I’m the Newsletter Guy — and this is Yet Another Newsletter About Newsletters

I never asked for this.

I never thought I’d take on some cheesy moniker.

I never thought I’d spend my days terrified of the words “open” and “click.”

But here I am. Somehow, I fell into the world of digital newsletters. Well, it’s not really a mystery — I got a job at an email-first company, worked in digital publishing and marketing, and soon became interested enough that I started my own email-first property.

I grew that property, “bootstrapped” as they say, from nothing to reaching over 200,000 subscribers. Eventually, I took from a hobby to a business, selling it to a private buyer last year.

Today, I work full-time as a Director of Newsletters for a large online publisher.

Sometimes I look around and wonder how it got to this point — to the point where sharing my insights and opinions about newsletters got so annoying to the people I know that I decided it was time to share them with strangers.

But here’s the thing — I learned through trial by fire. I didn’t just start posting and magically hundreds of thousands of people started reading my stuff and sponsors began to line up.

Today newsletter agencies are raking it in by promising the secrets to building your own lucrative newsletter business. The truth is that becoming a solo operators, or even building out an email-based business when you have lots of resources, is hard work.

I won’t pull any punches, and I don’t expect you to either. This publication is for operators, writers, marketers — anyone who’s out there trying to solve this puzzle at a time when building an audience is allegedly easier than ever.

And I won’t charge you thousands of a dollars a pop just to get the info you actually need to do it yourself. I believe that anyone who’s interested in this business deserves a fair shot. Yes, I’ll have my own paid offerings (we do live under capitalism after all), but I’ll offer my insights at prices that won’t immediately put you in the hole.

Hi, I’m James, aka the Newsletter Guy. Nice to meet you.