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👋 Hey!
You have published dozens, maybe hundreds of issues. Be honest: when did you last reopen one? For most of us, the answer is never, which is odd, because your archive is the most valuable thing you own and the one asset you never put back to work. We dig into that this week, plus a curiosity habit that kills the blank page, a five-year-old newsletter worth studying, a free Gmail tool that x-rays any sender's setup, and the welcome email almost nobody tests, even though it out-earns your subject lines many times over.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
📣 One Announcement Before We Dive In
We're opening two slots for a fully managed newsletter.
We run your newsletter from start to finish. Research, sourcing, writing, editing, and the grind of shipping every issue. Any niche, any cadence. Your name stays on it. Your voice stays intact. You stop dreading production day.
It runs on the HeyNews system behind 550+ published issues across 10+ formats, paired with human editors who own the final read. The software does the heavy lifting, our team ensures the quality.
The results are already shipped. We doubled one newsletter's revenue and pushed another's quality into Paved's top 3 to advertise on. That is why it’s only two.
So you run a newsletter you care about and are tired of carrying alone? Meet with the team. When the slots are gone, they're gone.
😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
Your newsletter archive is the most valuable asset you never reopen. Years of past issues hold your real beat and your sharpest forgotten lines. Export it this week, then mine it before you draft from scratch again.
Mailchimp launches Analytics AI for conversational reporting. Ask plain-English questions about opens, clicks, and revenue instead of wrestling with dashboards. Smaller teams get answers without the spreadsheet detour.
CU Boulder is shutting down its alumni email accounts. More .edu addresses are about to bounce. Clean your list and ask for updated emails now, before the August 31 cutoff dents your sender reputation.
Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly says 1,000 true fans is still the play. Direct audience access still beats raw scale. AI just helps you find your niche readers faster and monetize them with fewer middlemen.
Buttondown adds gift details to the subscriber portal. Gifted readers can now see who sent the gift, the note, and the expiry date, which trims support questions for paid newsletters.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
How: Keep a running scratchpad of odd questions you cannot stop wondering about. Carry it on walks and in the shower. Email three or four strangers a month with one narrow question, then turn every reply into a post or an interview seed.
Why: Ideas pulled from real curiosity beat ideas forced out of a brainstorm. The topics feel fresher and more specific because they started as something you actually wanted to know, not a slot you had to fill.
Expected Result: A steadier pipeline and a handful of publishable ideas every month, with far fewer Sundays lost to a blank page. The team at Buttondown lays out the full "compulsive curiosity" version of this habit.
Spotlight: Embedded
What works:
A free interview series, My Internet, that asks extremely online people the same set of questions twice a month. It is the recurring hook that gives readers a standing reason to open.
A clean free-to-paid funnel. The interviews and one monthly essay pull people in, while the rest of the essays, a Friday media gossip column, and a monthly video series sit behind the paywall.
Almost five years of publishing. Co-founder Kate Lindsay calls the growth "a lesson in consistency," and it shows in an audience now past 45,000.
Cultural authorship. Lindsay coined phrases like the millennial pause inside the newsletter itself, which keeps Embedded quotable and shareable far beyond its own list.
Your takeaway: Build one signature free format, run it on a schedule readers can count on, and let it become the testing ground that feeds your paid tiers and side channels later.
🛠️ Tool of the Week
Why You'll Love It: Open any message in Gmail and a small badge tells you the sending platform, drawn from more than 140 providers like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and HubSpot. Click it for the full picture: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI status, plus whether the sender sits on a shared or dedicated IP. The sharpest use is auditing your own deliverability. Send yourself a campaign, click the badge, and a warning triangle flags anything failing before your next big send. It runs entirely in your browser, collects nothing, and costs nothing.
Best For: Operators who want to confirm their own authentication before they hit send, and the curious who like seeing the exact stack behind every newsletter they admire. Built by the team at emailtooltester.com.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Test: Most operators pour their testing energy into the weekly subject line. Prospeo's 2026 breakdown of email testing asks a sharper question: which email is even worth testing? It compares your regular campaign sends against triggered flows like the welcome sequence.
Result: Triggered flows earn roughly 18 times the revenue per recipient that broadcasts do, around $1.94 against $0.11, and click far harder too, near 5.6% against 2%. Yet more than 65% of brands never test those emails at all.
Takeaway: Test the call to action in your welcome sequence before you touch another subject line. It is the highest-intent moment you have; it reaches every new subscriber, and almost nobody optimizes it. Start there.
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