Getting Started
How to start a newsletter
The technical part takes an afternoon. The parts that decide whether it works — the niche, the cadence, and the first hundred readers — are what this guide is about.
Pick a niche narrow enough to be obvious
The most common reason a newsletter fails is that nobody can tell who it's for. "A newsletter about technology" competes with everything and belongs to nobody. "A weekly teardown of one B2B onboarding flow" is instantly legible — a reader knows in three seconds whether it's for them, and the ones who say yes are the ones who stay.
Narrow feels like it limits your audience. It doesn't; it makes you findable. You can broaden later once people know what you are, and every established newsletter you admire started far more specific than it is now.
- Name the reader, not the topic.
- Promise a specific recurring thing, not general coverage.
- Pick something you can still write about in six months.
- If you can't describe it in one sentence, it's too broad.
Choose a platform in ten minutes, not ten days
Platform choice absorbs an enormous amount of time that would be better spent writing. At zero subscribers the honest answer is that it barely matters: Substack is free until you monetise and requires no configuration, which makes it the sensible default for most people starting out.
The two things genuinely worth checking are whether you can point your own domain at it later, and whether it publishes a public, crawlable archive. Both keep future options open. Everything else — segmentation, A/B testing, referral programmes — is worth paying for at the point where you can name what you'd do with it, which is not today.
Set a cadence you can hold on a bad week
Pick the frequency you could sustain during your busiest month, then commit to it publicly. Weekly is the default and works well, but a good monthly issue beats a weekly one you come to resent — and irregularity is what actually loses readers, because people who can't predict you stop expecting you.
Write three issues before you launch. It gives you a buffer for the first bad week, and more usefully it tells you whether the idea has legs before you've announced it to anyone. A surprising number of newsletter ideas die at issue two, and it's much better to find that out privately.
Get the first hundred readers deliberately
Nobody arrives by accident at the start. The first twenty subscribers come from asking people directly — not a broadcast announcement, but individual messages to people who'd genuinely find it useful. It feels awkward and it's the highest-converting outreach you will ever do.
After that, use the channels that work without an audience: submit to newsletter directories where readers browse by category, participate properly in the one or two communities where your readers already gather, and make sure your archive is public so search can start working in the background. A hundred readers is not a vanity milestone — it's the point at which cross-promotion becomes available to you, and that's what unlocks everything after.
Frequently asked questions
How do I start a newsletter for free?
Substack and Buttondown both let you publish and send at no cost, and beehiiv has a free tier with a subscriber cap. Substack stays free at any list size until you start charging readers, which makes it the simplest starting point if you're not monetising yet.
How many subscribers do I need before launching?
None. Launch at zero and grow in public — waiting for an audience before you start is the most common way a newsletter never happens. What's worth having before you launch is three written issues, so you have a buffer and proof to yourself that the idea sustains.
How often should I send a newsletter?
Whatever you can hold during your busiest month. Weekly is the common default, but consistency matters far more than frequency — a reliable monthly issue builds a better list than an erratic weekly one, because readers who can't predict you stop opening.
What should my first newsletter issue be about?
Make it the clearest demonstration of the recurring thing you're promising. Don't spend issue one introducing yourself — new subscribers care whether the format is worth their inbox, so show them the format working. Save the introduction for a permanent About page.