from Hacker News

Things no one tells you when you start a newsletter

by oaf357 on 3/25/20, 4:13 PM with 5 comments

• by zomglings on 3/25/20, 7:49 PM

  Seems like Substack was built to solve the problems that the author mentions. Curious how good a job it does - it seems to be gaining traction lately.

  I have been considering it as an alternative to Medium, although Medium does have the best distribution story out there so far.

  Am also curious how many DevOps'ish readers are using IE6 to read his website. :)

• by milesvp on 3/25/20, 8:19 PM

  Interesting about the advice not to have "weekly" in your newsletter, due to the implied deadline.

  I'm curious how this plays into other advice I've read from content creators, that delivery consistency is key. And that the cadence you should finalize on should be something like N-1, where N is the amount of content you can consistently produce in a period. That way you have a pipeline and a backlog to allow you to take time off, or be sick. You can create 20 webcomics a month? Great, find 3 days a week to publish. 20% overcapacity seems to be a good number based on multiple sources I've seen from mostly solo producers, and it allows them to be consistent while not burning out.

• by sixhobbits on 3/25/20, 10:11 PM

  This feels like 4-5 random ideas that don't really fit together, combined into one post.

  DNS and good source IPs are mentioned and it starts off as if it's going to be fairly technical, but then talks about ideal cadences, and some guy called Gareth. Then markdown and Hugo?

  Good writing, but I would suggest more thinking about what your point is and then making it.

• by lonelappde on 3/26/20, 8:21 AM

  I'm sure someone would tell you, if you subscribed to their newsletter.