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👋 Hey!
This week: Substack dropped a bunch of useful updates, we're dissecting how Gina Acosta built Horizon AI to 70,000+ subscribers with a daily tutorial format, and there's a 6-step blueprint for building a $100K+ paid newsletter you'll want to save. Plus the Philadelphia Inquirer is proving AI newsletters convert readers to paid subscribers, Paved just opened up to major publishers, and there's a one-emoji A/B test you can run on your very next send.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
Substack just shipped a batch of quality-of-life updates worth knowing about. You can now save Notes as drafts before publishing, pin multiple posts to your homepage, export Publisher Stats as a CSV, hide revenue and subscriber counts from your dashboard, and manage all your live videos in one place.
AI-assisted newsletters are driving Philadelphia Inquirer subscriptions. The Inquirer launched eight AI-curated newsletters and hired two staffers to scale the program, and it's becoming one of their biggest subscription drivers. Newsletter creators should take note: AI plus niche focus equals faster list growth.
Buttondown now lets you filter sent emails by engagement rate. You can now sort your sent history by open or click rate, combine with other filters, and zero in on your best and worst-performing issues in seconds.
Major publishers are adding newsletter inventory to Paved. AdWeek, VICE, Perfectly Imperfect, and TheStreet just joined the Paved marketplace. For creators, that means more competition for sponsor dollars.
Yahoo Mail is cutting mailbox storage globally. Subscribers with full inboxes may start bouncing your emails without warning. Now's a good time to prune inactive Yahoo subscribers, add a whitelist instruction to your welcome email, and keep an eye on Yahoo-specific bounce rates in your analytics dashboard.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
The One Free / One Paid + Cliffhanger Paywall Blueprint
Writer and creator Kieran Drew broke down his exact 6-step system for building a $100,000+ paid newsletter on Substack and the cliffhanger paywall placement is the part most creators get completely wrong.
How:
Pick a topic with a built-in traffic engine: Substack Notes, X, or Medium all work.
Publish one free post per week and one paid post per week. Consistency beats volume.
Use Substack's Paywall Preview to make the first 25–50% of your paid post freely visible.
Place the paywall right before the tangible deliverable: the prompt, the template, the framework, right at the moment readers most want to keep going.
Republish short-form content daily on Substack Notes to feed the platform algorithm and drive new eyes to your free posts.
Use AI to generate 3 teaser endings and A/B test which paywall placement drives the most upgrades.
Why: Readers see real value before deciding to pay. The free content handles discovery; the cliffhanger handles conversion. You're just earning trust with the free post and then making the paid post impossible to ignore.
Expected result: Initial free-to-paid conversion of 1–3%, rising to 3–8% with paywall placement optimization. The author reports roughly 20% of paid sign-ups can come directly from Substack's own network when you publish and republish consistently.
Pro tip: The cliffhanger placement works best when your deliverable is very specific: a list of prompts, a swipe file, a template. Vague value propositions don't convert. Specific ones do.
🤝 Deal of the Week
DMARC Report: protect your sending domain and keep emails out of spam — for life
What the deal is: Lifetime access to DMARC Report starting at $69 (normally $497 — that's 86% off). It monitors your domains for phishing, spoofing, and DMARC failures, then sends you real-time alerts when something's off. You also get aggregate and forensic reports, DKIM auto-discovery, and MTA-STS hosting. If you manage newsletters for clients, the white-label dashboard lets you resell the whole thing under your own brand. 60-day money-back guarantee through AppSumo.
Who should take the deal: Newsletter operators who've dealt with deliverability headaches and don't know what's happening behind the scenes with their domain authentication. Especially useful if you run multiple sending domains or manage newsletters for clients.
Spotlight: Horizon AI
Gina Acosta built Horizon AI into a 70,000+ subscriber daily AI briefing while working as a Data and AI leader: no celebrity brand, no viral moment, just a consistent format readers come back to every morning. Each issue runs about 3–4 minutes and covers a top AI story, a hands-on tutorial, and a curated tools section.
What Works:
Tutorial-as-editorial: Every issue includes a practical AI tutorial: "How to use Claude's Memory Transfer feature," "Build a McKinsey-level deck in minutes" that gives readers an immediate reason to open. It's not commentary on AI news; it's a skill transfer. That's a retention engine disguised as content.
Layered sponsorship structure that scales: Horizon AI sells three distinct placement tiers: a top-of-newsletter Main Placement, a mid-newsletter AI Tutorial slot, and a lower-friction AI Tools mention. Sponsors can bundle placements with Gina's X account for cross-channel reach. One newsletter, multiple revenue lines, clean upsell path.
Daily cadence as a compounding moat: Publishing every weekday means Horizon AI shows up in readers' inboxes more than almost any competitor. Open rates normalize at a lower individual level, but total weekly impressions are far higher. Daily newsletters are harder to build and harder to unseat.
Creator Quote: "If you are looking to stay on top of the rapidly evolving world of AI, you have come to the right place."
Your Takeaway: Tutorials convert better than takes. If your niche has any "how-to" angle, try anchoring one section of every issue to a concrete skill readers can try the same day. It's the fastest way to make opening your newsletter feel like a habit rather than a choice.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Topol: a drag-and-drop email template builder that requires zero coding
Why You'll Love It: Topol gives you 400+ responsive templates, reusable custom blocks you can save and drop into future issues, merge tag personalization, and a custom HTML editor for when you want to go deeper: all in a clean drag-and-drop interface. Templates render correctly across devices and email clients without any extra work on your end.
Best For: Newsletter creators who spend too long wrestling with layout and formatting, and want a faster way to design polished, on-brand emails without relying on a developer or designer every time.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Inspiration: beehiiv's analysis of A/B test data across newsletter campaigns found that adding a single, relevant emoji to a subject line resulted in roughly 65% higher click-through rates in one study. Not every test shows the same lift, but the directional signal is hard to ignore.
Result: Higher CTR when an emoji is present, with the keyword being relevant. Emoji dropped in randomly or used for decoration alone didn't show the same results. The emoji that performed best mirrored the emotional tone or topic of the subject line itself.
Why it works: Emojis catch the eye in a crowded inbox, especially on mobile, where subject lines are truncated and visual pattern-breaking matters more. They also signal personality and tone before a single word is read, which primes the right readers to click and discourages the wrong ones (a good thing).
Takeaway: Pull up your last five issues and check whether your subject lines used any emojis. If not, run a simple split test on your next send: version A gets one emoji at the start or end of the subject line that actually fits the topic; version B gets none. Let it run for two issues and compare CTR. One character. Measurable difference.
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🔗 Quick Links
Questions? Just write a comment below. I read all the comments and respond to them.
Thanks for reading,
Eren Daskesen