Sam Patel
Audience
Writes about audience: where readers come from, why they leave, and which growth tactics survive contact with a real list.
12Money11Growth06Growth02Design
Do the paid-tier arithmetic first
Two percent of your list will pay. Multiply that out before you spend three months building something to sell them.
The forty people who opened nothing
Every list has a dormant third. Most advice says to win them back. The arithmetic says to let them go, and to do it on purpose.
The welcome email is doing all the work
It gets opened four times more than anything else you send, and most people write it once, in a hurry, and never look at it again.
The archive is the product
Most newsletters treat past issues as a backup. They are the only thing a new reader can judge you on before they hand over an address.