We’ve been publishing a newsletter in some form since 02012. That’s over 12 years! We were driven to start during in the early days of social media. In the world of ephemeral short messages on Twitter/Pounce/Jauku (and others), a newsletter felt different. When someone gives you their email address, they are welcoming you into their inbox. RSS is great, but certainly doesn’t have the same level of trust or commitment.
Some people argue that a newsletter is (or should be) a blog post. They certainly do share a lot of overlap in terms of content, but they are also unique in their own way. With a blog post/article that we sporadically write, it could a hodgepodge of ideas quickly put together or something abstract or some topic we’ve recently been deep into. Our newsletters are much more curated, structured, self-promoting and have some cadence.
Newsletters
When we started our newsletter we wanted to deliver something fun and interesting to our readership. We chose quarterly since that was a timeframe we felt that we could reasonably accomplish without missing deadlines. For the longest time, the newsletter was a mix of what we were up too as a company, speaking engagements, and some interesting links. Over time those themes ebbed and flowed in amount and quality.
So three years ago, we decided to split the newsletter in two. Our quarterly newsletter would be ◍ Quarternotes (a play on the weekly weeknotes) and would focus mostly on internal projects, plenty of self-promotion and something interesting we could write about. Then the second newsletter called ⪮ Good Morning would be monthly with no self-promotion and just a series of links and a short description on why it was interesting.
At this time we also left our previous bulk mailing service MailChimp, partly because Intuit bought them and partly because we wanted to opt-out of all the tracking. So, like any computer programmer, we rolled our own newsletter tool. From composing to publishing to sending, we built something ugly, but usable for us. That means we have complete control on how we manage the messages. There is an HTML and plain-text version of the emails with dark-mode CSS available and no tracking query strings.
We made a conscious choice not to track our readers. That has taken some burden off of “will this link get the engagement numbers we want” because we don’t have any numbers. The biggest downside is that we rarely get any feedback. We don’t have an open rate. We don’t know if people like it. For the most part, all we have are the server logs for the public, published page.
The last three years of newsletters have been a lot of work setting up, researching and writing to then sending them into a black hole. We know people read each newsletter, some people reply, some people mention it on social media, but overall we’re missing the discussion and feedback.
The goal was always to have the newsletter somewhere at the “top of the funnel” and use it to promote and sell other products. But for the last few years, we haven’t really been speaking, selling or have anything to directly promote (except ourselves). It was time to re-evaluate our newsletters.
⪮ Good Morning
Back in 02021, Craig Mod wrote about newsletters. We took some of that advice and applied it to our ⪮ Good Morning newsletter. We set this up as a monthly newsletter and annual seasons. We felt that collecting 3-4 short, interesting links each month would be well within our ability and if things became too burdensome, we only had to stick it out until the end of the year!
We managed to get 36 episodes over 3 seasons written and published, but now it is time for a rest. With the demise of Twitter and the shift to Mastodon (and off social media in general) means we’re not seeing or collecting as many interesting links here and there to be squirreled away for a future newsletter. Plus, the general workload has been pretty high so finding the time to read, compile and write is always difficult.
The newsletter is not gone, just on ice for 02025. It was taking way from publishing /required articles, which is something we want to get back too.
The goal of the newsletter was to grow a readership that we could create a feedback loop for other ideas and projects. With newsletter fatigue and we didn’t want to be annoying and sound like a broken record (Oh, by the way we have a newsletter), means we didn’t grow our list as much as we’d hoped. Coupled with the fact that we didn’t want to make ⪮ Good Morning feel like self-promotion means we painted ourselves a bit into the corner for cross-promotional activities in the company!
We’ll take everything we’ve learnt, save-up a bunch of links and be back with Season 4 of ⪮ Good Morning soon.
◍ Quarternotes
Our quarterly newsletter isn’t going anywhere. We still use/need this, the readership is strong and it’s a great away to “keep the engines warm” to be able to contact people about future projects; be it an event, a crowdfunding idea, a new product or an ask for help.
This newsletter has fallen now into a nice format: What we’ve done, what we’ve written, something interesting, link to merch, open office hours and maybe something more.
Some of what ⪮ Good Morning was, with interesting links, will get folded back into ◍ Quarternotes. Our goal is to stay relevant & interesting and deliver some value to you for subscribing & reading. There are a lot of folks we used to meet regularly at conferences and sometime we wonder “What are they doing now”? This newsletter is a way to answer that question others might be asking about us.
Subscribe
If any of this is interesting, we highly recommend that you subscribe in some fashion. Either sign-up and get our newsletters delivered to your inbox (it is easy to search, works offline, syncs across devices) or subscribe via the RSS feed (its anonymous, no spam filters) so you never miss an issue (that is until the AI bots ruin it). You can even read them online (if you remember to check), they are there for people to read back issues and to be picked-up by search indexes.
Using our RSS feeds, it is possible to get our newsletters and articles side-by-side in your newsreader. We recently add feeds so that people can caught-up with us in the way they best see fit.
As long as you keep reading, we’ll keep writing.