How I got into the newsletter space

😦 Am I… a content creator now?

I find it so funny—and cool—how there’s this entire underground community of people who are obsessed with newsletters that just exists right beneath the nose of mainstream media. The people in this community live on Twitter and Reddit, and their heroes are people like Sam Parr, Shaan Puri, Austin & Alex ☕, and Noah Kagan.

Yesterday, I announced on Twitter that I was starting this thing called Tree Rings (the newsletter you’re reading right now). I’ll be honest, I have no real Twitter following. My Twitter followers consist of: six friends from high school, my high school magnet program, and my mom. The rest of my 67 followers are bots—down 20 followers from yesterday after I starting to go and block the accounts that looked like they’d try to lure me into a crypto scam. I basically have no followers and very few posts.

And yet, after I tweeted out about Tree Rings, people in the newsletter community miraculously saw it and responded. This one in particular made me LOL:

📧 How I found out about the newsletter space

I might’ve only just recently established my presence in the community, but I’ve been following the space for a few years now.

I was getting ready to graduate high school in May 2021, and my next big move in life was to attend NC State and pursue an undergraduate degree in English. I was searching for scholarships to help pay for my college education, and I ran into bold.org and began applying for as much money as I could.

I didn’t get any scholarships. But what I did get was a subscription to The Hustle.

I already had a little bit of an entrepreneurial mindset at the time, so even though I subscribed to The Hustle for scholarship points, I became pretty interested in the content it was sending out. Entrepreneurship, and not just business, was a hot topic for it at the time, because just a couple of months prior to my subscription, The Hustle was sold to Hubspot for over $20 million dollars.

As a 17-year-old seeing that, I remember thinking, “What the hell?”

Honestly, even now I still think, “What the hell?”

I ended up doing an entire Internet deep-dive search on this guy named Sam Parr (he created The Hustle), and I quickly fell down a rabbit hole of newsletter success stories and learned about the different ways people are using newsletters for personal and business purposes.

It took me a while to start writing one myself, but I tried to keep up with everything that was happening in the space—the new tech being built for it, the new ideas and businesses popping up from it, and where I thought I could fit into it all.

🌐 What my plans are now

Since finding out about newsletters and really diving into my entrepreneurial side, I’ve started a major personal project with my friend, Kemmia. We decided to launch a newsletter for college students, and we’re calling it The Acquisitor. It started rolling this summer, and we’re hoping to really lift it off the ground as the school year starts.

And honestly, we have no idea what we’re doing 😃👍

But that’s what makes it fun. I already feel like I’ve learned so much about newsletters and life this summer just from focusing my mindset on this project. It’s part of the reason why I decided to start writing Tree Rings.

Currently, my goal is just to write, write, write. But one of the biggest things I’ve started to ask myself this summer is: Why not also share?

It’s that added bonus of sharing my thoughts and writing that turns this into a perpetual process of ideation, learning, reflecting, connecting with others, and growing as a person. What’s the point of everything if we aren’t going to talk about it?

🔵 Why do people hate LinkedIn so much?

I fell down a rabbit hole of LinkedIn-hate posts on Reddit today, especially after perusing r/LinkedInLunatics. Maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t think LinkedIn is that bad.

But what if we changed how we used LinkedIn? What if we dropped the “I’m happy to announce that…” template posts and traded them in for something more authentic? I don’t entirely know what this would look like. It’s just a thought that had me feeling a little stumped.

Either way, I decided to give it a shot and explore this idea by writing a new About section for myself on LinkedIn.

• 📱 Newsletter Reading App: I am subscribed to so many newsletters that I decided to download an app called Meco that streamlines the process of reading them all. This is what I mean when I talk about this space being super “niche.”

  • 🐝 When you search “beehiiv” in the App Store, Meco is the first thing to pop up LOL.

• 💬 Networking Tip: Here’s a quote that totally changed the game for me when it comes to networking - “It’s not just about who you know. It’s about who knows you.”

• 📖 New Productivity Book: I’m reading Ali Abdaal’s Feel Good Productivity, and it’s been really eye-opening. What I think is most compelling about its title is the second half of the book’s name: “How to Do More of What Matters to You.”