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👋 Hey!
Last Tuesday, HeyNews opened to the public and finished 8th on Product Hunt for the day. Then the Newsletter Conference happened on Friday in NYC. Meanwhile, Cagri sat down to count how many minutes a typical issue spends in the formatting layer (spoiler: a lot). Such a week, it has been. Here is what stood out, what we are still thinking about, and one A/B test where changing a single word lifted clicks by 20%.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
The Newsletter Conference 2026 wraps up at The Times Center in NYC. Dan Oshinsky flagged the Oliver Darcy and Nicholas Thompson conversation on email's future as the day's standout.
Newsletter formatting eats 45 minutes per issue. It should take zero. The 45 minutes you spend on layout every Sunday is the rounding error nobody on a marketing team would accept.
Writers are fleeing the "Substack Tax". The Ankler and others are leaving Substack's 10% revenue cut for Ghost and beehiiv. If a meaningful share of your revenue is paid subscriptions, model your net take before you renew anything.
Faster, toward what? Speed is the wrong newsletter goal. A 90-minute production stack is easy to brag about and easy to lose readers with.
Ex-BBC News CEO says creator journalism is the biggest media disruption yet. Bigger than digital, bigger than social. Her advice to legacy media: liberate your journalists and let them act like independent creators.
Google is testing a 5GB Gmail storage cap for new unverified accounts. The test is currently in select regions, but it's a signal: Google is squeezing fake and throwaway accounts harder.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
How: Build a 7-email welcome flow modeled on Tyler Cook's deliverability rebuild.
Email 1: under 100 words from a non-founder address with a question that begs a reply.
Email 2: Your real welcome (engagement is higher now because Email 1 already broke the pattern).
Email 3: pull subscribers to a second channel.
Email 4: a 3-5 question subscriber survey, including "who else do you follow on this topic?"
Email 5: a soft referral ask at peak engagement.
Email 6: an honest unsubscribe prompt that filters out the disengaged.
Email 7: a sharper, incentivized referral ask aimed at the people who chose to stay.
Why: Inbox algorithms treat the first week of a subscription as probation. Replies, contact adds, opens, and clicks during that window weigh more than the same signals three months in. The sequence is engineered to generate them in compressed time.
Expected Result: Tyler reported one 300K-subscriber client going from sub-40% to above 90% inbox placement (measured via GlockApps).
Spotlight: Entre Nous with Esther Perel
What works:
A clear hub-and-spoke setup: weekly newsletter, the Where Should We Begin? podcast, live virtual events, and three paid tiers all feed each other.
One sharp niche (relationships, belonging, desire) expanded into a full media ecosystem instead of being broken up across topics.
Paid community depth: bonus chats, episode debriefs, and Salon Community AMAs at $200/year give the most engaged readers somewhere to go.
Creator quote: "I always wanted to bring the therapeutic ideas into the public square. Now I want to create a public square."
Your takeaway: Pick one core idea you can talk about for 20 years, then package it across formats and price points until each one feeds the next.
Deal of the Week
HeyNews: an editorial AI that learns your newsletter voice from your archive
What the deal is: Use code WELCOME50 for 50% off any monthly plan during the launch window (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. We ran 600 internal issues through it before opening the trial. The 14-day free trial gives you 5 generated drafts before any subscription decision.
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
Why You'll Love It: Arcade turns static product screenshots into interactive walkthroughs your subscribers can actually click through inside an email landing page. It captures your screen, generates professional videos and visuals with AI, and lets you add synthetic voiceovers and branded camera recordings without a studio. You can build interactive hotspots, chapters, and branching paths so readers explore the parts of your product (or a sponsor's product) that matter to them. Built-in product analytics show exactly which subscribers engaged with which features.
Best For: Newsletter operators selling their own software, running sponsored placements for SaaS clients, or building lead magnets where a static screenshot isn't doing the heavy lifting anymore.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Test: Podcast FYI swapped a single high-intent word inside one outbound message to drive clicks.
Result: A 20% lift in response and click activity from the wording tweak alone.
Takeaway: Most operators rewrite the entire subject line when they want a lift. The cheaper experiment is to change one verb or one noun, keep everything else identical, then rerun the same send to a fresh segment. Tiny copy changes can produce outsized lifts.
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