Review & Takeaways from the 2024 Newsletter Conference in NYC
Hello!
After spending a little more than a week in California, I jetted over to New York at the beginning of May to learn from titans in the newsletter space. Here's a link to the official conference page 👇
I'll start with a quick review of the one-day event, followed by a list of my top learnings.
Was it worth it?
Pros:
- Having an entire conference around a single niche was incredibly useful. It was a much deeper experience than other, more general, creator-focused events I've attended.
- The attendees were elite. Roughly half the room worked for the biggest publishers on earth (traditional media or VC-funded enterprises, all with millions of subscribers), while the other half were independents working on their own newsletters, software tools, or supplemental businesses in the space.
- The venue (in The New York Times building) was immaculate. Such an elevated experience.
- Finally, the layout & pacing of the day was awesome. Sometimes, one-day events feel like they try to do too much, but because of how focused the topic was - it felt like the perfect length.
Cons:
- I wanted more time + guidance for networking. Throwing 400+ people into a room and expecting great things to happen is a bit of wishful thinking. Granted, I still met half a dozen amazing people — including a few experts I was hoping to shake hands with. But I didn't come away with the deeper friendships I have from other events.
- Tracks would have been helpful for relevance. Like I said above, the room was divided between pretty far ends of the newsletter spectrum. It would have been great to spend time specifically with "our people" (i.e., instead of a general session on advertising, a panel specifically for solo-operators talking on the subject).
That said, I feel like I more than paid my money's worth for the ticket. I give the event a solid 8 out of 10 and will more-than-likely be attending next year.
A few of the most interesting things I learned
The two big themes of the day were growth and monetization, so pretty much every note I have falls under one of those two umbrellas.
Below are the highlights from my 12+ pages of notes (I write a lot, mostly so I can remember the context of great ideas!). They're not in any particular order, but I will go ahead and label whether it's a growth tip or a monetization one.
- Successful newsletters need to be operating (at least to some degree) in all four growth quadrants: Owned, Earned, Algorithmic, and Paid.
- Owned: asking for referrals
- Earned: courting bigger publishers, creators, newsletters to share your content
- Algo: building a steady presence on one primary social channel
- Paid: consistently experimenting with ads in one channel (FB, other newsletters, etc.).
The caveat here is that the best/biggest newsletters all got to where they are by focusing on one or two of these strategies, and only expanding into others once a critical mass was hit (sometimes that's 10k+ subs, but usually 100k+). TLDR, pick one of these four and go hard until you hit a meaningful milestone.
- Let your audience shape your newsletter strategy.
This sounds painfully obvious in hindsight, but you could tell it was a real lightbulb moment for the audience (and me!). Examples: (1) Most people aren't going to read a 2k+ word essay first thing in the morning, so change your send time to the evening. (2) Listen to what content types or sections get the most engagement - consider eliminating everything else.
Nothing should be static about your newsletter. It should be in a constant state of evolution guided by a deepening relationship with your readers. It's likely a good thing if your newsletter looks COMPLETELY different a year from now, so long as the different is because people asked.
- Don't recreate the wheel for lead magnets. Repurpose your way to growth.
Chenell Basilio shared a great story about how her most successful growth hack was compiling insights from her longer-form works into a single Notion database that new subs got access to. It enabled new people to quickly access and implement her ideas without having to catch up on hours of reading.
Chances are, you already have mountains of useful info or stories too. How can you reshape these to do the heavy lifting for you?
- It's more effective to incentivize people towards loyalty than growth.
As the space gets more competitive, advertisers and the like are asking for more & better data to support their buying. A list of 50,000 people used to mean a lot. Now, it matters what those people are doing. A writer who can prove 15,000 people open every email they send will get paid more, sell more, and leverage their audience for more opportunities than a writer who only promotes their top-line subscriber number.
You don't just want people; you want the right people. And you want to keep them around, happy, reading, and excited to be a part of what's happening—partnot just a consumer.
- The BIGGEST mistake newsletters make: not clearly explaining what they are (and who they're for).
This came up a few times from several different speakers. The most painful, costly mistake they saw was lack of clarity.
If you don't have a 1-sentence elevator pitch that explains what you do, why it's interesting and gets people excited to sign up — you're lacking the foundation needed for everything else.
It's not just that people want this clarity; it's for you, too! The clearer you are on what you're building, the easier it will be to make the kinds of decisions necessary to sustain growth, set you apart, and keep you moving in the right direction as a creative.
This one hit home for me because even with how much thought and care I've put into BPS, I still feel like it lacks distinction. My advice to you is what I plan to do myself: talk to more people. Find out what words come up (from me and them), and use those to put together something that gets every ideal reader off their butt and typing in their email asap.
- Show your face, a lot!
A growing trend across the B2C and B2B environments is that people are gravitating towards personality-driven brands. We already know this is the case instinctively (i.e., the Kardashians built massive brands off of who they were more than any actual competitive or qualitative product advantage).
No matter what you write about, you need to tie your face to your content. That means posting your picture on the about page. Integrating your image regularly into content so that people feel like they know you. This also means engaging with audio content or video or in-person events.
The more people buy you, the easier growth with come.
- Look for out-of-the-box ways to monetize your content by understanding who your work is important for indirectly.
One of my favorite sessions from the day was a panel of local newsletter operators. These people had discovered ways to monetize their work through government grants, institutional gifts, and enterprise partnerships. It was amazing. We're talking multi-six-figure sums because these organizations (city governments, businesses entering a new city, etc.) want a reliable way to reach people through a trusted intermediary.
This boils down to two steps. Gain trust with a group of people, especially one that's difficult to communicate with ; you want the right people. And you want to keep them around, happy, reading, and excited to be a part of what's happening—. Then, find out who's been trying to communicate with them and leverage your services as a gatekeeper (in the best sense of the word).
This gave me a lot of ideas about how I could localize my efforts with BPS.
Here are a few smaller ideas I think are worth mentioning.
- Meme pages on IG are critically underrated. Find ones adjacent to your topic, test them, and (possibly) reap the rewards.
- In-person guerilla tactics, like handing out cookies on college campuses, are ridiculous but incredibly memorable. Love the weirdness of this one.
- Everyone steals from each other. Find what works and make your own version of it. Seriously, 95% of the reason person B is winning is because they're copying person A.
- Get sponsors to pay for cool stuff outside of your newsletter. One speaker gave the example of doing sponsored in-person interviews with industry leaders. Each event promoted the interviewer's newsletter and the sponsor's business. Everyone wins, and it's a remarkable (i.e., worth talking about) event for the guests.
There is no path but yours.
— Dan Oshinsky
To sum up, you want to straddle the path between finding what works and testing things no one else is doing.
Of all the newsletters on stage that day, only two had been around for less than a year (and both of those operators had been in the industry for 10+ years before launching their own thing).
Your thing is going to take time, it's going to evolve, and it'll feel like a rollercoaster pretty much the entire time.
Just don't quit.