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👋 Hey!
Lilach Bullock had over 200,000 followers across social platforms when she decided to restart her email list two years ago. She figured the hard part was already done.
She started with roughly 40 real, engaged subscribers. Getting to 1,000 took just under four months, and she says it was more work than building the 200,000 ever was.
This week: the lead magnet swap that moves signup conversion from 1% to double digits, Shea Serrano explaining why he only needs 350 paid subscribers, and a send-frequency test where the open rate dropped and the business got better. Plus, a breached email provider sending phishing from a real brand address, iOS 27 landing on Apple Mail, and a free year of viaSocket for you.
Let's dive in! 👇
Meme of the Week
This Week's Hot Takes
Apple shipped iOS 27 on Monday, and an updated Apple Mail came with it. Faster loading and better search are confirmed. Rendering and BIMI behavior are not, so watch your Apple numbers this week.
Advanced AI adopters are 54% more likely to follow accessibility guidelines. The fine print: self-reported intent from around 500 marketers is not evidence that anyone's emails got more accessible.
Buttondown now exports every individual open and click. Hit the export icon in the analytics pane and choose itemized to get the raw event log behind your numbers.
A YouTube channel handed a CSV of its subscribers to a third party. A breakdown of why permission can't be transferred and why the mail that follows is unsolicited bulk email by definition.
Tool of the Week
viaSocket: connect 2,300+ apps and let automation handle the repetitive stuff
Why You'll Love It: viaSocket links your ESP, CRM, sheets, and Slack so they pass data between each other without you in the middle. Sync new subscribers, log sponsor details, fire a notification the moment a send lands. AI agents handle the steps that need a judgment call, and built-in Tables hold the data your workflows run on. No code required.
Best For: Operators juggling five tools who lose an hour a week to copy-paste, and anyone who wants subscriber data moving between platforms automatically instead of on a Sunday night. Viasocket is your tool for building and automating workflows with simple AI prompts, and HeyNews readers will get the yearly Pro plan for free, which is normally worth $799. See below for details.
Perk of the Week
viaSocket Premium, free for a year: no card, no countdown clock
What you get: A full 12 months of viaSocket Premium, a plan they price at $799, at no cost. No credit card required, and the account rolls down to the Free plan when the year ends instead of quietly charging you.
How to claim: Redeem code HEYNEWS before October 15, 2026. One thing worth knowing: if usage runs past the plan limit, the organization gets blocked and unblocks itself a month later. Watch the redemption walkthrough
Growth Hack of the Week
Post short notes until the algorithm knows who you are
How: If you're building on Substack, write four to six sentence notes of roughly 250 characters with line breaks between thoughts, and post those before you worry about publishing long articles. Lori Ballen's order of operations: find your audience first, show up in notes consistently, then write the articles for the people who arrive.
Why: Substack's For You page surfaces notes to readers who have never heard of you. That's the discovery surface. Your articles mostly reach people who already subscribed, which means posting essays to a list of nine people is the slowest possible start. Ballen's framing is that you don't need to migrate an audience from somewhere else to begin.
Expected Result: Ballen doesn't attach a subscriber number to this, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. What you get is distribution to strangers on a platform where most beginners are publishing to nobody. Document what you're actually doing, struggles included, since stories that end in a lesson travel further than clean how-tos.
Spotlight: GOOD MOVIE by Shea Serrano
What works:
He did the arithmetic and it changed everything. Serrano realized that one of his books sold over 200,000 copies at around $20, roughly $4 million, and that he saw very little of it. When he and Jason Concepcion left Amazon, ESPN and others came calling. He published the new show himself instead.
The number he needs is small enough to hit. Through a network, he reckons a twice-weekly podcast needs about 100,000 downloads per episode to gross $500,000 in ad sales. On his own, he needs to add 350 paid subscribers. Same person, same show, completely different math.
Fewer people to pay means more room to be strange. Four people depend on the show: his editor, his video guy, Concepcion, and himself. That's why he can build formats around counting how many times a word gets said in a movie instead of chasing a mass audience.
The launch worked without a spend. First week: 126,000 views and 10,385 downloads, entirely organic, no paid promotion. Around 120 new paid subscribers arrived in the weeks around the announcement.
Creator quote: On leaving the network model behind: "There's more responsibility, more work, but there's also nobody I have to answer to."
Your takeaway: Run Serrano's calculation on your own newsletter. Work out what you need to earn, divide by what a paid subscriber is worth to you, and look at the number. It's almost always smaller than the audience you've been telling yourself you need.
A/B Test of the Week
Test: Lilach Bullock ran a six-month frequency test on her own list of roughly 12,000 people. Version A, for the first three months, was one weekly email of 400 to 600 words on a single topic. Version B, for the following three months, split that same material into two shorter sends a week.
Result: Weekly opened at 38% with a 6.2% click rate. Twice weekly dropped the open rate to 31% per send, which reads like a loss on the dashboard. But total clicks per month rose about 18%, and consulting enquiries from the newsletter roughly doubled. Her separate data point is the one to fear: after her newsletter went quiet for about four months, the first send back opened at 19%, down from a steady 34%.
Takeaway: Your open rate percentage is supposed to fall as you send more often. What matters is whether total engaged opens go up. Bullock's blunt version is that nobody pays their mortgage with an open rate. The cadence that actually damages you is the one you can't sustain, because inbox providers score recent engagement rather than how good your content used to be.
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Thanks for reading,
Eren & Cagri