
Things no one tells you when you start a newsletter - oaf357
https://chrisshort.net/things-no-one-tells-you-when-you-start-a-newsletter/
======
zomglings
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.
:)

------
milesvp
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.

------
sixhobbits
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.

~~~
henriquez
I disagree. If you’ve run a mailing list of any reasonable size before you’ll
quickly run into the same experience the author had: you have to get good at a
lot of disparate skills in order to keep the list from falling apart, either
due to user attrition or technical reasons like spam traps and engagement
metrics.

The OP didn’t pitch this as an exhaustive reference of every issue that can
come up, but it’s a good sampler of the kind of problems you have to deal
with, and stuff that most people wouldn’t even think about.

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

