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👋 Hey!
You studied the three newsletters you admire most, borrowed the best parts, and did everything right. That is exactly how a distinct voice goes flat. This week we dig into the sameness trap, plus beehiiv selling subscriptions to whole companies in one checkout, the SMS list move 95% of publishers are skipping, how beehiiv's own CEO built a 120,000+ reader newsletter that nobody can copy, and a tool that turns your written issue into an on-camera video in five minutes.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
You’re gonna want to see this live
On July 16th at 1PM ET, beehiiv is unveiling the next chapter for audience-led businesses.
For years, creators and brands have been forced to stitch together bloated stacks of tools just to publish content, grow an audience, and make money online.
Newsletters in one platform. Websites in another. Podcasts somewhere else. Analytics scattered everywhere.
beehiiv thinks there’s a better way. Now, they’re ready to show it off at their Summer Release Event.
This Week's Hot Takes
The newsletters you study most are the ones you quietly disappear into. You borrow the opening, the structure, the warm sign-off, all for good reasons, and land on an issue that could have come from anyone.
beehiiv now lets you sell one paid subscription to an entire company. Group Subscriptions adds a one-checkout, multi-seat option with an admin dashboard and CSV invites, so B2B newsletters can land bigger deals. It is on the Max plan.
WordPress just handed creators full control of the subscribe moment. You can now write a custom signup popup heading, describe what each paid tier includes, and hide the free plan so new readers see only the options you want them to.
beehiiv added one-click control over which AI bots crawl your work. A new Cloudflare partnership lets you block or allow AI crawlers without touching robots.txt, plus analytics on who is scraping you. Substack still opts you in by default.
Buttondown now lets you attach files inside reply threads. Send PDFs, images, and media kits straight from a subscriber conversation, so sponsor follow-ups and reader support stay in one place instead of scattered across tools.
Growth Hack of the Week
How: Add an optional phone number field to every signup form, then ask for it again in your post-signup survey. To pull numbers from readers you already have, give incentives: webinars, lead magnets, giveaways, or a text-based challenge where people reply "DONE" each day. Keep the field optional and give a clear reason to share.
Why: SMS open rates run 95 to 98%, against an exceptional 40 to 50% for email, and click rates sit far higher too. Autofill means the extra field barely dents conversions. MarketBeat added the field and watched landing-page conversion hold steady.
Expected Result: Matt McGarry of Newsletter Operator says this gets 25 to 50% of new signups to hand over a phone number. MarketBeat now pulls 30% of its revenue, $1.5M+ a month, from SMS.
Spotlight: Big Desk Energy by Tyler Denk
What works:
The voice is the product, and it can’t be swiped. beehiiv cofounder and CEO Tyler Denk shares the real behind-the-scenes of building his company, the fundraises, the numbers, the missteps, in a candid founder voice no competitor can fake. That is why 120,000+ readers stay.
The design refuses to blend in. The whole thing runs on a retro Windows 98 theme, custom section headers, and a "CD Player" linking to a Big Desk Energy Spotify playlist, so it looks like nothing else before you read a word.
It picks one reader and goes deep. Every issue speaks to startup founders, and that focus is why it is read at funds like a16z and Sequoia and companies like Stripe and OpenAI, the exact audience sponsors pay a premium to reach.
Founder-led trust does the selling. Denk does not pitch beehiiv hard; he documents the journey of building it, and the product sells itself as a byproduct of the story.
Your takeaway: Stop sanding off the parts of you that feel too specific. The behind-the-scenes story only you can tell, wrapped in a look only you would choose, is the one thing no swipe file can reproduce. Lean into the weird.
Tool of the Week
Editory: turn a written issue into an on-camera video in minutes
Why You'll Love It: Editory walks you from article to script with a built-in teleprompter, then records you reading it, no editing software or production team needed. It auto-adds professional cuts, b-roll, and platform-native captions, and uses real footage of you rather than a synthetic avatar. Everything stays editable before you publish.
Best For: Newsletter creators who want to repurpose long-form issues into short, branded social clips or embed quick video in their emails, without adding video production to their weekly grind.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Jay Schwedelson's GURU Media Hub compared standard call-to-action buttons against what he calls "inner dialogue" buttons, written in the reader's own first-person voice. Think "Show me the playbook" instead of "Download the playbook."
Result: The first-person framing lifted click-through rates by over 22% on the B2B side and over 25% on the consumer side, with no change to the offer behind the button.
Takeaway: Your reader is already narrating the click in their head. Match it. Rewrite your next CTA from their point of view, "Grab my template" or "Send me the breakdown," and split-test it against your usual wording.
Quick Links
Questions? Just write a comment below. We read all the comments and respond to them.
Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri