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👋 Hey!
A loyal reader can hear it before you can. The week an AI draft slips half a step off your voice, the person who has read you for two years catches it in a single paragraph, while you, the one who actually edited the whole damn thing, hear nothing wrong. Plus, the customer list you already paid for and never email, beehiiv handing the publish path to AI, a 9-word email that wakes up dead leads, and how Hunter Harris turned a voice no model can fake into a 190,000-reader habit.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
SEO on your list now. Autopilot after setup
AutoSEO handles articles, backlinks, and authority-building for 2,500+ businesses. Set it up once. Step away. It keeps running.
This Week's Hot Takes
beehiiv shipped Write Access for its MCP. beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk calls it the most-requested MCP feature. You can now draft, edit, tag, and build Automations by chatting with an AI, while you keep the publish button.
You are the last person who can hear when your newsletter stops sounding like you. When you edit an AI draft, your brain fills the gaps with what you meant. A two-year reader hears the miss in one line.
Buttondown now links your latest issue right on the subscribe page. Curious first-time visitors can sample your best work before handing over an email. It is off by default and only appears when your archive is public.
The cheapest growth channel you own is the customer list you never email. Past customers buy again 60 to 70% of the time. Strangers buy 5 to 20% of the time. Most budgets still chase the strangers.
Mastodon is adding email newsletters to grow the open social web. The decentralized network is betting that the inbox can fix its audience problem. For creators, that opens fresh cross-promotion and list-building outside the big platforms.
Growth Hack of the Week
How: Pull every subscriber who joined at least 60 to 90 days ago and never bought. Send them a 9 to 12 word email with a tiny subject line like "Hey," asking one open-ended question ("Still planning to launch a newsletter?"). Add no links, no CTA, no signature block.
Why: It reads like a personal note instead of a pitch, so people reply rather than scroll past. Once someone answers, you guide them to the next step by hand, one human reply at a time.
Expected Result: Dormant leads resurface, and conversations restart, recovering sales that most operators had already written off. Newsletter Operator credits the move to Dean Jackson's classic 9-word email.
Spotlight: Hung Up by Hunter Harris
What works:
A voice no model can fake. Hung Up reads like cultural criticism crossed with a late-night group chat, and that specific point of view is the exact thing nearly 190,000 readers subscribe to.
Readers are treated as customers. Harris ships twice a week on schedule because she sees readers as people she owes work to.
A paid chat that became a world. Her subscriber chat turned a reading audience into one of the most devoted, lore-dense corners of the internet, and the engine behind her paid tier.
One hub, many spokes. The newsletter is the job; the podcast, TV writing, and brand work all orbit it, so nothing dilutes the core relationship.
Creator quote: "The newsletter is my job."
Your takeaway: Lean into the voice only you have, treat shipping as a promise you keep, then let a community layer turn that audience into something a feed can never copy.
Deal of the Week
HeyNews: an editorial intelligence tool that matches your voice, by learning it from your archive.
What the deal is: Use code WELCOME50 for 50% off any monthly plan for the last week (open until June 30). HeyNews connects to beehiiv, Kit, Substack, Ghost, Mailchimp, or any archive URL, reads your past issues, and builds a voice profile that drives every draft. The 14-day free trial gives you 5 generated drafts before you pay for anything.
Who should take the deal: Solo operators, newsletter professionals and teams who keep losing Sunday afternoons to source monitoring, formatting, and second-guessing whether the gray is right.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Best Newsletter Tools: the curated directory every newsletter operator needs
Why You'll Love It: A vetted directory of newsletter tools, platforms, and services, sorted into categories like Email Service Providers, Monetization, Deliverability, Newsletter Platforms, Writing, Growth, and AI-enabled tools, so you stop Googling "best email tool for newsletters" and start browsing one place built for the job. It also runs a newsletter-discovery section so you can study what top creators are doing.
Best For: Creators at any stage who want to compare platforms, find deals, and discover tools without digging through scattered blog posts and Reddit threads.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Run the same newsletter two ways. Variant A goes out once and stops. Variant B sends once, then resends to non-openers two to three days later with a fresh subject line, while the people who already opened are left alone.
Result: That second send commonly recovers 10 to 30% more opens from subscribers who simply missed the first one. Constant Contact's 2026 data shows 80% of its top performers run a resend to non-openers.
Takeaway: It’s the same issue you already wrote, nudged once toward the people who never saw it, so engaged readers are never bothered twice. Change only the subject line, wait a few days, and claim the opens already hiding in your list.
🔗 Quick Links
Questions? Just write a comment below. We read all the comments and respond to them.
Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri