re thrilled that he’s pioneering this feature for us. The new podcast, Off the Chain Daily, will feature episodes of 10 minutes or less that discuss the hot issues of the day in crypto. Listening to an episode feels like receiving a personal audio-letter from a highly knowledgeable friend. It’s a great format and one that we hope many other Substack publishers will use in the future.

Substack’s audio feature is in private beta, but we’ll be rolling it out to more people over the coming weeks and months. If you’d like to get your name on the invitation list, please fill out this application form.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Today, we’re moving into paid podcasts with the launch of a tool for audio publishing. The first Substack publisher to use the tool is Anthony Pompliano, who is launching a daily podcast for Off the Chain that will be available to his paying subscribers.

We’ve always believed that one of the great benefits of Substack is that you can subscribe to a person. That power is intensified when you can actually hear that person’s voice.

Subscription podcasting through Substack works in the same way as publishing newsletters. Once the feature is enabled, you can create an audio post that is just like a normal post and can go out to everyone or only to subscribers. After receiving the post by email or accessing it on the web, subscribers can listen to the audio through the Substack web player. (Try it by listening to our special announcement episode right here in this post.)

It used to be that the web-player experience for audio wasn’t great. In iOS, for instance, audio that was playing from a browser wouldn’t keep playing once you switched apps or turned off the screen. These days, however, the web-player experience for audio is good, with persistent playback and controls that are accessible from the lock screen. With the Substack player, you can speed up the audio, too, so if you like to listen at 2x you’ll be well looked after. We may soon add the ability to add a private feed of episodes to podcast players, but we like the web solution for now. (Give us your feedback, etc.)

We also like email being the distribution channel. When you are constantly bombarded by tweets, push notifications, and updates, receiving an email that gives you a direct link to a podcast episode just feels... sane. Plus, email is a decentralized system that avoids depending on platforms that may or may not be interested in helping you build a subscription business through a direct relationship with your audience.

Anthony has been doing amazing work with Off the Chain, so we’re thrilled that he’s pioneering this feature for us. The new podcast, Off the Chain Daily, will feature episodes of 10 minutes or less that discuss the hot issues of the day in crypto. Listening to an episode feels like receiving a personal audio-letter from a highly knowledgeable friend. It’s a great format and one that we hope many other Substack publishers will use in the future.

Substack’s audio feature is in private beta, but we’ll be rolling it out to more people over the coming weeks and months. If you’d like to get your name on the invitation list, please fill out this application form.

Get on the email list at on.substack.com

Bill Bishop is the author of the Sinocism China newsletter, and our very first publisher on Substack. In this interview, we discuss his secrets to building a great newsletter business and his fascinating career, from running video tape for news stations at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 massacre, to co-founding the financial news site MarketWatch, attempting to build a gaming business in boom-times China, and ultimately starting Sinocism.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit on.substack.com

Bill Bishop is the author of the Sinocism China newsletter, and our very first publisher on Substack. In this interview, we discuss his secrets to building a great newsletter business and his fascinating career, from running video tape for news stations at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 massacre, to co-founding the financial news site MarketWatch, attempting to build a gaming business in boom-times China, and ultimately starting Sinocism.

Get on the email list at on.substack.com