Why a personal newsletter?

This week I teased and later announced the start of this newsletter, quickly passing 200+ subscribers interested in reading “A newsletter about building and growing newsletters.”

Okay… but wtf does this actually mean?

Over the past 4.5 years, I’ve been building my own newsletters. One was even acquired by a YC-backed company and ultimately re-acquired by me following a layoff. That’s a story for another newsletter.

But during this stretch, I’ve had countless people reach out to do interviews, pick my brain, ask how I’ve done certain things, etc.

I’m definitely not an expert and people have built (and sold) much larger newsletters than me. But I figure if one person is asking how to do x, then there are likely many others wondering the same thing.

Enter Ryan’s Newsletter.

This newsletter will be a place for me overly transparent with the projects that I’m working on. A raw and unfiltered look into my learnings, failures, experiments, and maybe even actual P&L breakdowns from time to time.

I’ll go into detail of growing Workspaces to 14,000+ subscribers from companies like Figma, Notion, Microsoft, Stripe, Apple, Instagram, and more.

I’ll go into detail about how I’ve received multiple acquisition offers for Workspaces.

I’ll go into detail about how I manage all of the weekly content and sponsorship needs.

I’ll go into detail about how I built this entire audience off of other people’s content.

But… why?

Hunter asked a good question… why put effort into this when I could be focusing on growth and monetization for my current projects?

Fair question.

I have a few thoughts/reasons.

I think an owned audience is now more important than ever. Email gives you that 1:1 relationship with someone. The only algorithm is avoiding the spam folder. I couldn’t confidently tell you if Twitter will be around in its current form 6 months from now… but I know email will be.

I think I forgot how to think and write. As Head of Content at Loops, I was writing daily. I wasn’t using AI to do this. Since May, I haven’t written at all. I want to get back into the flow of actually writing before I become completely reliant on AI.

I think this will actually lead to monetization opportunities. I will be able to give updates on sponsorship openings, new sponsorship tiers, sponsor results, etc. And if I can prove that I at least somewhat know what I’m talking about… maybe some consulting.

I think this will help me avoid going into “auto-pilot mode” with these projects. There’ve definitely been times over the past 4.5 years where I have found myself just checking the box of publishing. By taking the time to outline my thoughts and plans here, it will help keep me engaged and proactive with everything else.

Some upcoming topics

Here are some ideas for the next few editions. Let me know how this sounds.

• Making $1,000 in 11 minutes with a single tweet

• The entire Workspaces story

• The H1 Gallery story and how it was discovered by the CMO of a $2B company on day one

• How much time does it really take me to work on Workspaces each week?

• Piggybacking off other people’s audiences and content to 50,000 followers and 14,000 subscribers

• How I think about sponsorship pricing

State of the newsletters

Thanks for subscribing and opening up the first edition of Ryan’s Newsletter. Was this at all interesting? Are you looking forward to some of the upcoming topics?

Reply and let me know.

-Ryan