Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and I talked about building a sustainable business with an email list, rather than relying heavily on social media.
Sustainable can mean a lot of things, but we found in our conversation that it means ease, calm, peace. Like sharing resources, and solving problems together.
This can mean having fun in putting together a newsletter each week, as it’s not just for “marketing purposes,” but it’s to bring joy and fun to your readers, as Sarah mentions here:
“There is this genre of newsletter that is really fun where you're not quite sure what you're going to get. You know, will it be a playlist one day? Will it be my top 10 favorite places to eat when I'm touring in Cincinnati? It's like you don't know, and I think that's also kind of fun, too. It's like, ‘what are they going to send me this time?’ Like maybe it's a fun treasure trove or surprise box. That's another way to approach it"
And when we share these adventures with readers, we bring in the right readers, those who appreciate our weirdness, our unique views of the world, or our excellent choices for our weekly playlist. Says Sarah:
"It's much better to have a thousand people on your newsletter who really get you and really understand and are interested in what you have to share and say, than 10,000 who don't know who you are, who are going to unsubscribe every time they get a newsletter from you."
The rush for some subscriber milestone, or sales goal, or daily traffic - the constant seeking of more, instead of better. Seeking the right people to invite in, as Sarah and I discussed in this clip:
We’re not for everyone. Decide who enters our creative space.
This is why we don’t start bands that sound like everyone else, or we don’t make paintings or take photos or make podcasts that follow popular trends - we’re doing things our own way.
We’re making art and running our businesses the way we want to run them, so our newsletter - this means by which we reach our biggest fans - should be run in a way that reflects how we operate. Says Sarah:
"How can your newsletter be a playground? How can it be another fun creative outlet? Like, do you have a creative outlet that fits the container of the newsletter?"
A newsletter can be peaceful. You could send a newsletter once a week, instead of posting three times daily on Instagram.
Now, maybe you’ll lose some likes, and fall out of favor of the algorithm, but who are we serving here?
Are we spending our time in 2025 increasing shareholder value for Meta?
What if we saved the bits we would post on social media (yes, even Substack Notes) and published it in our newsletter instead?
Flip “Instagram eats first” to “my subscribers eat first.”
Save your witty rants, magical photos, and delicate thoughts for a weekly newsletter, feeding those who signed up to hear from you, rather than hoping a social media post “goes viral” and brings in 25 more subscribers.
Because what is enough?
That question came up in last week’s Escape Pod Zoom call.
The whole, “doing a thing, and then having to increase the visibility of that thing on social media” To what end? What is enough?
Could we trust our own audience, the network of creative people in our orbit, to share and talk about our work? It may take patience, as it might not lead to some “viral” moment, but is building our work on “going viral” a good strategy in the first place?
What if our work resonated just a bit more deeply with the people who already love our work? Could they love it more? What’s that look like, and how can we get there?
// LET’S TALK ABOUT IT: join me on this week’s Escape Pod Zoom call where we’ll talk about this newsletter, this interview with Sarah, and lots more. It’s happening on Thursday, Jan 16 at 2pm ET. Details here.
// Google (and Gmail) suck. Switch to Fastmail. Get a free 30-day trial and 10% off your first year here (affiliate link).
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