Things that matter for growing a newsletter

Lessons learnt from growing First 1000 over the past 4 years.

Hello Friends 👋

After four years, 85k subscribers, and 120+ issues later, I think I learned a thing or two about writing a newsletter that I want to share.

I spent much of the first couple of years focusing on growth (see growing from 0→2k and growing from 2k→10k). Even though today, I spent virtually no time focusing on growth, I believe I have picked up a few heuristics about what matters for growing a newsletter.

Here are a few themes that stood out to me over time:

The most surprising realization was that optimizing subject lines and send times wasn't worthwhile. It consumed too much time and energy for little long-term gain.

The one exception is brevity. Brevity is critical when it comes to writing a newsletter. Shorter subject lines and concise content can increase open rates by about 20-30%. In general, it's better to communicate your point with fewer words.

The other big realization was that for long-term subscriber growth, almost nothing mattered except writing more consistently. But I don’t think this is because consistency is a magical formula for building an audience.

What a higher publishing cadence does is that it acts as a forcing function to explore different ideas. The more variant ideas I explored, the better I understood some of the underlying principles governing them. Ultimately, these more universal principles were more interesting to explore and write about, but they took a few layers of exploration to unveil themselves.

I can’t believe how fast time goes. Here is to another four years!!

Talk soon,
Ali Abouelatta