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👋 Hey!
The newsletter creator’s burnout is real and scary, AcyMailing users have a CVE to patch, and Ghost finally let you style your welcome emails the way you style your newsletter.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
Here’s What to Do Next.
Costs are rising. Clients are paying slower. Hiring feels riskier than ever.
And every day brings another hit.
The Survival Hub gives you practical, in-the-trenches support to respond:
how to cut costs without breaking operations
how to stabilize cash flow
how to keep leads and clients from slipping
how to stay organized when everything feels reactive
Built for leaders navigating uncertainty.
Staying standing isn’t about doing more. It’s about knowing what to do next.
😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
The "Sunday Dread" is newsletter burnout, and experience makes it worse. 74% of creators with 8+ years hit burnout, versus 49% of newcomers.
Critical AcyMailing vulnerability lets attackers escalate to admin. If you run AcyMailing for your newsletter, patch tonight, rotate credentials, and audit autologin activity before attackers get there first.
Ghost now lets you fully customize your welcome email template. Colors, typography, buttons, and logos match your newsletter, and you can set the sender name and reply-to address separately from your regular sends.
Buttondown explains why SMTP beat X.400. Simplicity and interoperability killed the more "complete" standard.
HubSpot Media acquires Futurepedia, the largest AI education network on YouTube. The deal adds 17 channels and 2.1M subscribers to HubSpot's media stack, joining The Hustle, Mindstream, and Starter Story.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
Welcome Sequence Relaunch: a 2-hour audit you can run tonight
Most welcome sequences get written once, shipped, and never touched again. Meanwhile, they're the highest-engagement emails you'll ever send (50 to 80% open rates on the first one) and often the difference between a subscriber who sticks and one who ghosts you by week two.
Simon Harper's framework, pulled from his All About Email newsletter, turns the audit into a focused 2-hour sprint:
Purpose check (5 min): Write one sentence that defines the single goal of the sequence. Welcome? First click? Product intro? If you can't pick one, the sequence is doing too much.
Honor the signup (10 min): Update email one so it mirrors the exact promise that brought them in and sends immediately.
Map 3–5 emails (30–45 min): One purpose per email. Story. Best resource. Clear next step. Reply-or-preference prompt. No email that tries to do all four.
Test the flow (15 min): Sign up as a real subscriber. Verify triggers, delays, personalization tokens, and every single link. Do this on mobile too.
Deliverability check (10 min): Confirm SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are clean. Send seed emails to Gmail, Outlook, Apple, and Yahoo. Check the primary tab.
Launch and monitor: Watch opens, clicks, replies, and drop-offs daily for the first 72 hours. Then run one A/B test (subject line OR CTA, never both) within two weeks.
Why it works: Welcome emails hit subscribers at peak attention. Fixing the weakest link compounds across every future send because it decides whether they form the habit of opening you at all.
Expected result: Teams running this audit typically see measurable lifts within 1–4 weeks: stronger opens, more replies, and fewer unsubscribes when the content matches what the signup form promised.
Spotlight: Inbox Collective by Dan Oshinsky
Dan Oshinsky ran newsletters at BuzzFeed and The New Yorker before launching Inbox Collective, a one-person consultancy that's worked with 100+ newsrooms, non-profits, and indie operators.
What works:
The sender is a human, and acts like one. Every issue comes from Dan's name, not the company brand. He lists his email and LinkedIn in the footer and tells readers outright to "say 👋." That single move lowers the bar to reply and turns the inbox into a conversation, not a broadcast.
Practical playbooks beat think-pieces. His DMARC step-up guidance (pct=10 → 25 → 50 → 75 → 100) is concrete enough to implement on Monday morning. Every issue ships with at least one thing a reader can do this week.
Scarcity and community do the selling. When he plugs The Newsletter Conference, it's with specific numbers: 30 days out, roughly 400 attendees, price deadline. Readers convert because the math is visible.
Creator Quote: "Readers want to connect to real people via newsletters."
Your takeaway: If your newsletter sends from a brand name and a no-reply address, you're training readers to treat it like mail from a vendor. Swap the sender name to a human, invite replies in the first email, and keep the CTAs specific.
🤝 Deal of the Week
HeyNews: the editorial intelligence platform that sounds like you
What the deal is: 50% off for 12 months with code WELCOME50. HeyNews trains on your newsletter archive, learns your vocabulary and rhythm, then drafts new issues in your exact tone. You get voice-trained AI Writers, a relevance-scored story feed pulling from your existing sources and surfacing new ones you haven't found yet, one-click article saving from any browser, performance analytics, and native integrations with beehiiv and Kit.
Who should take the deal: Newsletter creators burning 5 to 10 hours per issue on research, writing, and reformatting. If you want your Sundays back without trading your voice for AI-slop, this is the tool. Use code WELCOME50 at checkout.
Start your 14-day free trial and lock in launch pricing here.
Start your 14-day free trial here.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Why You'll Love It: Drop a CrossPromo link into your newsletter. When readers click, they see the newsletters CrossPromo has matched you with, and for every subscriber you send out, CrossPromo sends one back. No manual outreach, no awkward size mismatches, no "subscribe layer" sitting between you and the reader.
Best For: Newsletter operators who are too small for manual swaps with the big players, and anyone who's tired of trading 500 of their subscribers for 50 of someone else's. The aggregation layer matches you with publishers who can reciprocate at your scale.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Test: Tuesday 10 AM vs. Friday 6 PM send time
What it is: Version A: Send this week's issue Tuesday at 10 AM in your readers' local time: the default slot newsletter creators have leaned on for a decade.
Version B: Send next week's issue on Friday at 6 PM local time. Keep the subject line, sender, preheader, and content identical across both. Compare opens, clicks, and unsubscribes.
Why it works: MailerLite analyzed 2.14 million campaigns sent between December 2024 and November 2025 and found Friday generates the highest average open rate (49.72%) and the highest average click rate (8.09%) of any day of the week. The reason is structural: roughly 17% of all marketing emails go out on Tuesday, creating inbox saturation that quietly flattens individual performance.
Expected result: Creator, lifestyle, and consumer newsletters tend to see the biggest lift on this swap because those readers engage with email outside work hours. B2B newsletters aimed at decision-makers may stay put; those subscribers really do open at their desks Tuesday through Thursday morning.
Takeaway: Schedule your next two issues as a back-to-back test: Tuesday 10 AM for the first, Friday 6 PM for the second, same topic mix and length. If Friday wins by more than a couple of points, make the switch permanent.
Don't keep us a secret: Share HeyNews with a fellow newsletter nerd.
🔗 Quick Links
Questions? Just write a comment below. I read all the comments and respond to them.
Thanks for reading,
Eren Daskesen