📧 They paid before the first issue

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👋 Hey!

When Georgina Wilson-Powell moved to Margate, she kept missing things. Events, community groups, all of it. She felt stuck at home in a town she didn't know yet.

So in October 2023, she launched Don't Miss Margate, a weekly what's-on email. Ramsgate followed in 2025 and Broadstairs this April. In both new towns, some readers paid to subscribe before the first issue went out.

They had nothing to read yet. They just wanted their town to have one.

This week: beehiiv turns into a video platform, Matt McGarry puts a price tag on subscriber quality, paywalls in places readers don't expect, and a signup form rewrite that lifted signups 258%.

Let's dive in! 👇

beehiiv is officially a video platform, starting with 60-minute videos in your community. Keep them free or make them a paid perk. The same release fires the Upgraded automation on every paid tier and drops bot and security-scanner clicks from poll results.

Organic subscribers are worth $48.76 each in revenue, recommendation subscribers just $0.73. Matt McGarry, who runs Newsletter Operator, pulled that from 87,000+ subscribers across his own businesses. Paid social landed at $6.06. His new tier list also calls referral programs overrated for most publishers.

Hack at Japanese email vendor Arara may have exposed 77 million addresses. Attackers also used the platform to send up to 7.13 million phishing emails. Arara plans to make clients reset passwords and API keys before it reopens. When did you last rotate yours?

Pizza Hut Canada agreed to pay CA$500,000 over alleged anti-spam law violations. Canada's regulator, the CRTC, cited mail sent without opt-in, missing unsubscribe links, and ignored opt-outs.

Signatoro: sign every email, even the ones your AI agent sends

Why You’ll Love It: Hand your sponsor pitches to Claude or an n8n workflow and your signature tends to stay behind. Gmail’s and Outlook’s own MCP servers send mail with no signature at all: no booking link, no legal footer. Signatoro saves your signature once and lets any agent fetch it before every send, over MCP or a plain API. Update your title Monday, and Tuesday’s agent emails already show it. Since the API returns the signature as HTML, the same block can close your newsletter, too.

Best For: Operators who let AI agents handle sponsor outreach or reader replies, and anyone in a regulated niche like finance or health, where every email needs its disclaimer. Free covers you plus one AI assistant with 50 API calls a month (and a small Signatoro link under your signature); the compliance footnote starts on the $19 team plan.

Put the paywall somewhere readers don't expect it

How: Instead of locking up "exclusive content," gate one small thing that only you make. Ann Friedman ends every issue of The Ann Friedman Weekly with a hand-drawn pie chart and blurs it for free readers. No ESP she found could blur paywalled sections, so she makes a blurred copy and uploads it separately every send. Elizabeth Holmes lets only paid subscribers comment on So Many Thoughts, even on free posts. Lachlan Cartwright lets only paid readers forward Breaker, then watches for anyone who racks up dozens of opens on a single issue. That's often a sign it got forwarded to colleagues, so his team pitches that reader a group subscription.

Why: The standard perks all sound alike, so a gate on something distinctly yours makes the ask feel like part of the newsletter. Friedman doesn't think many people pay for the pie chart itself. She treats it as a thank-you to readers who already feel connected: "People want to pay people, not institutions." Cartwright says the forwarding rule has helped him sell some high-priced group subscriptions.

Expected Result: Writer Claire Zulkey, who rounded these up for Inbox Collective, doesn't have conversion rates for most of them, so treat this as a menu. One warning from the same piece: The Charlotte Ledger expected to spend hundreds mailing pens to survey takers, learned it would cost thousands, and ended up hand-delivering them around town. Price the postage before you promise anything physical.

Read all the ideas.

Spotlight: Don't Miss Media Group by Georgina Wilson-Powell

What works:

Creator quote: "Human curation is our secret sauce." Georgina Wilson-Powell, founder, Don't Miss Media Group

Your takeaway: Give AI the jobs that eat your week without needing your taste: formatting listings, chasing sponsors, rebuilding the same rate card for each new edition. Keep the picks human, and tell readers they are. If you're planning a second edition, let people subscribe and pay before launch. In DMMG's second and third towns, some did.

Read the full case study.

Test: Reasons to Believe, a ministry that writes about science and faith, had a newsletter signup form in its website footer. The headline said "Sign up for our newsletter," with one line underneath offering the latest from the RTB Weekly Digest. Earlier tests on that form hadn't produced a valid lift. This time, in a test documented by fundraising research firm NextAfter, visitors were split between that version and a new one. Its headline asked whether they were looking for scientifically accurate, biblically sound reasons to believe in God, and the line below listed what arrives each week: blogs, online courses, upcoming events and ministry updates.

Result: Signups went from 0.41% of visitors to 1.5%, a 258% relative lift at 100% confidence. The test needed 638 visitors to be valid and got 7,352.

Takeaway: "Sign up for our newsletter" names the action and nothing else. The winner told visitors who the newsletter is for and what shows up in their inbox every week. Look at the form in your own footer or popup and give it the same treatment: a headline that names the question your reader already has, and one line on what they get and how often. Caveats: one organization, a test from 2022, and the headline and description changed together, so there's no telling which did more of the work. Also, starting from 0.41% makes any relative lift look enormous.

See the full experiment.

Thanks for reading,

Eren & Cagri