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👋 Hey!
Every morning since June 25, 2020, a newsletter called Random Daily Art has sent one painting. No essay, no takes, no sponsor block, no paywall. The artwork, its title and year, a few sentences on the artist, and a link if you want more. It has done that 2,285 times.
Most of us have the opposite problem. The issue keeps growing, the send keeps slipping, and the archive fills up with things we're proud of that nobody remembers.
This week: Des Brown and Arielle Nissenblatt reopen their newsletter course for podcasters, beehiiv turns community profiles into subscriber data, and Cloudflare flips the switch on AI crawlers. Plus a lead magnet trade with a fairness formula, a navigation test where strangers beat power users, and HourDrop launching today with prices that won't last.
Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
This Week's Hot Takes
Des Brown and Arielle Nissenblatt are teaching podcasters to build a newsletter. Owned runs for eight weeks starting October 6 over Zoom, and you finish with a named, published newsletter plus a monetization map.
beehiiv's new community profile fields land straight on your subscriber records. Ask members anything at onboarding and use the answers in Segments and Automations.
Cloudflare flipped its AI crawler defaults last Tuesday. New domains now block Training and Agent bots on any page that shows ads, while Search stays open. Multi-purpose crawlers like Googlebot get blocked wherever Training is blocked, so check your archive's settings.
Buttondown replaced its user-agent textarea with one toggle per crawler. The new Crawling add-on under Settings → Archives decides separately whether search engines and AI scrapers may index your archive, independent of who is allowed to read it.
beehiiv's Media Collective now reaches over 1 million subscribers. Members keep 100% of revenue. Newest additions: CBS travel editor Peter Greenberg, whose The Upgrade was slated for September 15, ex-IndieWire chief Dana Harris-Bridson, and FOIAball's David Covucci.
Tool of the Week
HourDrop: one product owns the whole screen for an hour, and it launches today
Why You'll Love It: Our latest project, HourDrop, goes live today. Book an hour on a seven-day calendar, bring two real discounts (a VIP deal of at least 20% off that only works during your hour, then at least 10% off for up to 24 hours), and your product sits alone on the homepage. Shoppers need no account, the code appears only when someone presses the button, and afterward you get the numbers: presses, flames, time on screen. Launch pricing starts at $10 an hour, $100 to lock one outright, and it changes once the launch period ends.
Best For: Operators with a paid tier, a course, or a template pack who want a clean, dated test of what a real discount does with the room to itself. The launch perks are on a clock, so book early.
Growth Hack of the Week
Trade lead magnets with a peer newsletter and settle the bill in clicks
How: Find a founder, creator, or publisher who serves your audience without competing with you. Agree to promote each other's lead magnet: one or two dedicated emails each, or two or three ad slots. If the lists differ in size, use Matt McGarry's click parity rule. The bigger list sends first and counts the clicks it delivered, and the smaller partner keeps promoting until it has sent the same number back. Once a plain swap works, build one lead magnet together on a single landing page and split the leads.
Why: McGarry ranks this fourth in Newsletter Operator's new list of the seven growth tactics working right now, and the case is quality. He says subscribers who arrive from a niche peer newsletter open at 70% or more, click through at 10 to 20%, and convert to customers at double the rate of other sources. You publish nothing new, you spend nothing on ads, and you can rerun the play every month or two with a different partner.
Expected Result: No subscriber count is attached, and the engagement figures are his agency's observations rather than a controlled study. What is certain is the cost side: one email you were sending anyway, traded for a warm audience that was hand-picked to match yours. Start with the plain swap, then graduate to the co-created version once you know a partner delivers.
Spotlight: Random Daily Art
What works:
The whole issue is one decision. Every morning since June 25, 2020: one artwork, its title and year, a short artist note, and a link to read more. That's 2,000+ pieces so far, and the sample email on the homepage looks exactly like the one that went out yesterday.
Copyright wrote the editorial policy. The FAQ is candid: most contemporary art is copyrighted, so public-domain work dominates the feed. Living artists get in by creating a profile and submitting, which turns the audience into the pipeline.
The artists do the promotion. The Instagram bio pitches submissions, not subscriptions: get featured, be seen by thousands. Listings on Artwork Archive and RevArt do the same job. A featured artist shares the email, and their followers become the next subscribers.
Every send becomes a page. Each artwork has its own URL with Artwork Notes and Artist Notes, every artist has a page.
Creator quote: From the FAQ, on why the newsletter exists: "This small project will be a big success if your day is just 1% better because you paused for a moment to enjoy some art."
Your takeaway: Find the smallest unit of value you can ship every single day and make that the entire product. Random Daily Art takes ten seconds to read and ten seconds to forward, and the archive shows a send for every day of the past month. If your format can't survive a week where you only have ten minutes, your discipline might not be the problem here.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Kit pitted its old horizontal navigation, where every feature lived inside a dropdown, against a new vertical sidebar. Two groups, each a deliberate mix of long-time Kit creators and people who had never opened the product, got the same tasks: send a broadcast, check the status of an automation, and so on.
Result: People finished tasks around 40% faster on the new layout, with fewer wrong clicks and fewer moments of being lost. The gap was biggest for newcomers, as expected. The surprise was that creators who knew the old nav by heart were also faster and more accurate on the new one. In the opt-in rollout that followed, roughly 70% of creators who made a choice picked the new nav and about 92% of them stayed.
Takeaway: Two things worth stealing. First, test with strangers. Product designer Alf Salib recruited non-users on purpose because existing creators carry a familiarity bias, and a test that only asks loyal readers measures how much the new thing resembles the old thing. Second, his line about menus applies to newsletters: features buried where nobody looks don't exist. Kit kept getting requests for features it had already shipped. If readers keep asking for the thing that lives in your footer, the footer is the problem.
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Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri