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π Hey!
Every operator has a drawer like this. An archive nobody promotes. A website footer that says nothing. An edition that took nine hours to write and got exactly one send. Meanwhile, the hunt for the next growth tactic continues in someone else's newsletter.
This week is about the assets already sitting in your house. A footer unit that takes 10 minutes to set up and converts for years. A LinkedIn play that turned four already-written editions into 1,000 subscribers. Plus, two high schoolers who took the one asset nobody could copy (spoiler: their age) and turned it into 56,000 readers at McKinsey, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs.
Ready to raid your own archive? Let's dive in! π
Meme of the Week
This Week's Hot Takes
Email first, website second is how The Londoner sells subscriptions. Editor Hannah Williams says every piece is emailed first and subscriptions are email-led. The glossy website exists to support the inbox.
Astute raises $1.2M to match B2B brands with newsletter creators. Founder Vida StaniΔ is building two AI agents, one managing partnerships for creators, one working the brand side. More demand for your ad slots, less cold outreach.
France's tracking consent deadline has passed, and Italy's is next. CNIL's July 14 transitional window has closed, and Italy's runs until October 28. Donβt forget to audit how your open tracking gets consent if you have subscribers from these two countries.
Dark mode email support is still half-baked. Buttondown reports only about 42% of email clients support dark mode CSS. Design for readability in both modes instead of chasing a pixel-perfect theme.
Sending from a domain you don't own is a data leak. The researcher who owns noreply.net gets nearly 700 misdirected emails a day, bounces and personal replies included. It also breaks SPF, DKIM, and DMARC in one move.
Growth Hack of the Week
Turn your website footer into a quiet signup machine
How: Add a bold, high-contrast signup unit to your website footer with specific copy: your newsletter's name, how often it lands, and what readers actually get. Embed the signup form right there if your platform allows it; a link to your landing page works if it doesn't. If you publish several newsletters, promote only your flagship, the one you want every reader on.
Why: Dan Oshinsky's new breakdown at Inbox Collective explains why this punches above its weight. The unit appears on every page you have ever published, and the readers who scroll all the way to the footer are your most interested visitors, so they sign up at high rates. Vague labels kill it, though. He found major publishers whose footers just say "Newsletter signup" with no hint of what arrives or when, and readers skip those. Specific pitches, like SATX Today's promise of the best San Antonio news, are the ones that convert.
Expected Result: Roughly 10 minutes of work for a passive signup source on traffic you already earned, one that keeps paying for years with zero maintenance.
Spotlight: Passing the Torch by Jasper Gould and Emile Chilingirian
What works:
The angle is the product. Plenty of newsletters cover monetary policy, private credit, and prediction markets. Exactly one is written by two Brooklyn high schoolers, Berkeley Carroll junior Jasper Gould, founder of the BYCIG youth finance community, and co-founder Emile Chilingirian. They lead with that contrast everywhere: built by students, read by Wall Street.
The audience proof does the selling. Their advertiser-facing homepage publishes the receipts: 56,000+ subscribers, 77% on corporate email domains, roughly 1,500 readers each at McKinsey and JPMorgan, about 1,300 at Blackstone, and 759 at Goldman Sachs. No adjectives required when the reader list is the pitch.
Serious cadence, serious packaging. They ship 72 issues a year of macro analysis and treat the whole thing as a media company. Passing the Torch Media, founded in 2024, already houses the newsletter, a podcast, and research products, so every new format compounds the same audience.
They monetize the perspective. Bulge bracket readers pay attention precisely because a generation that inherited a different economy sees different things. That is a moat no incumbent finance desk can hire its way into.
Creator quote: From their Diary of Two High School Founders series, on being teenagers in finance: "We're still supposed to be 'the future,' not the present."
Your takeaway: Your unfair advantage is the seat you already occupy. If a high school junior can earn 759 Goldman inboxes by writing from the one perspective nobody else has, your "too niche" angle is probably your whole strategy. Stop sanding it down.
Tool of the Week
Flourish: turn your data into charts, maps, and interactive stories
Why You'll Love It: Flourish turns raw data into interactive charts, maps, and visual stories with no code. Import your data, design in the visual editor, and embed the result on your newsletter's website or blog, so readers get to explore the numbers instead of squinting at a static screenshot.
Best For: Data-minded operators who want their benchmark posts, market breakdowns, and annual reports to look like they came from a graphics desk, without hiring a graphics desk.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Promote your next edition on LinkedIn two ways. Version A links straight to the full issue. Version B gates the most valuable part, the full prompt, workflow, or template, behind a subscriber break, then asks readers to comment for access while you DM each commenter the link yourself.
Result: Ryan Carr of Tailwind ran the gated version to grow his newsletter Moodboard from zero to 1,000 subscribers in 27 days, using just 4 LinkedIn posts built from the first 4 editions. The posts pulled 445K impressions in total, and the biggest one, giving away a complete AI-assisted ad workflow, drew 3,529 comments and 234,000+ impressions on its own, because every comment pushes the post into that commenter's network.
Takeaway: Write each edition to answer one specific question and keep it evergreen, so it stays gate-worthy long after send day. The manual DMs feel unscalable, and that is the point; each one is a warm, one-on-one conversation with exactly the reader you want. One asset, two jobs: content for current subscribers, lead magnet for the next thousand.
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Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri