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👋 Hey!
Paved just dropped real sponsorship benchmarks by category, Substack drops a set of new features, Buttondown shipped a subscription wall you can set up without Stripe, and there's a free 30-day growth challenge in this issue, featuring tactics from top creators.
Ready to level up? Let's dive in! 👇
😂 Meme of the Week
🔥 This Week's Hot Takes
Newsletter creators spend 100+ hours per year just monitoring sources. Writing is only 20% of production time. The other 80% is scanning, evaluating, formatting, and scheduling. Your bottleneck, explained.
Paved releases newsletter sponsorship benchmarks by category. Startup newsletters average $4,741 per sponsorship; history newsletters average $185, even with higher open rates. Use these benchmarks to set your CPMs and negotiate better deals.
Substack adds post templates, Notes scheduling, and live tools. Save your go-to layouts as reusable templates, schedule Notes in advance, and control live events mid-stream. Practical time-savers for creators who publish on a regular cadence.
The Telegraph's daily newsletter is now its biggest source of paying subscribers. The "From the Editor" email reaches 850,000 daily readers and converts registrants into paying subscribers through an email-first paywall journey. Proof that a flagship newsletter can drive subscription revenue at scale.
Buttondown adds subscriber-only archive 'subscription wall'. Gate your archive posts for free, paid, or gifted subscribers without Stripe setup. Everything below the wall stays visible only to subscribers, turning your back catalog into a conversion engine.
Sponsors pay for engagement, not subscriber counts. Pitch your open rate, CTR, demographics, and 90-day averages instead of raw list size. Use placement tiers and add-ons to boost what you charge per send.
💡 Growth Hack of the Week
30 Days of Growth: 30 real tactics from 30 creators, delivered free to your inbox
Most growth advice comes from one person's playbook. This one stacks 30 of them. Chenell Basilio, founder of Growth In Reverse, is running a free daily pop-up newsletter along with Dylan Redekop, starting April 20th, where 30 creators each share one proven tactic for growing your email list: the strategy, why it works, the results, and exactly how to implement it yourself.
Here's what to expect:
One short email per day for 30 days. Each edition features a different creator and a single, tested growth lever. No theory, just tactics that drove real results.
The lineup includes Dave Gerhardt (Exit Five), Katelyn Bourgoin (Why We Buy), Justin Welsh (Saturday Solopreneur), Aleyda Solis (SEOFOMO), and 26 more creators who've actually grown their lists.
Past results from the first round speak for themselves: a Google Doc strategy that drove 18,000+ subscribers, a lead magnet that pulled in 14,337 subscribers in 8 months, a single social post that generated 500+ new signups, and a welcome email tweak that boosted engagement by 40%.
Tactics work at every stage, whether you have 500 or 50,000 subscribers.
Why it works: You're getting 30 different perspectives across 30 days, each one field-tested by a creator who ran the play themselves. The first round attracted thousands of high-quality subscribers, proving the format converts.
Expected result: At least 3-5 immediately actionable tactics you can implement the same week you read them, plus exposure to creators and strategies you haven't encountered before.
Spotlight: From the Editor by The Telegraph
One year ago, The Telegraph launched From the Editor as a twice-weekly email digest. Today, it's a daily newsletter read by 850,000+ people, drawn from a total list of over 2 million, and it's become the publisher's single biggest source of new paid subscriptions, converting "tens of thousands" of readers into paying subscribers in 12 months.
What works:
Auto-opt-in removes friction. Every free-registered Telegraph user is automatically subscribed. No extra signup form, no second ask.
Editorial voice replaced algorithmic curation. The original product was an auto-generated content digest. When The Telegraph invested in giving it a distinct editor-led personality, hand-picked stories, reader comments, exclusive columns, puzzles, and cartoons, conversion rates climbed.
Frequency matched the trust cycle. Starting at twice-weekly and ramping to daily let the team test engagement before committing resources.
The paywall journey is patient. Executive editor Christopher Williams describes it as a journey "from being just somebody who's flown in from Google to giving us your email address to subscribing." Most readers convert after a couple of months, not days.
Creator Quote: "We have an intelligent paywall that takes you on a journey from being just somebody who's flown in from Google to giving us your email address to subscribing." — Christopher Williams, Executive Editor, The Telegraph
Your takeaway: You don't need a massive editorial team to copy this model. The core insight is sequencing: capture the email first, deliver consistent value, then present the paid offer after trust is established. If you're running a freemium newsletter, audit how many touchpoints a reader gets before they see a conversion CTA. If it's fewer than 10, you're asking too early.
🤝 Deal of the Week
HeyNews: the AI-powered newsletter workspace that writes in your voice
What the deal is: 50% off for 12 months with code WELCOME50. HeyNews learns your writing style from past issues and drafts new ones that sound like you, not like a robot. You get AI Writers trained on your tone, a relevance-scored story feed, one-click browser saving, performance analytics, and platform integrations with beehiiv and Kit. We built this for our own newsletters first, and now it's open to early adopters. Offer ends June 30, 2026.
Who should take the deal: Newsletter creators spending hours every week researching, writing, and formatting issues. If you want to cut production time without losing your voice, this is the tool.
Use code WELCOME50 at checkout.
Start your 14-day free trial here.
🧪 A/B Test of the Week
Test: Link post vs. native text thread on X (with link in the reply)
What it is: Version A: Post a standard tweet linking directly to your latest newsletter issue with a headline and URL. Version B: Write a 3-5 tweet thread summarizing the key takeaway from your issue, with the newsletter link placed only in the final reply.
Why it works: New analysis of 18 news publishers confirms what many suspected: X's algorithm actively suppresses posts containing external links. The New York Times, with 53 million followers, routinely gets fewer than 100 likes on link posts. Native text content gets algorithmic distribution; link posts get buried. By front-loading value in a thread, you earn the impressions first, then convert interested readers in the reply.
Expected result: 3x–8x more impressions on the thread vs. a standalone link post, and a 15–30% increase in click-throughs to your newsletter because the readers who do reach the link are already engaged with the content.
Takeaway: This week, take your next issue's best insight and write it as a standalone X thread. Drop the subscribe or read-more link only in the last tweet or first reply. Track impressions and clicks against your last 5 direct-link posts. You'll have your answer within a single issue cycle.
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