Newsletters

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Nov 15, 2025

Do local newsletters even work?

👋 Hi Reader, Many newsletter creators want to do well by their local communities and build a local presence, but they shy away from niching down into a local newsletter. Why? Finite addressable market, for starters. So I decided to dig deep and find out what the read on local newsletters look like. Thanks to Aniket Panjwani’s excellent newsletter database, I got a quick jumping off point. Ankit Panjwani (who writes the Content Quant newsletter) is not the typical content...

Nov 8, 2025

The LinkedIn Newsletter black box

👋 Hi Reader, As you folks are aware, I have a day job where I help early stage founding teams find their first 10,000 customers (what the cool kids call as 'GTM') at Anushka Ventures, and then I funnel my learnings into LetterStack. Most of these founding teams tend to have a watering hole on LinkedIn, which makes it easier for us to convince them to go all-in on LinkedIn-first content. An accidental fallout of that conversation is the aspect of getting into LinkedIn newsletters, and then...

Nov 1, 2025

Writing x AI: Where do the twain meet?

👋 Hi Reader, If you have known me for a while and have been a subscriber here, you might describe my relationship with AI as a dramatic jilted lover with massive withdrawal symptoms. I have hemmed and hawed at the prospect of writing with the help of AI. I have tried ChatGPT, Claude, and the plethora of tools available which claim to make AI-written-slop sound human. (Yes, tried that one too) So unless you are a writer whom I have known pre-ChatGPT for your writing, I am going to take...

Oct 25, 2025

TBPN’s Media Market Map vs. The Humble Newsletter

👋 Hi Reader, I like watching TBPN, a technology daily show, hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays. It usually plays in the background, as I go about my daily work routine. TBPN brings up the who’s who of technology and media to talk about their opinions on the media status quo, so that intersection is of deep interest to me, to know what’s happening in tech. TBPN's main site The reason I bring them up is they released a Media Market Map on X, which apparently captures the transition from...

Oct 18, 2025

What Newsletters Are You Reading?

👋 Hi Reader, I firmly believe that you create what you consume. For starters, I wanted my 10-year-old kiddo not to consume brainrot on YouTube Kids. She spent a lot of time on Victorious (which is not entirely bad), but I would rather she spend more time watching Carmen Sandiego (where she learnt about a new city in every episode) So my wife and I decided she needs to watch quality entertainment, so we decided to introduce her to...Full House. Yes, the 90s sitcom with Bob Saget and John Stamos....

Oct 11, 2025

The Case of the Devious Algorithm Landlord

👋 Hi Reader, I am a Kyla Scanlon fan. I admire her book ‘In This Economy’ and her work on Substack. So when she wrote recently about the attention economy on this thought-provoking piece Who's Getting Rich Off Your Attention? I had to sit down and write my perspective on how it applies so deeply to my mission at LetterStack. Kyla's book on Amazon Kyla speaks in detail about how only a few media empires have quietly consolidated the TV, and now social, attention span online. These few...

Oct 4, 2025

Let’s talk about the digital town square

👋 Hi Reader, I admire Justin Jackson, founder of Transistor.fm. He always puts the spotlight on thought pieces (not like LinkedIn Thought Leadership, actual long-form thesis) where the attention is due. So when he talked about Noema’s latest piece on ‘The Last Days of Social Media’, natually I lined it up for a Friday read. And what I read, validated what I had been mulling all along, on why I started LetterStack in the first place. Justin's post on LinkedIn It’s this: with AI slop taking...

Sep 27, 2025

Airbnb deals on a newsletter? Sign me up!

👋 Hi Reader, Who doesn’t like a great travel deal on an Airbnb? Especially if you are a digital nomad and you are looking for something long-term. If that’s you, that makes two of us. I signed up for a newsletter way back in 2019, when a random guy in a Slack community told he is curating Airbnb deals over email. Naturally, I signed up immediately. Fast-forward 6 years later - I am now talking to that guy, who is literally bananas. Chris Cerra (pronounced ‘Cherra’!) runs Remotebase, a...

Sep 20, 2025

The Price to Pay for Paid Subscriptions

👋 Hi Reader, As you are aware, there has been a lot of hue-and-cry about Substack’s paid subscriptions routing through the Apple in-app payments for the iOS app. But the noise just got louder with creator-side payout receipts now floating in the wild. Tyler Denk, the founder of beehiiv, talked on his LinkedIn post where he showed a screenshot of an App Store payout to a creator, where the difference between the gross earnings and net payout was almost 50%. Screenshot from Tyler's LinkedIn...