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👋 Hey!
A feed scrolls past your best work and forgets you by Friday. An inbox keeps you, and that single difference is why brands are suddenly lining up to pay for the trust a newsletter owns. This week: the two-issue test that proves whether your shiny new tool actually saves time, Substack opening real sponsorship deals to writers, a bootstrapped brief worth $101 million built by just 27 people, a partnership sprint that grows your list without ads, and a tool that reveals exactly which brands are already buying newsletter ads.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
📣 HeyNews is now for businesses, too
The engine behind creator newsletters just got a bigger job: turning any company's customer list into repeat sales, referrals, and new leads.
SaaS companies, restaurants, agencies, clinics, shops, B2B teams. If you have customers and their emails, you have a growth channel most businesses leave cold.
Connect your list and run it yourself, or let our team build and run the whole thing in your voice.
Run a business, or know one that should be emailing its customers?
😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
Substack opens brand sponsorships to writers and runs the matchmaking for them. You pick the brands, set the creative, and keep full editorial control. Substack CEO Chris Best says participating brands will invest millions in creators.
Your "this new tool saves me two hours" number is probably made up. Most workflow time savings are felt, never measured. Run the same issue your old way and your new way, then trust the clock over the vibe.
Paved launched the first MCP for newsletter advertising. Connect an AI assistant to 3,000+ newsletters and discover, compare, and book sponsorships in plain conversation. If you sell ad space, this is how brands will now find you.
The only real difference between a newsletter and a feed is you. A feed is computed; a newsletter is chosen. Readers subscribe to a human whose judgment they trust, not an algorithm that forgets them by morning.
A bootstrapped newsletter just hit a $101 million valuation with 27 people. Daily brief 1440 did $27 million in revenue and took no outside capital, roughly a million dollars per employee. The model works.
Three new DMARC RFCs just landed for the deliverability crowd. The updates are incremental and backward compatible, so nothing breaks today. A good week to confirm your sender authentication is set up right.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
How: Build a shortlist of 10 newsletters next to yours in terms of topic and size. Rank them by audience fit, then send one short, personalized pitch each, offering a recommendation swap, a guest issue, or a co-created piece. Hand them ready-to-paste copy and a simple yes-or-no.
Why: A reader who arrives on a trusted creator's recommendation already believes you are worth their inbox. That borrowed trust opens and clicks at rates cold, paid traffic rarely touches.
Expected Result: beehiiv calls creator partnerships one of the strongest growth channels of 2026. One or two good matches can send hundreds of pre-qualified subscribers your way, with no ad budget required.
Spotlight: The Rebooting
What works:
A single, expensive question. The Rebooting is about how media businesses actually make money and survive. That tight focus on the economics gives every issue a clear reason to exist.
Borrowed authority, earned honestly. Brian Morrissey writes it as the former president and editor-in-chief of Digiday, so two decades of industry credibility sit behind the analysis before the first sentence.
One point of view, many formats. The weekly essay is paired with The Rebooting Show podcast and recurring research projects, so the same perspective compounds across channels instead of living in a single inbox.
A clean paid layer. A private membership monetizes the most committed readers without cluttering the free essay everyone else gets to read.
Your takeaway: Pick the one money-shaped question your readers quietly obsess over, answer it with the authority most peers are too vague to claim, then franchise that point of view across formats and gate the deepest layer behind a membership.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Why You'll Love It: Appeared.in tracks more than 3,000 newsletters and 10,000 active sponsors, so you can see exactly which brands are buying ads, how often, and where their budget goes. Watch competitors to surface warm leads, pull verified contacts and LinkedIn profiles for decision-makers, and set real-time alerts the moment a brand boosts spend. You can study past ad creatives before you pitch and export lead lists straight to your CRM.
Best For: Operators selling their own sponsorships who want to stop guessing and start pitching the brands that already pay to reach newsletter audiences.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Test: Marketers compared sends with deliberate, written preview text against sends that left it blank, where the inbox auto-fills the preheader with whatever it finds first, usually a stray link or the unsubscribe line.
Result: WeddingWire lifted click-through by 30% by testing its preview text, and Autoplicity saw roughly an 8% bump in opens just from adding one. Over 90% of campaigns still skip a custom preheader entirely.
Takeaway: Treat preview text as your second subject line. Write a fresh one every issue that complements the subject instead of repeating it, then split-test it against the inbox default and keep the winner.
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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